The cultivator ants were emerging from their underground empire, the queen having spawned a small army down there in the dark. They were the length of a human finger, black with shiny red pincers, and while they weren’t the most fearsome things in my domain they had strength in numbers.

They were beautifully single-minded, well-organized, and vicious in battle. I watched as a skirmish with a lizard claimed dozens of them before the tide turned. The lizard had thought they were easy prey, snapping them up like candies, but their poisonous bites soon had the fat old fellow unable to escape as the hive swarmed towards him.

His limbs thrashed weakly as they clung to his scaly hide and wore him down under a sea of bites. It was a gruesomely effective way to kill.

I allowed myself a moment to observe as they went to work clearcutting the nearby mushrooms, organizing into orderly chains to bring chunks of fungal flesh back to their queen. In its place they planted the spore of the exploding blooms.

And while they expanded, I was hard at work on the newly opened western portion of my domain.

Previously, my territory had been comprised of three parallel tunnels, running east to west, with the furthest south having been sealed and converted into a den for my vipers and the remaining two joined together to form my Gardens. To the east, a breach in my walls gave way to the realm of the fisherman spiders, a dense cluster of mangrove trees spanned by enormous webs that existed as an island at the heart of a lake.

Now I fully controlled an access tunnel that joined the three to the west, bridging us to the daylight world above via a small ladder into the heart of the merchant’s district. I had also reached the river, my domain extending up the floodwater tunnel that was my first and original conquest to touch on the broad, muddy flow of the Caltern. The possibilities this opened to me were immense.

But first I would fortify my holdings.

I ate away at the walls of the access tunnel, widening it into a rough causeway of unworked stone. The walls were jagged and the floor underfoot was loose dirt. Next, that floor was torn away as I dug down, opening a deep chasm. My ability to consume unliving matter had increased subtly with each level I’d risen, and now it was easy to rip my way through the stone to form a deep, wide ravine, going down to the bottom of my sphere of influence.

It was time to make life difficult for any invaders. I seeded fisherman spiders into the base of the ravine, growing for them a tropical jungle of ferns, moss, even small trees. My expanded Mana reserve had no problems accomplishing things I couldn’t have dreamed of before.

And then I began the real work. I raised long, thin spars of dark glass from the walls of the ravine, having them slant up over the open space above. The main issue with digging a pit is that someone could simply throw a rope across. But as one long jut of glass after another was grown over the gap, that became impossible.

Soon, I had spun something like a jungle of narrow glass beams that would force anyone trying to cross to clamber through, squeezing their way past gaps barely fit for a human to cross. The slightest fall would plunge them into the ravine below, and worse, the spiders would soon weave their webs across this lattice I’d provided, creating an even more impassable challenge.

It was a clever enough obstacle, but it was also one that announced my presence as a Dungeon.

So be it.

I had spent enough time hiding, building up my resources. Now I was ready to come out fighting.

And I would give them a hell of a fight. The glass spars were reflective, and I covered them with creeping tendrils of luminescent fungi. Soon, the entire crystalline lattice shone with a bright blue light, reflected on faces of dark almost-black glass. It looked like the work of an enormous, hellish spider; with the Attunement of Gleam turning each spot of light into a hypnotic spectacle, and Gloom filling the shadows with illusionary enemies, I had little confidence of anyone crossing alive.

That left the ravine itself. I had taken the Sporeback Sloth as one of my Schema, and it was still the largest of my creations. I seeded them into the valley, alongside tall trees that would nest both the spiders and another foe of anyone trying to pass- the little birds that had accompanied the rhino through the portal.

They were curious things, with a symbiotic relationship to larger creatures. As best I could tell they survived by picking small insects from the rhino’s hide and flew into a psychotic rage whenever their home was threatened.

They would make perfect companions for the sporeback sloths, who carried entire ecosystems on their back.

Vaulder Claith was the fourth son of a rich merchant family. The old rule was that the first son should inherit the business, the second should go to the military, the third to the priesthood. A fourth son was an odd end. One his parents had shuffled through one prestigious academy after another in the hopes of making a scholar, before throwing up their hands and shipping him off to Caltern to manage his late uncle’s bookstore.

It was precisely the exile he’d imagined.

Caltern was a miserable city; the weather was miserable, the food was miserable.

The days where you were kidnapped by spiders were extra miserable.

It had happened so suddenly. The last of his few customers had departed from the door, leaving Vaulder to return to his daily game of flicking coins across the counter. He had just landed a particularly nice triple rebound when he heard a knocking from the back room.

Knock knock knock.

Vaulder pushed the door open and stuck his head into the room. Nothing. Complete emptiness.

Knock knock.

Cautiously, glancing at the darkening skies outside the window, thinking of every ghost story he’d ever been told, Vaulder stepped into the room.

And a door opened up in the floor. It flipped open, and from beneath came a skittering horror, the eight legs and eight eyes and drooling mandible-mouth of a spider rushing up at him. He screamed. He kicked. The kick, at least, was the wrong thing to do.

The spider seized his leg and dragged him into the dark, his claws scraping the floorboards as he was pulled down. The trapdoor snapped shut.

Vaulder continued to scream until a silk gag was wrapped around his face, muffling him. Another band was wrapped around his arms.

He was pulled through a smooth, strange tunnel, the tiny halo of light creeping around the edges of the trapdoor sinking away into the distance.

And then darkness.

He felt the tiny hooks of the spider’s limbs digging against his legs, and the scrape of the rough stone underneath him. He was doomed. Doomed. There was quite a bit of screaming, a long out-of-breath pause in which Vaulder realized he would already be dead if the spider wanted him dead, and then more screaming, as he realized a fate worse than death must be waiting for him.

When the screaming eventually stopped, it was because Vaulder had fainted.

I had the spider check that the idiot was still alive by pressing a hairy leg to his neck, feeling the reassurance of a pulse beneath. Satisfied he hadn't somehow wailed his way into an early grave, I commanded my newest minion to draw a drop of his blood with her mandibles, letting it splash across my surface. The amount of poison injected into him by the bite was probably insignificant.

And then the world began to fade. By now I was very familiar with all the pomp and circumstance, humming impatiently as the massive tablet of stone sloooowly descended into the arena of void where we'd fight our mental duel.

The newcomer gaped and stared like a fish. He had come unnarmed.

LISTEN HERE.

"Please by the gods have mercy on me! Please!"

YES I'M TRYING TO EXPLAIN HOW YOU CAN SURVIVE THIS.

"Anything!"

YES YES SHUT UP.

There was gratifying, blessed silence. Which was odd, because if you'll recall, this was mental communication. The boy had as much going on in his head as the average rock.

I AM GOING TO MAKE A CONTRACT WITH YOU. IF YOU RESIST AT ALL, MY SPIDER WILL KILL YOU.

He opened his mouth, closed it, and nodded. Nodded continuously.

YOU MAY STOP NODDING. NOW…

Between Vaulder Claith and the Nameless One

This Contract Shall Be Sacred:

Vaulder Claith shall stop making annoying noises.

He shall never tell anyone of the Nameless One's existence.

He shall do what he's told.

In return he will not be eaten by spiders.

The Contact was gratifyingly one sided. Just like that, I had claimed a lair in the center of the city. The only problem was, as my senses returned to the real world, I realized that the city had come for me. Seven dwarves and a single orc were prodding at the edge of my territory, examining the newly-forged ravine with its web of glass.

Oh.

Oh this was going to be fun.