Alfric’s family understood failing a dungeon.

It wasn’t supposed to happen often. That would be a sign that you were being sloppy, unprepared, or leaning too much on the ability to undo. But it did happen, especially at the higher elevations, or in the dungeons that packed more of a punch for other reasons. There were some dungeons throughout the world that were exceptionally dangerous because of what hex they were in. Even a normal dungeon could trip someone up sometimes though. Usually it was cause for some good-natured ribbing or commiseration over the guild channels. You did what you could to learn, then you moved on.

When Alfric had his first undone dungeon, there had been lots of support from his extended family. It had started a chain of guild messages where relatives shared their first dungeon failures. His mother and father had both chimed in, and he’d found that reassuring, even though he knew the stories. His mother’s first failure was because of a poison they hadn’t recognized until it was too late — delivered by the claws of a tiny crablike beast. His father’s first failure was an ill-considered run at a partially submerged dungeon where they’d forged on ahead even though they didn’t have the equipment for it. Some of the dungeon failures were admittedly stupid, like his uncle, who had wedged himself into a crevice and been unable to extricate himself, or his second cousin, who had gone solo against a monster that his party was skittish on. There were more than a dozen of these stories in response to that first dungeon report, and it had done a lot to assuage Alfric.

After the second failed dungeon, at Posy Point, there were fewer responses. People had already shared their stories, and failing a second dungeon immediately after failing a first was less understandable, more embarrassing. The cause of the failure had been different — Alfric had been killed in an instant by a searing beam of fire — which at least let a few of his relatives share their stories of times when dungeons had been absolute dung. There were the selden dungeons, places with horrible monsters and almost no loot, and there were monsters that came with such viciousness, strength, or unique attacks that there was almost nothing that could be done against them. It was rare, one in a thousand or something ridiculous like that, but it did happen, and people tried to tell Alfric that it was something that you had to deal with. Extreme variance, even from a relatively low elevation and low magic dungeon, could happen.

And then they’d failed a third dungeon, and it felt like all the sympathy had dried up. The family wasn’t seeing it as a learning experience, they were seeing it as a problem. There were attempts to diagnose the problem and attempts to fix it, sometimes without the diagnosis step, and the thread grew long as the days went on, suggesting various ‘fixes’. It was one of the worst experiences that Alfric had ever had with the family guild, largely because it just kept going. People he had only met a few times would chime in, thinking that they knew the specifics of his situation, when they had clearly not read his other reports, and in one case, clearly had not read the rest of the very thread they were replying to.

The third failure had been mostly Mizuki’s fault, though he hadn’t put it like that to her. They had been at Herbury Meadows, to the east of Pucklechurch, a place filled with summer flowers and including a corner of Lake Gornorian. They’d gotten a fairly wet dungeon, with at least one room flooded to the knee with water, but somewhat sedate monsters, at least right up until the end. The problem was that Mizuki had quite a bit of explosive power, and had been using it with abandon, and the reason for that seemed to be that she was worried that someone would get poisoned, or instantly killed by a beam of light, or some other thing. She was being aggressive because she was worried about a dungeon failure, and that had led her to release a fireball too close to Alfric. It had killed one of the three monsters they were in the middle of fighting, but left him stunned and throwing up, rattled hard.

He’d been out of the action for long enough that Hannah had to try tanking the hits, and unfortunately, Hannah just hadn’t been up to the task. Verity had been the one to die, and Hannah had lost an arm, with Mizuki falling to one of the beasts as Alfric tried to fight it off. He’d limped out of the dungeon with Isra and Hannah, then reset without waiting until later, mostly because of the head wound.

He had talked with them about it, dissecting what had happened, why it had happened, and what they could do better. He had spent some of their money, and had the others spend their money, to close some of the gaps in their defenses. He wasn’t sure that it was worthwhile. The problem wasn’t really their defenses, it was that they were walking into fights that were above their level, and had been for quite some time. Early on some of it might have been variance, but they’d done eleven dungeons including the undone ones, and if it was variance, then it was far on the upper end. They just shouldn’t have been fighting several thousand pound monsters, not for another year or two.

He tried to tell himself that the rewards they’d accrued thus far couldn’t be argued with. Other dungeoneering teams came out of a dungeon with a thousand rings to show for it, and once everything was said and done, it was likely that the Settlers had pulled over a million rings worth of entads, ectads, henlings, and bastles. It might even have been more. For eight completed dungeons, that was fantastic.

He also tried to tell himself that they were on the verge of cracking it wide open. The Ellusifé must have meant something, though Alfric had by this point talked with several dozen people and they couldn’t point him at the meaning. He’d spoken to five different clerics of Xuphin, including the archbishop of Xuphin in Plenarch, and they had almost nothing in the way of actionable advice, though they’d given him more than his fair share of aphorisms and philosophy. He’d gotten in touch with a supposed expert on dungeons in Lambria, the nearest province to the north, and over a very long conversation that had lasted for most of the day, he had been left with a conclusion of ‘dungeon generation isn’t random, but we can’t really predict it, and honestly the dungeon reports are pretty worthless too’. That had been both disheartening and unhelpful.

He had eventually sent a letter to the Holy City of Qym where a group of wortiers were attempting to create the ultimate dungeon codex, capable of categorizing and synthesizing entries on dungeon phenomena from hundreds of millions of dungeon reports, historical and contemporary. He had gotten a letter back, more than a week after he sent it, informing him that the project wasn’t taking requests at that time, and would likely not be completed for another decade. That one had been a long shot, admittedly.

