A lone figure clad in voluminous white robes strolled leisurely through the desert. Her gait seemed ordinary but each step carried her extremely far, her form blurring into a white streak that cut through the miles.

Tiny wings of light sparkled white on Lirael’s ankles as they were exposed by her billowing robes. The shard embedded within them making its presence known as it carried her towards her destination much faster than even the fastest caravan that plied the dunes. As one of the five core shards of her Dungeon it received the amplification of her Domain. It was the source of her confidence in coming to the Orcish territory without any escort. Even if they set out a Dungeon mage to detain her, she was reasonably confident in her ability to escape. After all, her shard was extremely special.

Unlike a Teleport shard that could be restrained by any shard that blockaded or coagulated space, her Space Compression shard didn’t affect space itself but her interaction with it. If space could be perceived as a lattice with each edge of the grid a unit long; instead of altering the lattice itself – either tearing a rift in it or connecting one node to another – her shard altered the value of the unit. When she moved an inch, she travelled a mile.

~Shrink a mile to an inch~

As they were unable to match her speed, she had placed Igor and Vlad within her Dungeon so she could hurry along. The patience of her family was running thin and she didn’t have much time left. The hourglass had been flipped and the sand was swiftly running out. Her eyes flashed with a silver gloss and time around her sped up thirty-two times, her figure leaving persistent phantoms as she flickered across the vast stretch of golden sand that glimmered white under the burning sun.

A minute and several hundred miles later Lirael collapsed onto the warm sandy ground gasping for breath. With a wave of her hand, a cloud of blood formed above her, shading her from the harsh sunlight as she lay on the ground, her chest heaving, her ankles aching and her eyes gritty and inflamed. Using her shards in tandem and so frequently had taken its toll on her.

Even with the near infinite mana of an Embryonic Dungeon sustaining her skill usage, shards couldn't be used indefinitely without intervals of rest. The reason for this was that they were fused with parts of the mage’s body and as such, overuse engendered fatigue in them. If she powered through this fatigue and overstained her shards, then she risked fundamentally injuring them. It wouldn't simply be a matter of healing the shards with mana then.

This refractory period was technically termed the cooldown and every shard had its own characteristic cooldown. Familiarizing themselves with the cooldowns of their skills and keeping track of them was something every mage worth their salt had to do. Lirael had never abused her time and space shards so thoroughly before – not together. So, this was a learning experience.

Closing her smarting eyes, she carefully savoured the feeling, recording it in her mind for further reference. Knowing her limits would allow her to tailor her future strategies skirting them.

Using her mana senses to look within herself, she observed the Space Compression shard that had fused with her ankles and the Agility shard that had fused with her eyes – both of them at Tier 5; both of them part of her Dungeon.

Fissures overspread the transparent crystal embedded in her ankles on both sides of her feet. Four separated pieces of the same shard that resonated with each other ignoring the intervening space. Under the wash of her violet mana, the fissures were swiftly closing up. Although she had pushed herself to the point of injury, she had managed to stop before the brink.

Satisfied, she transferred her attention to the tiny shards of silver crystal that resided in her tear ducts. Agility shards were a relatively common shard with several beasts condensing them. By increasing the flow of time around their user, they would, in effect, speed them up. At Tier 1, it sped up the flow of time two times and for each subsequent Tier, the amount it could speed time up increased by a factor of two. Perception, reflexes… it was a comprehensive promotion. The only reason for their lack of popularity was the amount of mana they guzzled with each use. A Tier 1 shard could drain an upper stage Red mage dry within a minute of its use and a Tier 5 shard could drain a upper stage Violet mage in the same duration. As such, Lirael had never had the opportunity to test its cooldown. But now, with the infinite mana of her Dungeon at her disposal, she had meant to try.

Unfortunately for her, before she could achieve her wish, she had to deactivate the skill. Rather than its cooldown, her shard had reached another kind of limit. It had run out of food.

Depending on the source of the shard, different Agility shards had widely varying diets. Hers drank her tears. She had obtained it from a Weeping Willow – a macabre tree that captured living beings with its flexible woody vines and fed off their misery; weeping copiously from the facial features engraved on its trunk in the process. The shard was the reason its whipping vines were nearly impossible to avoid.

