Dragonheart Core

Well. I had little cause to compliment the lesser, scuttling things of my dungeon, particularly when they lacked finery or elegance—but to their own damning credit, at least the webweavers had managed to construct a passable shrine.

A collection of intricate webs, melded together into the faint reminiscent ideal of her symbol of worship—I'd originally thought it as a needle's point, but now that it was before me, it shaped itself like a spider's mandible, thread unspooling from the base and scattering around. Nenaigch, the goddess of weaving, with her newest followers.

And they'd already done what I'd chosen them for—namely, sacrifice. Though I hadn't started to fill the Haven with populations of creatures I wanted to live there, mostly because I wanted to save my mana until I knew if a threat was imminently banging on my door, I had built up the beginnings of the prey populations needed to support them.

So, in fine fashion, they had immediately butchered a burrowing rat and strung its desiccated corpse up on the marble platform.

That was probably about as close to prayer as a bunch of identity-less spiders could manage.

My confidence in the plan to avoid humans and go right to spiders was waning, just a touch.

But that was a question for when I had alternatives, so for now I pushed more worship into their insipid minds and moved elsewhere.

Time was an ancient enemy of mine, particularly when my distractions numbered painfully few. Until Nicau returned, I couldn't work on the new tunnel branching out of my dungeon; until Seros returned, I couldn't talk to him about my future plans; until both of them told me of the outside world, I couldn't prepare for my retribution.

When I had torn out my own heart to wreak vengeance on the man who had slaughtered me, I hadn't exactly anticipated the waiting.

In the future, I would work on limiting the number of my Named I sent into the wider world at the same time. I hated being stuck without intelligent conversation, which was in short supply with Veresai busy compelling Kriya and Akkyst having long, meandering talks with Bylk about their ancient stone plaque and his blessing.

Which meant I had to go entertain myself. Horrible.

My attention was neatly divided between the Jungle Labyrinth and the Scorchplains, the targets of my design. For the Jungle Labyrinth, it was relatively plain—wait for Nicau, finish the Haven, and then carve a twisting escape far through the madness and the depths of the Alómbra Mountains.

Then potentially go steal some priests, because while I wouldn't put myself in the alien mindset of a deity with nothing to worry about but sycophants, I also wouldn't call the webweavers particularly respectable followers. Nenaigch had been calm for the moment, the spool of iron-threads in the back of my mind, but I doubted she would stay so forever. No, I needed a better plan.

I glared a little harsher at the scuttling, ghost-pale bodies in the Haven.

But the Scorchplains—they were the next floor to truly work on finishing. The Hungering Reefs were well on their way, three rooms of impossible danger and beauty, from the swarming swallows of the first to the elegant lagoon of the second to the crushing depths and many-fanged jaws of the sea serpent in the third room. My own little paradise, though I doubted many of those who died there would see it as such. I wasn't quite ready to finish it yet, considering I could see little pockets where new creatures could fit, but it was working there. The Scorchplains were an untapped spring of potential.

And, well. I was impatient in all the ways that a dungeon core could afford to be. The sooner I strengthened the Scorchplains and made them a land that would survive, the sooner I could begin my eighth floor, and I had many wonderful ideas already scattering through my thoughts. But not until I got this one to a serviceable level.

The Scorchplains were, at their core, a very mean-spirited place. The basalt columns, never equal, always a tripping hazard—and tripping that could go right into a magma pool, coal-filled chasm, or waiting stinger of a mottled scorpion. Smoke in the air and darkness all around, no water beyond little oases of mushrooms, rampaging packs of scorch hounds and herds of bounding deer whose preferred response to threats was to trample them.

Fire-tongue flowers belched smoke into the air, choking the land in smog where the burning coal didn't. Already the magma salamanders had blossomed in size, from hatchlings to threats, bulbous bodies pouring molten stone from their skin and wrapping near-toothless maws about anything that entered their pool's surroundings. Death and devastation made pairs.

There had been some interesting developments—namely, the splitting. The Scorchplains were enormous, some ten thousand feet long, but not divided into rooms or areas like my previous floors. I had imagined it as more of a threat of endurance, where invaders had to struggle across a field of pure darkness with danger on every side, a race of attrition.

But my creatures had a different idea, it seems.

