Morgan Mackenzie was hearing voices. Or, at least, she thought she was; faint whispers seeming to echo down the twisting corridors as if people were dancing and laughing just out of sight. The area she found herself in was maddening, with passages changing before her eyes as vines and plants drew back and regrew around her, almost as if shepherding her. No pathway stayed as it was for more than a few minutes, and within the first half an hour, she knew she was well and truly lost.

 

Before she left First Raven’s Roost, Moghren had briefly mentioned dungeons, if only to warn Morgan to avoid them if at all possible. Unfortunately, the old crone had offered no specifics, and Morgan had had other matters on her mind, so the question of how to recognize -- and more importantly, avoid -- dungeons had simply never been asked.

 

Through experimentation, Morgan determined that the hostile Mana surrounding her only really affected her Earth magic, and had little other impact. She had used Fire to burn away particularly aggressive plants, Lightning to ‘discourage’ more mobile predators, and Ice to freeze a watery slime solid.

 

“Thank God for small favors,” Morgan muttered. Lulu made a noise of agreement.

 

The little loofah refused to leave her mistress’ shoulder, purbling warnings every time Morgan approached a trap, and alerting her to danger around blind corners. A good thing, too; her [Primal Instinct] could barely keep up with those comparatively small threats, as it screamed constantly into her mind about the imminent danger she faced by merely being in this place.

 

To give herself something to focus on besides sheer animal panic, Morgan had taken to collecting loose stone and dirt from the walls and floor, shaping them into small disks and cubes, carving runes into their surfaces and then leaving them littered behind her. They served the secondary purpose of acting like breadcrumbs, letting her know where she had walked before. By the end of the first ninety minutes, she had come across her markers no fewer than five times.

 

It was growing increasingly clear to her that, beyond being shepherded, she was actively being herded towards the center of this place; by listening to how her instincts shrieked at her, she was able to determine that movement away from the center, where the heart of malice lay, was becoming an impossibility.

 

For certain definitions of impossible, she thought bleakly. Though the hostile aura permeating this place made it difficult, she felt reasonably confident that she might be able to simply force her way directly through the walls...if she wanted to drain herself dry and take hours in the effort. She had determined one thing: though her [Terrakinesis] was being blocked, the effect posed little obstacle to her [Plasma Glaive]. The only downside was, it imposed a fantastic drain on her Mana, and demanded all the focus she could spare to burn her way through the walls. Though she could recover by eating the meals she had prepared, she simply didn’t have enough to make it feasible.

 

Night had already fallen when she had stumbled into the dungeon, and she had spent the last several hours -- or more, she had no way to tell -- wandering its halls. There were sources of  ambient light inside the place that kept her from tracking time that way even if she could see the sky: glowing flowers and vines; pale, pearlescent mists; and insects bigger than her thumb that reminded her of fireflies. If not for the constant oppressive sensation of menacing danger that pushed down on her mind, it would have been beautiful.

 

The sounds of merriment coming from just around every corner were getting more pronounced the longer she wandered. Lulu seemed to be even more agitated by it than Morgan, the loofah emanating a much lower purbling sound into her ear that was closer to a growl than anything else Morgan had previously heard coming from her lacy companion.

 

“She cannot catch us!” came a high, childlike, and ethereal whisper of excitement from somewhere just out of sight.

 

“But she can hear us,” giggled the response. “Too slow, too slow!”

 

The words came so softly Morgan could only just make out the meanings, the mocking tones pitched just right to carry along the foliage-covered corridors. Exhaustion pulled her towards sleep as well, the lullabye of distant music and laughter swaying with the walls as she walked.

 

Ignore them, she thought.

 

“She’ll sleep soon!” Another hushed exclamation.

 

“And then we eat her!”

 

Must not sleep.

 

“And her magic too!”

 

“I bet it’s delicious!”

