I had to leave Cabochon on the lakeshore for the time being, until I could find a way to safely smuggle him back below the city. For now, I had work to do, always work to do- and I loved it.

I had discovered something important. As long as they were part of a Vault, I could place doors around my core without blocking the flow of Mana and threatening a backlash. Which meant there was nothing, nothing at all, keeping me from turning the entirety of the Garden of Glass Bells into a single, enormous Vault.

You see, I had a problem. Most of the creatures I had designed early on, when I had little Mana to work with, were rather small. Beautiful and deadly, but not on a human scale.

I had a wonderfully black-hearted plan to change that.

Within this Vault, the Law shall be:

All invaders shall be cut down to size.

If my enemies were too big for my lovely serpents to devour, I would simply make them smaller. Small enough for a viper to kill or a mantis to hunt. My gardens would become a jungle, my deadly little creatures would become goliaths. I placed glass doors at the entrances, sealing the room to begin the work.

The process of making a Vault was fascinating. First, Mana was drawn from my reserves to infuse the walls, inundating them with magical energies to make a sealed ‘room’ in which the currents of Mana could only enter and exit through the doorways. Then, a twisting happened, pulling on the currents of ethereal Mana flowing through the air and bending them, delicately, into shape.

It was like creating a Shard, but instead of working with condensed, solidified Mana within a jewel, it used the natural flows and leylines that passed through the Dungeon.

It also drained me to the point of exhaustion. The initial preparing of the walls alone drew up so much Mana that my ‘sight’ began to fade and grow dark, fuzzy spots, and the lurch as the ambient energies were drawn into formation was nauseating. I checked and was horrified to see I’d lost an entire half of my inflow of Mana.

The poison-cup Vault, by comparison, had barely cost me anything.

In the end, I would have to say the powerful effect was worth the price, but lessons were learned- Vaults were expensive luxuries, and best reserved for clever traps or puzzles instead of brute-forcing a second Law into place.

Still. I couldn't help imagining the first intruders to fall into the trap and find themselves shrinking away, my serpents and insects growing enormous by comparison. Their horror and shock would be well worth the expenditure.

And speaking of pests...

There were still adventures clinging on to the edge of the ravine, prodding at my defenses and slowly mapping out the slope, scratching down the location of spider-caves and disguised pitfalls, drawing sketches of the enormous lumbering sporebacks. In a way they were very polite guests, chronicling my Dungeon with a slow and precise detail.

Flattering, yes, but their end goal was to sell the information on to adventurers who would be mounting real incursions. Killing them would be deserved, but I had a better plan.

As they ventured out of camp, making one of their short jaunts downslope, my ratty crew crept into their campsite. The wallflower dipped the tip of his prehensile tail into an inkwell and added several strokes to their master copy of the map, a lovingly detailed work of several days. In no time we had added several phantom hazards that would send anyone following the map on a roundabout, pointlessly zig-zagging course to avoid them.

And that would be hilarious.

At the same time, I was looking at making a route for Cabochon to return by. I had several of the large, stone-burrowing maggots I had used to make hidden nests for the nacre-spiders guided to a quiet location in the sewers, pointed due west, and made to dig. They would need constant replacing but would allow me to cut a route that extended past my own domain, eventually breaking free of the city’s underbelly and finding a place to safely dig up.

Until then, Cabochon was out in the world, exposed. He assured me he would be fine. I found his optimism all the more reason to worry on his behalf.

The ‘guides’ I had arranged for the burrow-grubs were the fungal lion, lazily reluctant to do any work, and my latest recruit.

The orc-child had survived his trial by fire. After a week of breathing Dungeon Mana, he had gained enough affinity with me to absorb the Shard, letting me into his head. It was a little cramped in there. Not unintelligent, but cluttered with emotional nonsense, fears and inadequacies and other things I had never found useful.

But useful he would become. I was determined to make something out of him, and I had my reasons. One was to spite the Dungeon that had made such ugly things to begin with, to show that I could do better. Another was to honor that same spirit, the ambition it had showed, trying to usurp the powers of the gods. For all that Ilbur was an awful little toad of a thing, his Mana pathways were more complex by orders of magnitude than anything I’d managed to replicate in my golems.

These orcs were the seed of a grand endeavor, and although I’d never meet the deceased Dungeon who laid the foundation, I might be able to finish its work.

I let the ebb and flow of my domain distract me, envelop me, carry me away. It was always a joy to work on my territory, to flow from scene to scene in the unfolding dramas of the creatures big and small that fought, that struggled for life.

It was only when I felt more intruders on my outer edges - the dwarf girl returning - that I was awakened from my meditative state enough to realize the day had ended. I was exactly one month old.

I hoped Suffi was bringing me another present.

Vaulder Claith didn’t love crowds by any means. Oh no. He hated the stumble of elbows, the press of sour bodies on all sides, the constant jostle and shove until it felt like he was a ship tossing in a sea of flesh. Oh, it was fair to say Vaulder Claith was terrified of crowds.

But today, Vaulder was prepared to be brave. They weren’t giant spiders, after all, and Vaulder’s bar on fear had been raised quite high recently. He held a tray of fizzing elixirs aloft, long fluted glasses containing an even mix of sparkling cider the alchemists produced to bubble and fizz beautifully, and Kathe’s own patent tonic that had such an invigorating effect. They were a dark caramel color in whole, with a flavor of almost-burnt honey and medicinal bitterness underlying a sweet initial sip.

Delicious stuff. Vaulder’s new confidence may have owed more to chugging it relentlessly than to any new leaf turned. To accompany it he’d bought out the local bakeries, loading his stall with high, fluffy cakes layered by fresh fruit and whips of rainbow-colored cream, delicately cross-hatched pies, little pastel cakes stacked in a pyramid, scones topped with caramelized sugar and studded with tart berries; a panoply of delights.

And business was booming. He’d had to hire toughs to defend his place in the market, fighting off the more predatory merchants who tried to rush to nearby bakeries and replicate his success. None of them had Kathe’s elixir. The fizzy stuff was going as fast as Vaulder could pour, bubbling from a cask like liquid gold.

Ale was still more popular, by a mile, yes- but it wasn’t all drunks and bravos who came to challenge the tower. There were academics too, alchemists and mages, all of them looking for a place to rest outside of the bustle of the crowd. Vaulder’s little cafe, with his well-defended borders and comfortable reading chairs hauled out from the bookstore, was a paradise to them.

Suddenly, one of his customers bolted from the chair. One by one, the rest rose as well, the whole market turning their gazes towards the tower that rose up into the sky. On the fourth layer, two sets of eyes had lit up with ghostly flames.

After four days, two people had made it to the fourth layer at once. And in the same moment every pair of eyes on the third had gone blank.

The doors flashed, and out staggered the defeated contestants- the crowd crushing in around them, hiding them from Vaulder’s view, pushing to be the first to see what they had taken as their prize. He sighed. This place was mad, and the frantic energy was starting to infect him.

Mhurr sighed alongside him, slapping the rag he was using to polish glasses over his shoulder. “I can’t take it anymore, Vaulder. Gods sight, I have tried, but I am a fool.”

“What are you on about?”

“I’m saying, I won’t ever forgive myself if I don’t go and find out what’s going on up there.”