The elder scorch hounds who had known the starvation in the Skylands, who had their pack whittled down from three dozen to half the number without the stability to support pups, had claimed the back half of the floor; had staked out their territory and defended it. And then all of the new scorch hounds I had created had been entirely kicked out to form a pack of their own, more in the front of the room, separate.

Which. Fascinating.

Made even more fascinating by just what was happening with the older pack; most notably, their newer member.

The beast-tamer kobold.

After several long, long stretches of failing to convince the eldest scorch hound onto his side—particularly in the changed environment, where he could no longer as easily hunt food to give her—he had switched his strategy. Now he tried to join them to, honestly, much better success.

He slept in their huddled piles, hunted alongside them with his spear and warbled shouts, bound their wounds. But in direct comparison to Nicau, who had been showing the kobolds how to become more humanoid, instead he had becoming more bestial to match them. Still with his spear, but now he sharpened his claws and tried to use those, bared his teeth and snarled, devoured meat and abandoned mushrooms. Not quite Rihsu's strategy, where she was following draconic urges; no, he was committing quite hard to his fire ancestry.

Smoke trickled from his mouth when he concentrated, and the embers of his eyes matched the scorch hounds. I hated every moment of it, but it was irritatingly possible that he was going to unlock his fire upon his evolution.

Quite possibly the worst, but fascinating.

And to match, the Scorchplains had grown and split around this new divided territory; multiple herds of bounding deer darted to and fro, mottled scorpions who would sooner eat each other than team up, magma salamanders living endless gluttonous lives without ever seeing another of their kind. The spined lizards at least formed small familial groups, three to five, darting around like knives in the dark.

With weeks to change, already great things had emerged; and it started with golden letters crawling over my core.

There was a genuine part of me that almost sidelined the message; it had been so long since there had been anything new, that wasn't just shuffling silverheads into new silvertooths or armourback sturgeons and luminous constrictors into crowned cobras, that I wasn't prepared for anything new.

But this was new, from my deepest floor.

Your creature, a Lacecap, is undergoing evolution!

Please select your desired path.

Houndspore (Rare): In partnership with carnivorous brethren, it has grown into a worthy ally. Its bulbous form billows constant spores that can grow on the fur of passing beasts, hardening into protective armour in return for living off some portion of its nutrients.

Magmacap (Uncommon): Fire begets fire. Its cap reverses to form shallow bowls, while its mycelium erodes stone to transport up its stem to melt within. Little pockets of pure lava in pale white caps, heat to dissuade predators and light to attract prey, serving as explosive traps for those who never look down.

Tumbleshroom (Rare): From lace grows a tangle; its gills have grown and hardened into a protective coating, many times larger than its previous form. The slightest movement is enough to move it around, where its bile-coated armour picks up all prey in its wake to consume them.

Well. Well!

In comparison to the reaper's cap far above, none of these were quite as brilliant as that change—which was sad, admittedly—but they were still very exciting. The tumbleshroom was the first truly mobile plant I'd encountered; while the creeping vine, thornwhip algae, and vampiric mangrove all had the capability to shift locations, that was slow, shambling movement that could take fortnights to clear feet. But slight movement or gusts of wind was much more promising, particularly in an environment where invaders couldn't see it approaching in the darkness. Not particularly lethal, but it wouldn't be a second evolution without a trick up its sleeve. The magmacap was an equal pairing, more snippets of perfectly miserable pockets of suffering for the Scorchplains, taking away even more sure footing until the size of the cavern became its most dangerous element.

And the houndspore; I'd certainly never heard of anything like that before. An altered version of the bloomcap from previous evolutions, but less parasitic and more mutualistic. Interesting. The scorch hounds had few predators at the moment on the floor, but I already had my eye on something larger to add to the darkness, and they wouldn't be the apex predator forever.

But hm. What a choice to make—add more mobile threats, increase the magma, or protect the hounds? There was the question also of whether this was the first evolution in a long spectrum—this particular lacecap was just the largest on the floor, grown fat on the density of mana, but it seemed likely that more were to follow. Was it worth it to invest all into one species, or cast my luck that I could get more of others later? And where did–

Energy, thrumming overhead; something connecting with my soul and a kick-up of mana from a slain luminous constrictor, far above on my first floor.

