Neiber was out of time. Life was bleeding out of him with every beat of his frightened heart, as he fled through the grimy tunnels of the sewers beneath Caltern City.

A long cut on his cheek welled up with thick drops of blood. A deep gash on his arm rendered the hand below shaking, limp, unable to close its fingers. Threads of blood trickled across his body. A huge stain of red plastered his shirt to his clammy skin, more and more welling up from the fatal stab, just above his stomach.

Behind him, he could see the lantern lights of his pursuers.

A ring was clutched in his good hand. Neiber came from a family of silversmiths, and this ring was his father’s masterpiece. Two serpents of silver, so finely textured you could see the scales on their backs, curled in a helix around a band of black onyx etched with delicate runes. Tiny flecks of pink diamond made the eyes. They clutched between their open jaws a pale green stone of peridot cut to perfection.

That wasn’t just any gemstone. It was the seed of a dungeon core, a tiny rift to the Beyond contained within. A wellspring of pure ethereal Mana.

It was worth killing for. Boss Gent, lord of Caltern’s underworld, had thought so. As soon as the ring was finished, he had Neiber’s father hung on a false charge. Just to make sure nobody knew he was wearing a Mana source on his finger.

Gent hadn’t expected Neiber to know enough runecraft to make a named dagger. Or to be furious enough to give up his own life to get vengeance.

Neiber giggled madly to himself as he stumbled through the low wash of rainwater rushing through the tunnel. Above, a storm cracked and boomed.

He stumbled against the wall and a brick fell loose.

It was perfect.

Neiber shoved the ring into the opening in the walls, and lifted up the brick, pushing it back into place, leaving only a slight bump in the walls. The most precious gem in this entire city, hidden in the sewers where nobody would ever find it. Perfect.

Behind him, there was a shout. “Here! I’ve found him!”

Neiber ran. He ran right out of this story, and into another.

The ring remained, hidden away, for days, then months...

 

 

I knew who I was and why I existed from the moment I woke up.

I was a Dungeon Core. I existed to create a killing field of traps, deadly monsters, and to lure adventurers in, to drain them dry of blood and soul to feed my growing Dungeon. 

And I had a crisis.

Mana was building up around me. I naturally filled my surroundings with a dense cloud of ethereal Mana, but now, thanks to being enclosed in some kind of tiny crevice, that Mana was building up. It was reaching a crisis point - any more and it could ignite in a spectacular blaze that would spell my end.

In a panic I shoved against the walls, and one of them gave. I shoved again, using the mana cloud to erode the stone until I suddenly burst through into a massive tunnel.

Well, massive compared to me. I was quite small, I realized.

A stream of cold, clear rainwater rushed down the tunnel. Rats scrambled along the sides. Numerous tiny insects fed off the moss growing on the walls. My cloud slowly expanded to take up a ten meter radius, invisible, imperceptible, seeing everything.

Or… ‘Seeing’ was not the correct word. My two senses were a kind of all-encompassing touch, feeling everything that moved through my territory, and an ability to sense Mana as a kind of heat, a flame within each living creature.

I had an appreciation, I realized, for beauty.

Most of the rats were ugly rugged creatures but I spotted an albino among them, pure white and beautifully groomed. A runaway pet. I admired the complicated weave of mycelium threads within nearby fungus. I adored symmetry and orderliness.

They reminded me of myself. A beautiful gem perfectly set in silver and onyx.

Having just been born, I was playful. I sent my will out through the cloud of Mana seeing what I could do, what my limits and my capabilities were. By sculpting and rolling it, I found I could create a kind of blobby solidified light, a lump of purest Mana. 

Naturally my next thought was to shape it into the image of a nearby deathcap. To my surprise the result wasn’t merely a Mana sculpture of a mushroom but the real thing, sprung suddenly into existence at the heart of a whirlpool of Mana.

As I quickly discovered if I wanted to create something I merely had to form an accurate vision in my mind and pour Mana into that visualization, like pouring hot metal into a mold.

In moments I had rats aplenty, dozens of rats. White, well-groomed rodents poured from my imagination and into the world.

My first mistake came when I tried to create a two-headed rat.

