You have reached the next stage

As a Dungeon Core, you have prevailed to the first milestone and unlocked new capacities. From now on, with each floor you descend you may declare a new Dungeon Law. What you speak shall be.

No Law may be an absolute bar on continuing. You must always leave a way through to your Core. The more limited the Law, the more power will enforce it.

In addition

You may create up to two Vaults per floor. Vaults are special rooms containing unique conditions to enter or exit, enforced by the power of Law.

You have matured to Gemheart Dungeon (II)

Your shards reach a new level of power, and you may now create new Blessings by devouring the spellwork within enchanted objects.

I was excited.

My Descent had left us in a small, hollowed out cell within the earth, a ten by ten coffin. To a Core nothing could have felt more like home. Laws, Blessings, all of them could wait. What I needed now was time to think and time to grow.

My tendrils of ethereal Mana begin to eat through the walls, expanding my reach outwards. Trace deposits of metals and minerals caused some formations to last moments longer than the rest, making molten and unpredictable shapes briefly appear as the stone around them was melted away. I stopped, suddenly, struck by what I saw in the churn of random forms- by some miracle of chance an iron vein had formed the perfect image of a tree, made red by rust.

It struck a chord with me, and I began to repeat that shape, carving trees out of the stone as I expanded and expanded. In no time a forest was born, grey and red, lifeless. It had a grim and austere beauty to it. I could do better. I used salt, huge dull slabs of crystalline salt, to cover the trees, giving them a pure white aesthetic. Their edges were rough, the crystals flaking and cracking and leaving each tree ruggedly shaped at best.

Then I coated the floors with small, colorless grey flowers. A carpet of them stretching throughout the entire lightless cave. It was as if all the color had gone from the world, leaving behind a land of stark white trees and ashen lilies.

It was beautiful in the most horrifying way.

Now, what could I do with this?

Weaving together the roots of the flowers, I found I could make them interconnected enough that they didn’t need solid earth beneath them. In this way I could create pitfall traps that were completely disguised under the endless field of grey flowers- the ground simply not there, the lilies held up by the roots of their neighbors.

So I went all out. As I expanded, I cut huge chasms that divided the floor into seven plateaus. Each island was connected to the next by a single bridge, rising out of the sea of grey lilies in a beautifully ornate arch made of glass.

Anyone descending from the higher floor would be stunned by the monochrome world I had created, the white trees stark against the cavernous darkness, their limbs melding with and lifting up the cavern ceiling. They’d first see a straightforward field of flowers, albeit a ghostly, ethereal one. It was only with deadly trial and error that they’d discover the chasms, and that their only points of crossing were the glass bridges.

In a moment’s inspiration, I hid the final bridge. All the others were gaudy, beautiful constructions, but this one was a plain thin walkway hidden among the flowers, barely wide enough for a human. Even if they found it, it would be a nerve-wracking experience to cross. Better yet, I shaped the final island into a ‘U’ shape, so that anyone trying to cross straightaway would go tumbling into the ravine in the middle. Spikes lining the ground below would make that a hard mistake to walk away from.

All of which was a fine start. An eerie white forest, an ashen earth full of hidden pitfalls.

It needed more. The night lantern I had bought contained a particular kind of crystal called nightvein, which drank in the light around it. I replicated that, pausing for hours at a time to let my Mana recover from the draining task, and created black fruits of nightvein that hung from the branches. With each one the darkness grew thicker, more solid. Soon the white trees were like ghosts in an abyssal gloom.

To occupy myself in the long pauses between conjuring up nightvein, I worked on the trees, carving them with wizened and ancient faces that seemed to suggest this place had always existed, long before the current era.

The first of the Arachne was in awe. As he watched, the earth was remolded, stone falling away like smoke dissolving in the wind - a faint swirl of grey dust and then nothingness. And then the true artistry began. Trees rose, first red and then turning white as dull, clouded crystal crawled over their rusted iron limbs, encasing them in the color of snow. The earth was consumed by the colors of ash as countless flowers sprouted, an endless field of grey.

It was a desolate sight. As the trees twisted to take on human faces, the Arachne felt strangely sick. Was he just another creation? A spider shaped to have a human face? Were the memories he had, strange and vivid fragments of a distant life, real at all?

He hoped the Maker knew. Because if the Maker didn’t know, and he didn’t know, then the inside of his own head would remain a mystery, and worse an accident.

He did not wish to be an accident. More than anything, the first of the Arachne wished to have a purpose and a place.

A stone statue and a rat had joined them, standing silently, the rat on the statue’s shoulder as they watched a new world take shape underground. It was a holy spectacle.

I was in a state of artistic meditation. Absolute calm, absolute stillness, the kind of peace only a Dungeon could know- the peace of a being that never needed to eat, to breathe, to interrupt its thoughts for organic nonsense.

As I painstakingly carved each tree’s face with a look of intense, resigned sorrow, I pondered my schemes in the world above. Right now the unicorn was being stored in Immer’s care, and it would need to be transported once it was sold. Considering they’d just announced the priceless beast’s presence to an assortment of Caltern’s most ruthless thieves, it was safe to say they were anticipating at least one attempt to steal it away, and security would be stringent.

Waiting for it to be bought, and turned over to less prepared hands, was the safest chance.

The hardest time to steal the unicorn would be the brief moment it was on stage, but that would also be the perfect chance to humiliate Immer. Making the prize of his auction disappear would be such a sweet revenge for trying to kill my rat.

And speaking of, through Argent I know had the greatest scouting force in the city. I had the lead in a very important way; I was an unknown to them and I could very easily know everything about them.

The worst thing I could do then, was be predictable. Making my move when they were on guard, expecting a thief, would be surrendering that one key advantage. Instead I should act to induce chaos and force them into mistakes.

My first move, then, should be to take a poke at the hornet’s nest.

I mentally sighed, finally satisfied with my creation. The supernatural gloom that laid over the forest made the reveal of the pale trees, the mournful faces, all the more shocking. I began to wind vines of bright bloody red around the trees. Few at first - on the first island you might see one or two splashes of color - but growing more common as you passed through the plateaus, over the bridges, until at the final island almost everything was stained with red. Vines sprawled across the ground like veins, disturbing the peaceful grey flowers. They crushed and overwhelmed the stone trees, leaving knots of organic, wriggling red in their place.

And now the finale. I carved an eighth island, connected to the seventh by a bridge made only of flowers, their thin roots knotted together into a hanging bridge just strong enough to take a human’s weight. On that island I hollowed out a shallow lake, and filled its bed with overlapping stones of red iron ore, layered like the scales of an immense and coiled snake. The water itself took on the tint and hue of fresh blood.

At the center of the lake would be an island. I seeded tall, proud flowers, with long stalks that erupted into trumpet-shaped blossoms of purest white. Their tall stems were lined with tiny, needle-sharp hairs, poisonous in the extreme. An island of deadly beauty in a fen of blood. I would reside there. In the middle of the poison garden I raised up a dais, a rough tablet of stone carved with two snakes entwined in a double helix. Where their jaws met, a small alcove would hold me.

BRING ME THERE, I told my newest creation.

But fate, fate had other plans. Fate was a cruel whore. Fate had heard my planning and couldn't resist throwing a wrench into the works.

As he stepped forward, the walls began to writhe. Cracks split the foundations of the earth, sending rushes of dirt and stone tumbling free. I would call it an earthquake, but it was localized entirely around my newest floor, tearing apart my finely crafted work. I had bloodlust raging in my soul as the first intruder pushed through.

It was a six-legged hound made of swirling earth and stone, spikes of obsidian rising from its spine. An earth elemental.