Dragonheart Core

The gleaming satisfaction of evolutions did sustain me for a while, but I was far too busy to really revel in it. A shame, because I was ever so excited for the reaper's cap, but the imminent threat of a Gold merrily sauntering his way into my dungeon after escaping with five floors worth of secrets took just a scale more priority.

That was the weight and work of it, unfortunately.

I darted overhead, scattering points of awareness in my wake like stars; healing mana coiled through the ambient air, crackling over the Skylands in forked points of lightning that both healed and thoroughly shocked anyone they brushed. Back in the Stone Jungle, Seros hissed at Syçalia's corpse, slitted pupils narrowed and gravitas pouring off his scales like rising tides. Our connection thrummed with his hunger, at the first true hunt he'd had in a long time that had been just a deception, just a fruitless battle against someone who hadn't been in their proper fighting mind.

He was a champion, my first Named, and this was not a battle he was happy to have won.

She was Gold, I murmured, at least a balm over the blasphemy. A good reward of mana.

Seros' thoughts simmered like boiling water. He did not, apparently, see it the same way.

What a little sycophant. He wanted to get stronger, which means he needed greater ambient mana and larger prey to sate his fill, and then he was pissed that he didn't get to fight the same level of invaders he had before. As if he would be happy clawing miserable little Bronzes to death and potentially chipping a fang.

He needed to go work through his frustrations in a battle with the sea serpent. He had grown from fledgling to juvenile, a true monster in the third room of the Hungering Reefs; his attacks cleaved stone from walls and he regularly devoured roughwater sharks to satiate his hunger, and all those within my halls knew to fear him. His battles with Seros were legendary.

In another world, Seros had fought with the sarco, a training companion of similar size.

But he was dead, and now she was dead, and the Underlake was missing its monarch.

Ghasavâlk would pay with blood and consequence for killing her and taking her corpse; I knew I needed to make a new one, to fill the void left behind by the end of the apex, but there was a biting urge of melancholy that roiled in my core.

Two sarcos had I had, and both had died. Neither had even been in glorious battle, in victories that came with their sacrifice; the first had killed the dryadic fighter, but the other had needed to be killed by Seros. Ghasavâlk and Syçalia had killed her without more than minor injuries—and she'd been so clever. Her thoughts had been full of some melody deep in her mind, a Song she spoke of with great reverence and wonder. A call to magic more than might, something that her evolution would have given her in spades.

It would have.

If she hadn't died.

To be a dungeon was to be one of death. Dozens upon dozens of invaders had entered my halls, and many of them hadn't left. I had relished in their demise, in the mana I had won from it; I didn't care about them, and frankly I refused to. They had made the choice to come seek treasure with a garotte around their necks.

But my creatures didn't have that choice. They were born within my halls, to live in a paradise—and they were killed before they could ever reach their heights.

The sarco, perhaps, could have been a mage. She had been reborn from a fossil, found nowhere else on Aiqith, and she had been so hungry for power. For something beyond what she had already had.

And she was dead.

I needed a distraction. I would come back to the question of new sarcos when I was more stable, when I had accomplished something other than letting a Gold with intricate knowledge of my first five floors slip through my clutches with corpses in his grasp, when I could focus past the death and the destruction and the decay—so I pushed Seros to venture back to the Hungering Reefs, to carve his frustrations into the only creature large enough to go claw-to-scale against, and fled myself down to lower floors.

Past the lightning, past the reefs, to the smoke far beneath. Still unfinished, still empty and yearning with its ten thousand foot sprawl, but I never felt better than when I dug my claws into a project, and this was one I had many ideas for.

The basalt pillars. The endless smoke. The untitled land.

In concept, the floor was simple and beautiful for it, and I couldn't love it more. For all I was still not a fan of fire and smoke, such dreadfully garish manners of destruction with little more spark of creativity than muddy earth, I had imbued a certain elegance of my own make into this seventh floor, and I treasured it dearly.

The billowing black choked out the floor, plunging it into darkness, thick and grey and deep—I had ignited another two furrows with mana from particular invaders to bring it up to nine coal-fires, all for magical cohesion, but I'd filled the rest with pockets of stone and potential. Not enough mana in my stores to create more magma salamanders given their seventeen point cost, unfortunately, but still those three I'd made were living up to the pedestal I'd set them on. Gluttonous, lazy beasts, some five feet long and growing, with cragged skin barely visible beneath the stone they melted under their bulk—glorious.

