My world turned and spun in the most nauseating way, leaving me adrift and confused.

The rat-hound I had created took its first few steps into the world, moving with a hideous, sinuous kind of grace, as if there were no bones beneath its mottled skin. It prowled the fifth island, its tongue slithering out to taste the air.

Salt and iron. Together, they made the scent of blood. It amused itself by putting its body to work, by running, slithering, leaping- it was an unruly thing in body and mind.

The rat-hound was a deadly creature, all spines and exposed teeth. Its form was a chimeric agglomeration of lethal things, tusks and tendrils, artlessly crushed together into one body whose basic grace was straining under the load. There was a certain way in which almost all natural creatures were beautiful, in that they were efficient, sleek little machines, whittled by years of adaptation into a singular purpose; the rat-hound looked like a child’s clumsy idea of a monster.

And I had created it, me. I’d hope anyone could see that made no sense. In the one short month of my existence, I’d proven myself a paragon of taste, at least. It was more than my reason to be.

It made me better than some animal in the dark, luring humans down to kill them and drink their souls.

I felt sick. My world continued to spin. Something here was bad, bad, bad. I felt the simple wrongness to the core of my being.

This had to be nipped in the bud.

KILL IT.

The entirety of my Dungeon stirred at the command. Even Aurum lifted his head, and the salt golems huffed, pawing the ground.

The rat-hound sensed the sudden shift in the air, darting back. Too slowly. The salt-rhino had already dipped its horn down, and with a sudden kick, burst into chugging, galloping motion, sweeping towards the unwanted pest.

The beast curved its boneless body, twisting, and feinted left then right and suddenly left again, disorienting the crude golem into rushing past. As the rhino did, a suckered tendril raked along its side. The wound was nothing, barely a scratch.

But it was lethal, nonetheless. I could feel the Mana pathways that animated the golem start to crumble and decay, unwinding, until the very energy that gave the salt-statue life was clashing about within its body, an uncontrolled flame.

I hesitated.

The second golem lunged forward, and again, that matador-show of agility sent it hurtling off in the wrong direction as the rat-hound ducked aside. It was almost playing with them. They kicked up huge clouds of dust as they turned, clumsily struggling against their own momentum. Grit billowed through the air as they sought to find the enemy, to crush it beneath their bulk.

The rat-hound was never there, always a step ahead. Ripping at them with shallow cuts and some strange poison I didn’t understand.

The first salt golem collapsed suddenly, falling apart mid-rush so that its own momentum carried it into a spray of salt chunks going tumbling along the ground. The rat-hound leapt upon the second, clawing its back viciously.

And I refused, refused, to watch this play out any further. To watch the second floor fall into chaos again.

A little fear flashed through me as I remembered what the rat-hound had been made to guard. What it could very well steal. The wellspring of earthen mana.

It needed to be stopped before it vanished down into the earth where neither my minions nor my own sight could reach it.

Aurum didn’t need to be told. He unwound from around me, slithering out. From the great mouth of the weeping tree he emerged, an uncoiling weight of golden scales, feathers, insect claws. His mouth opened in a long rattling hiss of challenge.

The rat-hound answered with a phlegmatic hiss, dropping away from the salt golem as this one, too, began to crumble and fall apart. Under the canopy of Aurum’s leaf-green scales, it was nothing, a tiny speck of flesh.

It turned subtly, eyeing the rift down to the earthen wellspring.

Aurum’s tail struck it before it could even return its attention to him. A whipcrack blur of gold-streaked scales, like a green bolt of lightning, smashed against the beast’s side and flicked it through the air. It returned to the ground in a long arc, skidding and rolling.

Already, Aurum had slithered like a tide between the hound and escape, cutting off its route to the rift and the earthen mana.

It climbed onto its feet, one leg held weakly, limping. Again that hissing warcry. It braced itself and charged for Aurum, head lowered, doing just what the salt golems had done.

Aurum’s jaw snapped open and a gout of flame came bursting, sparking, boiling up- a brilliant jet of flames that roared out in a fury of drifting sparks and leaping golden fire. I watched the hound reduced to a shadow within that brilliance, crumbling away.

By the time it was done, there was nothing left but a crisp of ash and charcoal left curled on the ground.

And still I felt sick with worry. What had that been? Why had its very touch been so deadly to the golems? It was like a poison to the Mana within them.

Poison.

I hurriedly pulled back from the scene, into myself. I turned my attention inwards, to my core, an ever-turning arrangement of five golden diagram-rings lined with countless runes that together orbited and contained a rift no larger than a fingernail, through which endless Mana poured.

It was as bad as I feared.

The outermost ring, the Attunement of Disguise, was starting to fray. The diagrams were askew, their clean geometric lines warping and bending. Sparks of purplish, bruisy light darted around the ring, like embers from a fire. As I watched, a portion of the runic designs crumbled into yet more sparks of purple light.

And there was nothing I could do about it. My core was the one place I had no power to change, none at all. Nothing I could do or will would affect those five rings, which existed to bind me as much as they did to strengthen me.

I was helpless now to anything but to watch the damage slowly spread, hypnotized by the sight of my own inner workings crumbling away like so much dust.

Too long was spent in fascinated horror at my own mortality before I realized there was something I could do. The motes of bruised light were nothing more than Mana, after all, and so I created the simplest, most harmless thing I could think of in the moment, a flower, and emptied my reserves into it.

A black orchid bloomed.

The feeling of being completely short of Mana was one I hadn’t experienced for a long time. My cloud of ethereal energies that let me see throughout the Dungeon began to break apart, and I was blind, deaf, in a blank world of my own as I waited to recover, my mind woozy with exertion.

But it had worked, at least to slow the bleeding. All the sparks of poisonous Mana were drawn away, thrust into the flower instead. I would have been elated if I couldn’t see how much damage had already been done. The structure of the outermost ring, the first Attunement I had chosen for myself, had begun to crumble apart.

And that process couldn’t easily be reversed.

I came back into the world, my ethereal senses slowly expanding again as ambient Mana flowed from me. I found I was being prodded, concerned, by the little kobold, who let out a happy bark as I sent waves of reassurance to his simple little mind.

EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE.

But I wasn’t so sure.