Cabochon had been given a charge. An oblong egg of dark blue, larger than his skull. Once born, the creature that gestated within would quickly become too big to climb the Dungeon’s narrow stairways, and be trapped on a lower layer. So it had to be this way.

He would watch over the nascent guardian of the zeroth floor until it was ready to stand on its own.

Over the past weeks, his work had become almost frantic. In zealous, studious slowness, he would take the lumps of clouded quartz brought to him by the stone-tusk rats, be it the soft honey color common to the earth here, the rarer soft pink of rose, or even the true prizes, the rutile quartzes with their needles of false gold cutting through the pale white. With his oils and his tools he would carefully slice away what was unfit, exposing the beauty within the stone, faceting them until the clouds of imperfections were gone and a sparkling core, fit to contain Mana, remained.

Dozens of finished pieces, the largest as long as his pointer finger, waited in his study. He handled them with a religious care, lifting them to the long spear of light that descended from his everlamp and turning them so the light sparked against every facet.

All this because he knew he must impress the Maker. That he must show his value. The love of the stones themselves was eclipsed by his desire to prove himself in the only field the Maker truly valued; beauty. A grand project was forming in his mind.

The dome of the hunting grounds was grim, lightless. Huge towers of black stone rose, holding up the ceiling, their tops branching so they seemed like petrified trees. Cabochon’s own suggestion to the dim leader of the stone-spinners.

They lurched behind him in a steady line, carrying the fungal cores that would bring life to this desolate place. Cabochon instructed them in the planting, watching as feelers of mycelium like silver hairs crawled slowly outwards from the fleshy hearts, a vein-work patch of fine snow-white spreading over the black as the first core unfolded. From it grew tiny, thin shoots of glass, curling at their tops to hide tiny bulbs that glowed with an eerie green. Waves of the spiral shoots soon spread across the floor, providing a thick ‘grass’ of fruiting bodies. Taller stalks rose slowly, putting out a corkscrew pattern of thin fungal shelves, each turning slightly red at the ruffled edges to add a splash of color against the gloomy sea of waving emerald feelers below.

This was the core born from the Somnolent Blooms, their pollen diluted to provide a constant haze rather than an explosive burst of poison.

The next to surface had put its roots deeper underground, in twisting inner mazes beneath the churned dirt and the remains of the cobblestone streets. Up from the earth pushed enormous, lopsided cups of red, their underbellies gilled by scalloped lines of purple. They were joined by grey, tiered mushrooms like strange organic pagodas, one flat and wrinkled cap after another expanding. Roots climbed the stone pillars of the false trees, spreading bubbling pink-freckled blobs of white, the mutant offspring of the Bursting Bloom, to be tended by enormous variants of the cultivator ants.

Soon, the open, gloomy space beneath the dome had been replaced by a vibrant jungle, a sea of emerald in which pale white mushroom-flesh took on a poison gleam, and the soft pinks of the bloody cups and the blooming stalks went dark as blood. With rounded, organic shapes, it seemed almost like the inside of some vast beast, some behemoth.

Cabochon saw potential as he laid the egg in a nest of woven mushroom-grasses. Yes, he could work with this.

Reaching out, he called to his power.

It was weak. Too weak to be compared with the Dungeon’s. But it was his, and it grew by the day, allowing him the tiniest strength to shape the world. Slowly, a flame of Mana congealed within his palm. He whispered rune-words to it, fed it with his murmured dreams. All his mind was given to a single thought, a visualization of a butterfly, and slowly, the fire condensed inwards into the four-winged shape.

But not any butterfly. The creature that loomed in the blue smoke and flame that emanated from his palm was as tall as a man. The petite scales of its wings were panels of luminous blue and bottle-green, with striations of midnight purple, and from its abdomen descended two longs tails. Each was threaded with countless razor sharp hairs, arrayed in long bladed fans. They glimmered in the color of steel. A butterfly with whip thin sword-tendrils.

He smiled as the fire collapsed inwards, forming flesh.

Forming his first creation.

[ Blade Butterfly ]

With beautiful wings and deadly tails, this beast is an ambush predator, hypnotizing with the glory of its body and swiftly taking lives. It will carry its prey into the heights to slowly rot, drinking the corpse once it has fermented to mush.

Golden dust rained from its wings as it took flight, rising from him into the sky. It brought a faint smile to the Arachne’s frigid, often-cruel face.

He drew deeper on the little flame that lived in his chest, drawing it forth until his fingers began to tremble. Still too weak. Still too small.

But this much he could do.

Clouded deposits of rust-red and emerald-green appeared on the trunks of the vast stone ‘trees’ - real petrified forests would be glimmering, alive with the light reflected on the mineral encrustations forced out onto the bark as the wood turned to stone. He made it so.