The poor result of my arrogant prodding into the domain of life and death was, well, hideous malformed. I hadn’t merely created two heads, but dual sets of organs, skeletal structures, viscera. With two hearts trying to pump blood two different ways, the result...

I don’t want to speak of this.

The important thing is, as it died, I felt a sudden pull. A spark of golden flame was lifting from the corpse and rising into the air. I wanted it like a child wants candy.

I formed a current of Mana around it, dragging it towards my core. Into my core.

That was my first taste of a living Soul.

 

 

As I recited the words whole new dimension to my psyche opened up.

It was like looking at bubbles of light threaded onto endless strings. Within each bubble was a different image of me, a different version of me, a different promise of what I could become.

In one bubble, I saw myself choosing the [Heart of Corruption] Genotype and sprouting tendrils of flesh, tendrils that ate and expanded constantly. If I continued down this path I would become more and more ravenous, expanding my body throughout the dungeon, until I was the beating, all-consuming heart in a labyrinth of blood vessels and bones.

If I chose another route, I could sprout like a seed and become a World Tree that towered into the sky.

There was a future where I ruled a kingdom of the dead, served by undead courtiers.

I could be worshipped as a god, granting blessings to my most fervent followers.

But…

I felt I was quite perfect the way I was. Even putting aside my own ego, which was enormous, it had to be acknowledged someone had devoted a great deal of time and skill to my creation, taking every pain to make me a work of art.

I wanted to honor that, so anything that changed my form was out of the question.

Being worshipped sounded quite nice. I nearly selected that option, before another caught my eye.

 

 

The moment I selected the option, I felt the complex runic seals and circles within me shift, rearranging themselves around the tiny, hair-thin rift at my center.

A rift to the Beyond, source of all Mana.

Five circles surrounded the rift, a complicated mandala of constantly-shifting letters writ in golden light. They spiralled like the tumblers of an infinitely complicated lock.

Mana flooded through me. It brought with it a rush of thoughts, racing through my mind at a million words a minute.

 

 

 

I couldn’t focus on the barrage of information being poured into my mind. With expanded consciousness came increased awareness of how vulnerable I was. I felt exposed, terribly exposed. A dungeon core’s greatest fear is open spaces, to be seen and coveted by the world. The only cure was to hide myself away.

I needed to build a nest.

I dug a rough tunnel upwards, a shaft that climbed about ten feet into the stone. Rather than smoothing it out, I took the crags and edges and sharpened them to a razor sheen. Then I got mean about it.

Absorbing some algae from the tunnels outside I created crops of the slimy stuff along the walls. Next I poured mana into it, drawing out the most useful properties, making it incredibly slippery just to be sure the climb would be impossible. If you didn’t cut yourself to the bone on the knife-like edges that jutted out from the walls, you’d be struggling to grab a handhold at all with slime coating every available surface.

Finally, I created a chamber underneath the shaft, a shallow little drop into a bed of stalagmite spikes. Over this I created an ice-thin sheet of stone - a false floor that would shatter under the weight of a full grown human and drop them onto the trap below.

At the very top of the tunnel I made a ring of spikes, so that it appeared like the waiting mouth of a beast. 

It was a nice flourish but I wanted more.

I searched through the tunnels, absorbing anything that looked interesting. Fungi with a faint luminescent sheen. Beetles with emerald-green wings. Centipedes with scarlet heads.

I wanted my lair to be beautiful.

I had already spent upwards of three mana - 3.2 to be exact - shaping stone and algae into a hellish climb. Now I spent another point to slowly turn the slime on the tunnel walls to a dark sea green, half translucent, the color of smoked green glass.

I made long-necked, puff-headed mushrooms shoot from the walls, lighting the chamber with a dim blue glow. I added flecks of glass to the walls that reflected that light into a spray of tiny blue flecks that danced and shimmered, adding a ghostly air to the place. Beetles with emerald carapaces climbed through the muck. Centipedes lifted their bright heads from avalanches of moss.

Above it all, a maw of stalactites waited to devour the climber.

As a final touch, I shaped the entrance to the outer tunnels into a stone doorway, the frame defined by two carved serpents. Between their open jaws they held a miniature sun. 

Finally, I felt satisfied.