Nyx asked the dungeon questions and it took its time replying.

As happened with Lark, Nyx found themself waiting in silence, eyes closed, for just long enough that they began to doubt whether the dungeon core was listening.

But then, once their consciousness had forgotten their body and receded fully into their mind, it answered them with images, not words.

What began as a deep, all-encompassing void—a normal inner space for Nyx, and for many normal people too—began to fill with core-colored light.

It resolved itself into stone. Then. as if Nyx were merely watching an IMAX movie of the mind, the view whizzed through blurry corridors of stalactites and slime as the dungeon core searched for...Urrich?

It’s okay if you don’t find him, thought Nyx. He’s probably somewhere you can’t see him, assuming you can’t see past your own domain...

The dungeon core assented.

The trip through the dungeon ended, replaced by another flash and a quaint place that Nyx figured had to be a workshop, a foundry, an artisan’s shop.

This time they felt their feet on the wood floor and heard the workday bustle. A small army of people in scuffed shirts and aprons carried, heated, hammered, and tweezed delicate metal parts, all in the midst of complicated and sparkling wood-and-brass machinery.

A fire roared next to Nyx—they stepped away, giving the glassblower space. Confused, and feeling misled, Nyx looked around another time, then wandered into the next room.

Nyx’s second question had been about the way dungeon cores were made. So was the dungeon saying that a bunch of people—Darshannan-looking, medieval-technology-level people—simply got together and made it?

...No. The dungeon core’s thrumming voice came back to Nyx and insisted that it was just a metaphor, since the truth could not be so easily grasped, even by a rookie demon.

You know I don’t have the patience for that, said Nyx, emerging in a smaller room dominated by a table topped with rows and rows of wooden bins.

The dungeon figured they had no choice, and reminded Nyx that this timeless void was not one-to-one equivalent with how time passed in the outside world.

Nyx mentally shrugged.

Artisans came in from behind them. What they held were pieces of a great apparatus—surely they all had their purposes, but right now they only looked like funny, implacable shapes. After they scrutinized their work and deemed it good, they set them delicately in bins and left. Shadowy hands were popping out from a third room and whisking the bins away. Nyx followed...

A single wizened man stood in a studio that Nyx almost couldn’t fit inside. It wasn’t for lack of space, exactly—but a giant brass globe on a pedestal dominated the room. Though there were many hollow slots in the globe clearly waiting to be filled by this slow old man and his faithful footstool, some, oblong-shaped, stood out to Nyx. The ovals that had been filled contained gems—and there were twenty-four gems, for twenty-four dungeons.

And in the last room, there was no ceiling but the vacuum of space as the artisans moved their work outdoors. They were setting their globes in a vast machine that resembled, but outclasses, a Ferris wheel within a Ferris wheel next to dozens of other competing Ferris wheels. The artisans didn’t struggle much—when the globes were hefted near their places, they put themselves in place as if magnetized. And then the machine began to move.

Nyx’s sense of instinctual wonder—which, come to think of it, may have been directly implanted by the dungeon core for the sake of sealing the metaphor—was defeated by the thought that it sucked how mortals and mortal-like beings were never allowed to learn biblical-scale knowledge in any kind of depth.

The core responded with a brief but vivid image of a hermit struggling in her cave.

In other words: It’s not that. I don’t know any further details either. I am sorry.

Then the third question, about the connections between the worlds.

Nyx no longer had any faith that this core could answer—in fact, they wondered why they ever had—but ended up pleasantly surprised.

They floated in a starscape. Cupped in their hands was a living planet, glowing blue with oceans. As Nyx peered through their fingers, they saw, underneath the clouds, the distinctive shapes of Darshanna and the other continents.

But another shape was overlaid and cross-cut with the planet. It almost looked like the planet was cradled within a crystal, but continually slipped outside the bounds as the shape of the crystal shifted. Looking at the crystal alone, the way it flickered in and out of perception, was hard. Looking at them both together delicately broke Nyx’s mind.

Strangely, though, the planet and the crystal, despite their different dimensions and their different planes of existence, were perfectly interlaced. The ever-morphing crystal was the underworld made visible.

On closer inspection, there were nodes on the planet’s surface that flickered like the crystal now and then—dungeon cores. That made enough sense, and Nyx kind of already knew that part.

But...anything about Earth?

A human appeared at the same impossible scale as Nyx, giving them a jolt. In a flash they searched the human’s face for anything that might be familiar—but nothing, nothing they could place. This person simply appeared in space, looking as lost and bewildered as if they’d been dropped in.

A whole crowd of humans appeared behind the first—not twelve—not twenty—a mass. Lost and bewildered and looking frantically toward one another and at last to the planet in Nyx’s hands. The closest human cupped their hands underneath it, under Nyx’s hands.

The planet was shocked into action. Instead of slowly revolving, it hurtled and spun. Nyx withdrew their hands with a start, like the globe was a buzzsaw.

Nyx sure didn’t have the power to get the world turning that way. None of the Twelve had, had they? Then what was this? Who was this?

They searched the crowd for an answer seconds before everything returned to total blackness.

The core did not know who they were. It apologized again.