Lirael sighed and blinked; her dry lids feeling like sandpaper as they scraped across her eyes. She doubted she would find anything even remotely resembling eyedrops in the middle of the desert.

Her exhaustion receded as more of the Genesis stone that made up her Dungeon vaporized to replenish her reserves that were consumed to heal her space shard. Right now, her ‘infinite’ mana was actually based on the consumption of the foundation of her world. Until and unless she could promote her embryonic realm to a true Dungeon, she wouldn't be able to generate her own Genesis stone and her mana would be like water without a source.

If time wasn’t of the essence, she would have preferred to travel by more mundane means but her circumstances didn’t allow her that choice.

Complaining about her lot in life would get her nowhere so with a grunt, she pushed herself to her feet. Testing her weight on them and finding them quite serviceable, she set off again. This time in a much more measured pace that balanced speed and sustainability. The Tyhr was vast and the Myriad Toxins Desert area a long way away.

In her wake, the cloud of blood ablated under the glare of the sun, leaving no trace of her behind.

Sand dashed down the mountain followed closely by the clacking of the fleshless jaws of his pursuers.

He had been exploring the mountain, trying to get a lay of the land and hopefully deduce something from it that would help him unravel the mystery of the Dungeon. Unfortunately, he hadn't gone very far before his booted foot had crunched something under the snow.

Looking down, he had found the empty sockets of a snow-covered skull staring back at him. He only had time to note how well the red snow contrasted with the bleached bone before the skeleton had attacked. Apparently having its wrist snapped hadn't put it in a friendly mood.

Even lacking a weapon, Sand was more than a match for a basic skeleton so a few punches and two well placed kicks later, the unfortunate undead had been dismantled into its constituent parts. Sand had just settled down to investigate the still-shivering bones of the creature when its friends had shown up for the party.

Wary of calling the wrath of a Bone Monster down on him if he wantonly slaughtered its subordinates, Sand had wisely decided to retreat but the stubborn creatures had gotten it into their empty heads to chase after him relentlessly, tiring him out and forcing him to dispatch two more of them that had relatively complete limbs.

Quickly running to the side of the gully, he started to climb his way down.

The first few steps weren't bad, there was a bit of a path that had been worn in the rock by melting snow, but after that the descent got more difficult. Fortunately, the rock face was broken up, with a lot of good hand and footholds and his month of exercise in the mines had given him enough strength for the climb.

The cliff became steeper the lower he went. To make matters worse, the frigid temperatures had compacted the red snow into a layer of blood ice that coated the rocks making every surface slick, drastically increasing the danger of his descent. To stave off the cold and frostbite, Sand had to constantly decompose some of his mana into heat. The warmth radiating off him melting the snow and frost around him. While that was good for ensuring that he didn’t slip on some ice, it gave rise to new difficulties in the form of the streams of slurry that ran down his arms and soaked into his shirt causing it to cling to him with a profoundly uncomfortable cold wetness. The rank stench of blood irritated his nose.

Looking up he saw a few of the skeletons climbing down the cliff above him. They were many and varied. Human, beast, a mixture of the two, they were moving slowly, none of them had all of their limbs intact, but they seemed to be managing to inch their way down by jabbing the sharp spurs of bone that grew out of them into the cliff for purchase.

Sand tried to descend more quickly, his right leg finding a narrow ledge that jutted about an inch out from the wall. Putting his weight on that, he felt about for purchase with his left. His left foot found a crack in the wall that he could wedge his toes into, and he kept creeping down the wall. At one point, the rock he was holding onto was dislodged by his weight and fell bouncing down the side of the cliff but he managed to hang on with his other hand. His stomach twisting, he found another handhold.

He was only a few feet from the bottom when his luck ran out.

Wedged precariously into a narrow crevice in the rock of the cliff face, Sand’s booted right foot cramped as he strained his left leg as far as it would go. But the next foothold was just too far away. His fingers shivered as they sustained most of the weight of his body. Clenching his teeth, he let go with his left hand, momentarily swinging free before his left foot slapped against the outcropping with a solid ‘thunk’.

Placing his entire weight on the limb, he twisted around and leap the rest of the way down bleeding off the impact by settling into a crouch. Without a backward glance, he dashed away.