At his will, one of the trees cracked open, revealing a geode-heart of clouded blue. The humans would flock to steal the glittering treasures exposed.

Weakness came over him suddenly, and his legs nearly failed him. His human body swung forward, sweat dripping from his brows, darkness washing over him in waves; he spent a long time in that between-place on the line of consciousness, chasing the feeling of power that had come over him in the instant before he collapsed.

The ability to shape life out of Mana. What a thing it was.

It was too precious to waste.

Slowly lifting himself, he turned towards the ceiling. Although life twined its way up the pillars, the sky was still lifeless and dour black, save for the fluttering colors of his butterfly.

It would not do.

“I must say, not many Dungeons have your taste…” The newcomer took his pipe in his backwards-bending hand and puffed out a cloud of scintillating blue smoke. A ghostly woman formed within the rising corkscrew of azure, dancing.

He stood on the edge of the final island, pacing the edges, letting the illusion of the silver tree break and reform as he turned to examine it from different angles.

“Which is the whole nature of our predicament.” He tapped ash from the pipe, little droplets of grey landing in the clear waters to be gobbled up by Brides of Heaven. I had relocated the wondrous fish here, where they would be safer. “You see, not many Dungeons would care for your creations. Beautiful, yes, but not…”

The tiger snapped his clawed fingers. “Here, here, let me show you…” Opening the outermost of his robes, he drew out a crystal of purest white, cracked through with veins of blue. “This wonderful thing draws spirits and discarnate ghosts. A soul bauble. You see how such a thing could be useful to any Dungeon…”

His way of talking was to never properly stop, but let the end of each sentence stretch into a purr. It made him an almost hypnotizing orator, with his lazy tiger drawl curling up each syllable into a satisfied, musical note. I could have listened for hours.

“Or here, look here…” Again from his cloak, which seemed to have different pockets and different treasures each time he opened it up, he drew a thin vial corked with a silver stop. Something like golden oil sparkled within. “Accumulated life Manas, fit to evolve any creature they touch. Better yet, I can sell you a flower that produces them endlessly. A fountain of adaptations and mutations...”

Frost traced the surface of the still pool, spelling words in gentle floats of ice.

DO YOU HAVE A WAY TO RESTORE BROKEN ATTUNEMENTS

“Broken attunements. My. Yes, yes, but…” A faint smile played around his lips. A tiger’s smile could never be called gentle. “Expensive!”

He blew a gate of smoke in the air and stepped through, vanishing. When he reappeared it was atop a large, painted wagon, drawn by two goats, pure white and pure black. MARVELO’S read the great sign on the side, with its sky-blue swirls of smoke and red lettering.

Leaping down, he patted his bleating beauties and stepped up, opening the wagon’s side to reveal a menagerie within. From elephants with tusks made of purest skygrist, to what looked like grey-scaled wyverns, they were all shrunken to the size of mice, caged with tiny dangling prisons of gold. He took one by the chain it dangled from and held it up to my inspection.

A golden stag. From the moment I saw it, I knew I had to have it. My world turned on my ability to own that beautiful creature, to possess it, to drink its blood and make myself whole.

“A god-sired beast. Fit to grant a fresh Attunement to replace the last. For my troubles, I cannot take Mana, not for a prize like this. I require…” He made it sound like the most reasonable thing in the world. “Payment in kind. Deal?”

I could almost have fallen for his glamours, if I hadn’t so recently been waylaid by the corruption’s intoxicating madness. Instead, I made the Mana around him writhe with anger, until he squirmed uncomfortably and released the spell with a laugh.

Instantly, he seemed far less impressive - his fur was shabby and threadbare, patches fallen away entirely, his eyes limned with grey slime. His robes were tatty and stitched-together.

“Damn.” He cursed, and laughed again. “But the deal, the deal you’ll find is very fair. I merely want your fabulous snake, oh yes, a prize beast he is, and-”

NO.

I made the wind roar the word, tossing back his layers of robes and making his pendants jangle as his own words were thrown back, lost in the all-consuming howl.

NO.

It echoed from every direction.

Grimacing, he bent himself into a bow. “Very well, very well. No need to get snippish…” Leaping onto his wagon, he cracked the reigns, relighting his pipe after my outburst wicked the coals to nothing. “In one month I will return. If you have anything worth trading…”

With that snide remark, he puffed a smoke-gate and drove through it, gone.

And good riddance.

It was only afterwards that I noticed Aurum writhing in dismay, searching high and low. At first I mistook him, trying to console him, promising with waves of affection that I would never-

But he already knew that.

No. Something was missing.

I was short one kobold.