And then, above on the basalt pillars and darkness skittering around, the bounding deer raced. Still with the eldest leading the original herd, his pale antlers held high and hooves kicking up sparks as he darted over the plains. Already he'd gained a knotted pink burn scar over his hindquarter, where a scorch hound had leapt for him in an attempted hunt—but he was fast and he was clever, as far as deer went, and he'd managed to escape. Other members of his herd weren't as lucky, their numbers thinned, but already the scorch hounds were blooming. The hollows between their ribs were filling out, the embers returning brighter than ever to their eyes—they'd claimed one of the many dens in the far back of the enormous floor, and already a litter of pups was on their way, with the hunting returning true dividends. They hadn't managed to scratch past the carapace of the mottled scorpions, but they were making steady progress. Everyone on the floor was developing stronger claws, actually, after running over the basalt—already the scorch hound who had so captured the attention of my beast-tamer kobold had sparks that kicked up around her paws, new fires in the darkness.

She was growing exponentially, actually, more than even her pack; something about the kobold working with her—more accurately, attempting to work with her, she hadn't really agreed to avail her pack to work with him yet, though he was making progress—had bolstered her beyond, and she was a beast in the darkness. Larger than the others, faster, more clever—her fangs were always tinged red, and she'd gained back the weight the Skylands had deprived from her.

A right monster, she was. And the kobold at her side was positively blossoming in these fiery depths, as much as I deeply, deeply hated it. His scarlet scales seemed iridescent at the edges, charcoal horns growing longer and more ridged, and in the middle of his hunt I'd caught him with smoke trickling from behind his fangs.

The absolute asshole. It seemed he was going directly the route of the fire-drakes, the idiotic imbeciles with their garish breath weapons and moronic fighting styles. Well. I had Rihsu, and Chieftess, and all the evolved kobolds from the Hungering Reefs. I would leave this little fool on his own.

He fit in with this floor, at least. I hadn't yet decided on a title for it, something to carve out meaning from the deep and the dark, but fire was unfortunately fitting and belonging here. His evolution was coming extremely soon, I could sense it, and that was even ignoring the bond he was forging with the scorch hound. Whatever he would evolve into, it would be something I would have to live with. Maybe.

As proven by Ghasavâlk, adventurers could make it down to the lower floors. Perhaps he would be put out of his misery before he could make the regrettable decision to fall to the fire.

But as Ghasavâlk had also proven, adventurers could make it down to the lower floors—floors which were not perfect. All creatures here relied on close combat, on invaders getting too close to their magma pool or not seeing them lunging from the darkness; but I did have a schema that hadn't yet found a proper home in my dungeon.

Well. I had given it a home, and then Veresai had killed them all. She was a true delight, at times.

The spined lizard would fit well on this floor, though.

I gathered all of the mana I'd had before Syçalia, since I certainly wasn't using the Gold-attuned points for this; only around twenty, but I wove together a group of four just to seed the population.

They were a touch too bright, the majority of their scales being a gold-brown instead of the deep grey of the basalt, but clustered over their backs were black-white spines that bristled and shivered at every movement. They blinked at each other, forked blue tongues flicking out. Their tails flicked.

In the distance, a scorch hound howled, and immediately they scattered.

Little hooked claws wrapped around the lips of basalt pillars and pulled them up, tails lashing as they ran—even with gold scales they blended into the darkness almost immediately, lost to the smog and the smoke. Already I could feel them weaken in the acrid environment, little lungs struggling under the grey, but these were common creatures not yet evolved—my ambient mana flooded through them, powerful and endless. Their little channels thrummed with mana, adapting to this new land, healing what damage the smoke caused.

This batch may not survive, considering the other predators here had already gotten quite on their way to perfecting their hunting style, but already I could see the dream—spines launched from towering pillars of basalt, striking from shadows unseen and unheard. There would be nothing that would stop them if they got powerful enough.

And in my dungeon, the potential was all there.

But for now, those four skittered off to distant corners of the basalt lands, finding the algae pools and carrion left by the scorch hounds, carving out a home amidst the chaos. When I regenerated more mana, I would create more, to pour them into the nooks and crannies to serve as smaller prey for the scorpions that were not quite fast enough to kill either the scorch hounds or bounding deer.

But with that, I rocked back, settling in my core with its golden lettering. I peered out, awareness flickering through my various floors, tracing the path that Ghasavâlk had taken out of my dungeon. It had taken him and Syçalia hours to go through my dungeon, even with him stealing paths from Veresai's mind, and in under a day another adventuring party would be coming through.

It would never end, I feared. And I would not die—I refused to die, not again—but a Gold had escaped. Escaped not just alive but newly bolstered with knowledge, with very uncomfortable information about my floors—I didn't know all he had learned, but it was clearly something, and that was without what he'd brought in himself. Something about Chosen, he'd said, rather than Named; and about sensing draconic powers and Kriya, deep within Veresai's den. So.

All things considered, not particularly desirable.

But I was alive, and Syçalia was dead, and new evolutions bloomed under my power—and there was still a void in the Underlake, still an emptiness of death, still a dearth of victories. I would not allow it to stand.

My gaze slid up, past the floor I was working on, to one that had so recently been tested. Been tested, and held strong.

The Jungle Labyrinth had certainly shown its strength. Perhaps it was time it received its just reward.