 

She stumbled, toes catching in the scattered detritus of sticks and vines and leaves littering the dungeon floor. Morgan had run all day, and then spent an additional several hours wandering around in this lush maze of whispers; to say she was exhausted would be an understatement. The constant warnings of imminent danger from [Primal Instinct] lay upon her mind like a heavy blanket, and keeping herself hyper-alert was draining in a way she had not experienced even when running from the Pack.

 

Vision starting to blur and run at the edges, she regained her balance and lurched her way down the corridor for another dozen yards before slumping against the wall, legs turning to lead. "S...Something," she slurred, sliding down the wall and ending up on her knees, "is vuh....very wrong..." Lulu became frantic, the normally refreshing effects of the loofah’s ministrations now stinging her skin as it zipped across her body. Something was wrong with its mistress but it could not find the source.

 

WAKE UP!

 

“No, sleepy…” she mumbled as she slumped to her side, sprawling on the hard ground.

 

Now I’m even talking to myself, she thought, slowly sinking down towards sleep.

 

No, you are not. Wake up or die!

 

But I just want to sleep!

 

WAKE UP!

 

The last thought slammed through her mind, accompanied by far more than words. Images of darkness, the bite of fangs, strands of webs, and an interconnected lace that spanned the world many times over rushed through her consciousness. Glimpses of things simply outside the reach of human understanding, cold and predatory, yet simple and without judgement. Alien, but not evil or malicious. The pain of the psychic intrusion was enough to startle her back to wakefulness, and she knew immediately something was very wrong. She had not been talking to herself or to Lulu.

 

“I think I’ve been drugged!” she shouted at the empty halls of the dungeon, halfway between a giggle and a sob.

 

Spores. Pollen. Bad air.

 

She could tell the thoughts were not her own, now that adrenaline had buffered her mind against the worst of the effects. She knew it would not last, and needed a better solution.

 

“It’s in the air?” she asked the voice.

 

Like dust, choking my children. We are trapped within the Eye.

 

WIth her mind temporarily cleared, Morgan could see. Just barely discernible in the air, and only [Mana Sight] allowed her to pick them out at all; tiny motes like the glimmers of dust in a sunbeam. She had no spell to filter them out, and no time to craft a new one: even as she watched, she could feel the spores -- whatever they were -- lay on her mind again, a choking fog to snuff her out. But Morgan did not need a specific spell for her inner fire. She merely had to let it out.

 

And so she did.

 

Lulu gave a trilling wurble of triumph as actinic purple light filled the green-sheathed hallway around Morgan, the little scrubby immune to the flames of its mistress. The sorceress breathed the flames in and out, embers searing their way from under her skin to flare into a localized inferno. There was still pain, but it was distant and muted. The fire was her and she was the fire, hungry and indiscriminate. And the dusty pollen proved to be wonderful fuel.

 

Waves and trails of orange flames flashed out in short-lived clouds even further away from Morgan as the fire ran joyfully ahead of her. Tendrils of yellow light burned their way down the hallway ahead, and sparked secondary flash-fires that raced in and around the leaves on the walls. Tiny buds hidden just under the leaves glowed like lantern-wicks for a brief moment before crumbling away to ash.

 

As the fire cleansed her body, her mind began to clear as well. Anger replaced confusion, and she added its heat to the fire. Around her kneeling body, the leaves and sticks littering the dungeon floor turned to ash and crumbled to dust, and then the dirt itself began to bake, flowing like sand as the stone underneath softened. Her knees and feet and hands sunk into the floor of the dungeon leaving imprints like a child playing in wet concrete.

 

PLEASE STOP!

 

The words sliced into her mind, the mental plea gutting her rage with its primal fear and panic, and she banked the flames, keeping them just within a few feet of her body. The words came fainter, as if pushed across a vast distance, strain evident in the speaker’s voice.

 

You burn even the webs!