Sand had climbed down the cliff hoping that the terrain would keep them out of his hair. He grimaced as he heard the impact of bone on rock behind him as the skeletons leapt the rest of the way down. Apparently, it hadn't been enough of a deterrence.

‘At least I know for sure that there’s an Undead Marrow in the Dungeon formula now,’ he consoled himself with a sigh. ‘Albeit one that hasn’t fused fully.’

As slow as the reanimated skeletons were, Sand should have been able to easily outrun them but in undead infested land population rather than speed was the thing to be feared. The eerie clacking of their jaws was some sort of necromantic battle cry that raised the skeletons slumbering beneath the snow wherever it echoed and more and more of them joined the chase.

Soon, he was surrounded by shambling bones on all sides. Clenching his jaws, he stopped trying to run away. Reversing his direction, he charged the bone regiment instead. There was no way the Dungeon master was unaware of what was going on in her own world. And having him die so soon after her purchase was wasteful to say the least.

So, if this wasn’t an accident and she didn’t want him to die – then she wanted him to fight. She would preserve his life in the critical moment. Coming to the conclusion, Sand unshackled himself fully and lay into the skeletons with all his repressed fury carefully tuning his performance to lie squarely between ‘desperate flailing’ and ‘talented brawler’. Shoulders, elbows, knees, feet, right fist and even his head turned into weapons as he attacked joints with them while his modified left hand snapped the thinner bones and crushed skulls.

He attacked furiously without any thought to defence and the wounds piled upon him, dyeing his soaked shirt a deeper shade of red. His mana level dropped swiftly as it was consumed to supplement his physical strength. His lungs were like bellows, his breath was steam and his eyes were widened in the panic of a cornered beast.

The skeletons had no end.

Sand’s confidence vacillated. ‘Was I wrong?’ he wondered. ‘Was this all an accident?’

Now that he had committed to his reckless assault, he didn’t have the energy left to try and break through the blockade in a single direction leveraging his superior martial skills. ‘To hide myself, did I kill myself?’

His eyes grew sharp. ‘No!’

With a full-throated yell, he lunged at the skeleton of a beast with a scorpion-like tail with his left arm drawn back. If his blow landed, he’d no doubt crush the creature’s skull but the tail would pierce his head. They would perish together.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the tip of the tail enlarged in his eyes. At the point of death, he only felt a light disappointment. It was too soon, he had just begun his second life. He would have liked to travel further, see new things, reach a boundary he hadn’t reached before… Fulfil his promise…

The form of a wrinkled old man with a stutter floated up from the depths of his memory. “Promise me… p-promise that you’ll free us all…”

‘Sorry brother, it looks like I won't be able to keep that promise this time either.’

A roar resounded throughout the mountains, echoing off the rocky walls. Wherever the sound visited, the myriad things froze instantly. Suddenly, the raging battle turned into a field of frozen sculptures. The sound faded. There was silence.

Trapped within a layer of ice, Sand felt the last of his mana drop swiftly as it struggled to keep him warm.

A light crack disturbed the peace of the frozen scene; then another, and another… With the sound of breaking glass, every sculpture shattered into tiny pieces. Powdered ice fluttered in the air, breaking up the light it caught into rainbows. Bloody snow, light of seven colours and a frozen human in their midst, fixed in a posture of war. The scene suddenly became surreal.

Sand felt the chill seeping into him, freezing his very thoughts. The last of his scarlet mana sputtered like a dying flame. Then he felt something land on top of his frozen head and the ice shattered into powder and fell off him, releasing him from its imprisonment.

He dropped onto his hands and knees, gasping for breath, his teeth chattering from the cold and his skin blued by the ice. Noticing something moving at the edge of his vision, he laboriously raised his head.

There, atop a large boulder stood his saviour. A majestic blue lion, its pristine white mane fluttering in the wind as it looked down on him regally. Even though Sand knew the power of the beast. Even though he knew what it was and what it represented, he couldn't help the mirth that rose unbidden in his mind.

He burst out into laughter. Great guffaws that put a stitch in his side. He didn’t know if it was the great changes in his situation in the span of a day, or his young body finally celebrating its first escape from the jaws of death. But for the life of him, he couldn't stop laughing even when the lion growled at him threateningly.

All because it was only the size of his palm.