Oh. Invaders.

Yesterday's group had been a collection of little misfits, from a scaled being that wasn't quite a kobold, taller, no proper heritage. Blegh. Lizardfolk; all the potential elegance of draconic kin, but forsaken for only their own strength and a pitiful reminder of what they could have been.

And, unfortunately, sapient enough I couldn't collect the schema from his corpse, once the armoured jawfish had politely removed his head from his shoulders. I had at least gotten something beyond mana though, in the form of a collection of insects preserved in glass in his supplies. Minor things, Underranked, but more to fill the poison-trap race in the Fungal Gardens. I'd take what I could get. His two companions, an angular-faced man with metal climbing over his body and a woman who wielded flashing balls of light, hadn't fared much better than him, although the mechanical man had dropped metal limbs like a spooked lizard and managed to clamber out. Irritating.

But it meant I flicked my attention skyward to the Fungal Gardens, poking points of awareness into the new arrivals that weren't even playing at subtly, and paused.

…huh.

I knew these invaders.

One of them was small and dusted and tripping along like he hadn't known sleep in a decade, and it was him whose mana had sparked alongside mine as his soul reconnected—Nicau, my Named, my wandering little spy with the tongue of a thousand species and the wits of none of them. Even now, his thoughts sung a weary funeral dirge of defective cohesion, blind to his surroundings. Goodness. I had long abandoned my mortal form and even I knew what he was doing was terrible.

Made infinitely moreso by the man standing beside him.

Tall, confident, strong—and familiar. Bronze scales and slitted pupils—ones that had faced my dungeon before. Chains and charms and cages—empty, for now.

Gonçal, the miserable fucking bastard who had stolen my wolf-wisp.

The mushrooms could wait. This was, just marginally, slightly more important. Because of some critical interest was the fact that Nicau, my Named, supposedly loyal to me, had just entered my dungeon side-by-side with a wretched thief.

My points of awareness unspooled overhead, weaving together amidst Nuvja's shadows until they formed a watching web of stars. Gonçal strode into my dungeon like he owned it but there was a wariness there, concern in his eyes, tension in his shoulders. As he damn well should, because through the mana-sense my dungeon was infused with, I felt the flickers of a response—the gentle simmers of something reaching back.

Around his neck, beneath the armour, wrapped in crystal and drenched in mana, was my cloudskipper wisp. Trapped. Contained.

Caged.

Nicau, halfway through entering with his shoulders hackled up to his ears, nearly fell flat on his face as the full force of my wrath descended into his mind.

Kill him, I snarled, vicious and biting and bellowing. Kill him, rip his spine out, shred his intestines, feast on his innards–

"Careful," Gonçal whispered, casual as all hells.

Nicau wheezed something without words, clutching at his head as pain echoed back through our connection. I bared unfortunately intangible teeth but did slink back, dropping my shrieks to hisses, untangling the fury into something more manageable. Kill him, I said again, cold. Kill him.

My Named, for some fucking reason, didn't immediately spring up to sink his dagger into Gonçal's throat. I was going to kill him, too.

Nicau just straightened up, still pressing a palm to his forehead like he could hold back his Otherworld mana. "My apologies," he managed, mana sparking to his tongue. "I'm fine."

Fine? Of course he was fine, he was back in the dungeon. What was less fine was the distinct lack of murder taking place. Why wasn't he–

Nicau looked up at the ceiling, eyes wild and panicked. His mind writhed with excess mana.

Ah, that was his problem—he'd only ever spoken to me out loud, using his mana-gifted tongue, but that was moderately more difficult with a companion. But I didn't really see why that mattered if he was going to kill Gonçal anyway.

Which he was. Because I demanded it.

Gonçal frowned, glancing around the Fungal Gardens, slithering with shadows and hidden threats. "If you are not feeling well enough to invade," he said, wary, "then we should not risk our lives for nothing."

"Don't worry," Nicau said, sounding like he was worrying enough for the both of them. "I have a plan."

Gonçal raised an eyebrow, mana flickering over his eyes. "A plan?"

"A plan," Nicau repeated wearily. "Just trust me."

Trust him? Trust him, who had brought a thief into my dungeon without the courtesy of gutting him first?

Oh, I couldn't wait to see this plan.