Lore, Dungeons

I never used to care about why dungeons existed or where they came from. It didn’t matter to me at the time as I was happily living the adventurer life with my party like I’d wanted to ever since I was a child, following in my parents footsteps. The older I got however, the questions most adventurers suppress, in either fear or willful ignorance, started to nag at me, begging me to seek an answer. When the curiosity got too much I reasoned to myself that finding out more would be an adventure on its own, like my father used to say: “The reason I became an adventurer was to live in the moment in places of the past, seeking out the unknown and uncovering its truth.”

It was an adventure, the greatest of them all in fact. It was also the last time I ever delved into a dungeon. There’s just no way I could ever set foot in a dungeon again after what I’ve learned, of the horror’s I have seen. I pity the lost souls who continue to delve after learning what they are, what they can do and how they come to exist. They have fallen for the trap even when knowing about it.

The dungeon core, or the seed as some have called it, gets planted seemingly randomly. There’s no information how they appear, why they appear or where they come from. The seed is like a parasite, an infection growing by feeding on the ecosystem and the power the world bestows on its inhabitants. Its greed is unending and the riches provided only a lure, never actually worth to you what your death is worth to it.

Many think of dungeons as mere natural phenomena but I know better. They’re creatures, like you and me but twisted into something ugly, a perversion of equivalent exchange meant to blindsight us from what is actually important. The longer you stay within its walls the more you will resemble that which you came to challenge, the greed for strength and want for carnage overshadowing all that isn’t related to ascension.

Please, my dear little sister. Don’t follow in our parents and my footsteps, focus on something that makes you happy without the need for all this death. Anyone coming to tell you otherwise doesn't have your best interest at heart.

Will and testament of ascension: Letter to dear little sister

Loriéliá Nimiel, Oldest daughter of the Nimiel high elf clan.