One could argue that a Dungeon was an intelligent being. After all, the difference between intelligent life and any other was an intentional use of mana, and anyone that has studied a Dungeon would agree that they had a particular penchant for mana and its use.

The Dungeon situated at the base of Skull Mount was no different. It has withstood the trying test of time that new dungeons regularly go through after their seemingly popping into existence out of nowhere. Some scholars have provided differing theories about how or why Dungeons exist and how they are ‘born’ in a lack of a better term, but no unifying agreement between said scholars existed. All that the people living on Belerem knew is that Dungeons exist and that they were ravenous mana-bound creatures.

Thus we return to the Dungeon at Skull Mount, as it was called by the sapients of the area it lived in. This wasn’t a particularly old Dungeon, but neither was it inexperienced. It already withstood several attacks and tried to make itself better at defending.

Naturally, a creature made and bound by the world’s mysterious energy that permeates through it also feeds and grows by inhaling more of it, and thus the primary concern of Dungeons’ existence was made pretty clear to the various sapient races. Dungeons wanted to take up space and kill things.

The other sapient races didn’t like something not-so-sapient intent of taking all their living space, even though they frequently take each others’ just as easily through many wars that happened over millennia. Thus, they decided to somewhat shelve the idea of conquering each other and work together in stopping Dungeons from their voracious land-grabbing.

Soon enough, the Dungeons and sapients were in a sort of an attrition war.

The Dungeons would pop into existence, as they always do, and start grabbing land to get access to more ley lines of mana. As they did, the less intelligent creatures would make their way into Dungeons as they cleared parts of the bedrock within them to house the mana reserves.

The sapients would then try and kill the Dungeon by making their way through the mazes and traps Dungeons use to protect their vulnerable parts, namely the mana reserves the sapients call a core.

An invasion of a Dungeon would prompt heavy recourse from the Dungeon itself, as it started to use its mana reserve to strengthen its inhabitants and direct them to the invaders, sometimes even able to use advanced magical techniques the sapients use. They called them spells, but to a Dungeon, they were a way of ‘life’, if a Dungeon could be called alive.

Thus we’re back to the Dungeon of Skull Mount. One party of invaders actually got to one of its cores and desecrated it, reducing the eastern portion of the Dungeon to rubble until more mana could be spared to restore it. The invaders didn’t think of the consequences of the ceiling collapsing in on them as they pierced the core with a heavy metallic object they called a sword. Sadly, their mana was dispersed into The Great Nothingness as the Dungeon lost claim to the area. It would have benefited greatly from such donation of life.

The Dungeon didn’t like losing, as it would mean that it would eventually die. It learned pretty quickly that most beings consider dying really really bad, and didn’t want to go that route itself. So it had to plan new avenues of defence.

It did try at first to just bury the core deep underground and be done with it, but to its chagrin, the mana flow to and from such core diminished to the point of inaccessibility, which was counterproductive.

The sapients, of course, learned pretty quickly of the phenomena that Dungeons had to have their cores exposed to make use of them and to feed and grow.

Thus, the Dungeon had to find more original routes to victory against the sapients. The fleshbags that were currently living in it could also be called sapients, but it liked making the distinction between friend and foe. But the fleshbags, as notorious and effective as they were, were starting to become underwhelming for the waves of intruders.

The Dungeon did realize pretty early on that it was great at moving things around. Perhaps it could move more fleshbags from somewhere else. It would hurt to try, as everything the Dungeon did to protect itself ironically meant it had to use the mana it stored. But it would be ultimately be used to survive and thrive, and thus it was a calculated risk.

Nobody told it that Dungeons knew nothing about maths.

Thus, the Dungeon set itself on recruiting more fleshbags. It thought long and hard about how it moved rubble and stone around and figured that it shouldn’t be that much different from that.

It started pulling mana from one of its cores, trying to see if that could provide a sight of a distant land to pull fleshbags from. Far sights were a lovely thing for early defence, as it meant the Dungeon could plan in advance whenever it saw invaders coming from afar.

However, it was apparent that no sight appeared. A lot of mana was sunk into nothing. Actually, the Dungeon realised that the mana was sunk into something, as there was a sizeable chunk of it glowing about the dungeon hallways. It just didn’t know what.

The Dungeon then sensed something wonderful. A fleshbag. It didn’t know how or why, but the chunk of floating mana actually saw a fleshbag. It was ugly and vastly different from other fleshbags living in it, lacking any protective apparatuses such as scales and serrated teeth, looking similar to the invaders instead. It didn’t understand where the fleshbag was actually, but that didn’t matter in the long run.

The Dungeon pulled. It used the chunk of mana it had collected and pulled onto the fleshbag. Then the fleshbag was nowhere to be found.

Infuriated, the Dungeon seemingly gave up on trying to pull more fleshbags from apparently nowhere and decided to make a spike trap and more hallways to extend its maze with. At least it knew how to do that well. And it always worked.

The Dungeon didn’t keep a tight count of signatures of life inside it. The fleshbags, while important, would constantly go up and down in numbers so it didn’t think much of it when there was suddenly a new signal of life inside the Dungeon. It didn’t really bother to check where it was, as it was currently concentrating on figuring out whether spikes should come from the floor or the ceiling. Experiments with the past invaders have so far proven inconclusive as to the effectiveness in either method. The Dungeon thought that maybe one of the walls would be a better place for the spikes.

Feeling pretty happy with the new arrangement, and still mad about the fleshbag pulling being an utter failure, the Dungeon went into slumber as it always does to conserve energy and gather more for future endeavours.

It still didn’t check the new life signal. Maybe it should’ve.

The Gods of Belerem were mysterious beings. They heralded and herded their subjects, but decided to stay far from them and influence them directly in only the most special circumstances. They spoke through their Priests and Champions, but that was a rare occasion and the subjects considered being approached by a God as the greatest honour.

One of Gods realised that suddenly, there was a subject where there shouldn’t be one. Apparently, one of the Dungeons did something to it, and now a human was transported deep inside its territory.

No God knew who the human worshipped, or who the human was. But they decided to go along with it. Semira, the Goddess of Life could glean that the man’s name was George and that he had come from a faraway land. She didn’t know how or why he decided to appear here, but she decided to help him nonetheless, and thus left him with an arcane book. Her priests would use the book to store incantations and discover new things about the world, and she hoped that it would aid the human in the quest against the Dungeon it had been mercilessly put into.

Usually, the arcane books were bound to a particular God and the subjects would be bound to the God as well. However, since there was no obvious binding in George, and Gods couldn’t force people to bind to them, the book would be unbound as well.

Semira hoped that George would find his way. She liked to see life flourish, and life flourishing in the Dungeon would be a paramount task she would be proud being a part of.

Scholars in Belerem knew of the spells to transfer people from one place to another. They also knew that some other planes existed, such as those that house Demons or Gods. They did know that Demons knew how to transfer between Belerem and their native plane, and the priests frequently told of Gods pulling mortals into their realm when the time was right.

What happened to George was nothing of the sort. You see, George lived in neither of these planes. So it was confusing to all parties involved when he blinked and, instead of his bedroom in the city, found himself alone in a dark damp cave corridor. A moment later a flash of light appeared and a book was plopped into existence right in front of him.

That was all he saw before he passed out.