 

The sounds of laughter and the auditory hallucinations were gone, but, to fill the void, an entirely new sound echoed through the halls: a distant screech, a furiously angry noise that told Morgan she was no longer alone here. Further up the passageway, where her fire had not scorched the walls, dried but still green foliage rippled in time with the enraged outbursts..

 

You rebuked her! She traps us all!

 

Who? She could not speak the reply out loud, her throat and mouth too dry for anything more than a faint croaking. She pulled a pouch of broiled shellipede from her storage, chewing on the grease-moistened flesh to wet her parched gullet and work up some saliva.

 

Solana of the Vines...her pollen brings the waking dreams, dragging us to sleep.

 

Morgan sat back on her haunches to think, the heat-softened stone soothing to her bare bottom and feet. Who is us?

 

The reply came not in words, but images and feelings. LIke looking through a hundred eyes at once, she could see an oval-shaped clearing from many different angles. From each viewpoint, she saw many different creatures entangled in thorny vines. Deer. Wolves. Tyrannorabbits and Murdersquirrels, even a Shellipede and what she thought was the emaciated form of a giant species of bear. A titanic creature that looked like nothing so much as an overgrown panther took up a space over six paces wide stretching from the dungeon floor up to the branches that formed the canopied ceiling.

 

All of us. I send my children to make webs to find a way to escape, but all fall prey to her spores until you! My children show me all the prey of Solana!

 

“Who are you?” asked Morgan, finally finished eating and having worked up enough saliva to actually speak.

 

A thousand images at once skittered across her mind. Webs spun in shadows and sunlight, between trees and along the banks of rivers, in damp tunnels and the open treetops. Eggs and silks and fluttery prey, the bite of fangs and sharp tang of venom. The satisfaction of the well-sprung trap, the hatching of offspring and their subsequent flooding out into the world spinning more threads to connect to the web that spanned across worlds.

 

I have no name. I simply am, and am trapped here like the others.

 

“Oh, you’re a spider.”

 

Morgan busied herself eating another parcel of cooked shellipede from her storage, stocking up on calories and getting ready for another fight. She would prefer to avoid it, but her preferences had had little to do with her circumstances of late. “I suppose you’re huge too, gigantic like all the animals in the wildlands…”

 

It was more of an observation than a question, but the voice still answered.

 

Not a spider, although that comparison is closer than any other. More images flashed into her mind with the words, feelings of insult mixed with amusement. I am as large as I need to be!

 

“Got it, don’t call the spider fat,” Morgan replied, a trace of amusement in her tone.

 

Exoskeletal chitin does not get fat. It simply grows to accommodate the tissues and ichors of the being wearing it.

 

Morgan chuckled grimly, finished with her meal and now letting Lulu tidy up the grease and crumbs coating her hands.

 

“So tell me then,” she said after the loofah finished it’s ministrations. “Where is this Solana? And what is this place?”

 

Solana feeds us to the Eye of Madness, and the Eye, in turn, feeds her. More images followed, visions of herself stumbling through the maze and leaving her breadcrumb trail of stone runes and pieces. The visions followed all the way up to her bursting into flame, and then the pictures continued ahead without her. The path ahead doubled back on itself multiple times, distorting the actual separation between her and Solana. It finally ended with the huge cleared room with the trapped beasts, and a pool of water ringed by roots and ivy-like leaves. The water roiled angrily, and the outline of a woman shrouded in leaves and vines lay just below the surface.

 

Many have sought to claim the power of the Eye for themselves, and all have fallen to her spores. Free us, Burning Woman! A grim urgency flavored the last part of the message.

 

“So...she doesn’t like fire, huh?”

 

Morgan pushed herself to her feet and brushed the worst of the ashen dust from her body as Lulu purbled about to take care of the rest.

 

“Well, I have lots of fire.”

 

And the [Skyclad Sorceress] strode further into the dungeon, girded with terrible purpose, her own laughter drowning out the frantic shrieks of the plant-woman in the center.