He’d been halfway hoping that with all these people he’d spoken with, he would be able to find someone willing to take the group on as a research project of some kind, but the best he’d gotten was a promise from the woman in Lambria that an assistant or student of some sort would come to Pucklechurch within the next two months if Alfric was still around, and might spend some time trying to research the issue.

The three failures had been in Latchet Point, Posy Point, and Herbury Meadows. Alfric had been torn on where they should try next, and whether they should return to one of those places as their ‘next’ dungeon. There were pros and cons to both, but in the end he’d decided on Herbury Meadows again, largely because it had been nice until it wasn’t. All they needed to do was overcome the odds once, and then he thought the team would be back on track. The last dungeon failure hadn’t even really been caused by the dungeon, it had been caused by the party’s reaction to the other failures — mostly Mizuki’s, though he was trying hard not to hold it against her.

They set out relatively early in the morning after a brief breakfast. Herbury Meadows was two hexes away, which necessitated that someone fly there, but that was only a brief trip. Alfric did it himself. He knew the way, after all.

Verity had better armor, a long robe with a hood that wouldn’t impede her movements or playing. It looked nothing like plate armor, but looks could be deceiving with entads, and in this case, it was capable of stopping most quick and heavy attacks. Beyond that, she had a layered translucent golden shell around her from a different entad, one with twenty-five layers when it was fully charged, and while this was still bad against a swarm, it would have saved her a fair bit of trouble from the birds. The shell was spherical, and needed some room, and also prevented her from using a weapon, but she didn’t use a weapon in the first place.

Alfric had paid for the entads with his own money, but when he’d tried to give them to her, she’d insisted that their cost should come from her share of their winnings. They’d had a negotiation over it, with both of them trying to be more charitable than the other, but eventually Verity had insisted one too many times, and Alfric had taken her money. She had claimed not to care too much about money anyway, which he was slightly skeptical of, even if he’d never seen her press too hard about creature comforts.

Isra was the other one who needed something, in part because the thimble armor was too thin and soft a metal. For her, he’d gotten an amulet that could make her slippery for brief bursts, magically empowered so that everything would slide off her, including claws and swords. They had tested it in the backyard, and Alfric had made sure that his sword glanced off her and his bident couldn’t pierce her. It was for emergencies, something to throw up in case she got caught out after moving through slowed time. Unlike Verity, Isra had been the one to request something like it in the first place, and she’d put up her own money without any mention of it coming from party funds. He had also equipped her with a proper sword, though she’d grumbled about it, as her bow was her weapon of choice.

There was a temptation to spend nearly all their money on new entads and bits of gear. That would have been a fool’s errand though, and something that had driven more than one dungeoneering party into oblivion. To spend all your earnings on doing things that would get you more earnings could leave you in a position where you broke your back for essentially nothing. Some tried to justify it by saying that they could resell their entads, typically the most valuable pieces of gear, but that was a bit of a crapshoot. Mostly, the dungeons would provide, and things that would have cost thousands of rings could be had for free if you only spent long enough at it. They had good travel entads, good storage, and almost all of it had come to them through the dungeons themselves.

They had made some minor alterations, many of them through the trial and error of the dungeons, some of them through practicing together. Hannah’s warhammer had not, in Alfric’s opinion, been cutting it, and she’d gotten something more like a pick. The liquid metal of her armor was, most of the time, sticking on her body rather than moving into the head, so it was decided that she would make her heavy swings with something designed for it. Alfric had tried to get her to switch over to a spear or other polearm, but that had resulted in a long discussion that had gone nowhere.

It was a lot of preparation, and a fourth failure might be coming. Alfric had steeled himself for it. He had reassured himself that the deaths weren’t real, that the things he’d seen were just like premonitions rather than actual events he’d lived through. Chrononauts had different coping strategies, and he hadn’t found one that worked right for him, not for this.

Herbury Meadows was filled with flowers, most of them outside the tiny town at the warp. ‘Town’ was probably overgenerous, as it was a collection of ten buildings, only one of which was a business. The largest settlement in the hex — though still quite small — was to the southeast, at the outflow of a river, where boats from the lake could dock. The flowers were largely purple and yellow, coneflowers and goldenrod, though in other seasons there would be streaks of red and orange, at least according to Mizuki.

“Lots of apiaries around,” said Mizuki. “Renowned for their honey. Hey, we should pick up some honey while we’re here. They have butterfly honey.”

“Butterfly honey?” asked Hannah.

“From butterflies,” said Mizuki.

“Butterflies don’t make honey,” said Hannah.

“Honey butterflies do,” said Mizuki. “They’ve got hives and stuff or something, I don’t know.” She shrugged.

“Sorry, but we had this conversation before,” said Alfric. “And then you said that the butterflies deposited their honey in specially built jars.”

“Ouch,” said Mizuki. “Caught out by the chrononaut. But I don’t think it should surprise anyone that I don’t know how butterfly honey is made.”

They hadn’t run into any insect swarms last time, thankfully, but they had come across a room with two dozen honey pots in it, which Alfric had been sorely disappointed to lose. You couldn’t trust dungeon food, but with Isra, most of the potential problems could be avoided.

“We should get going,” said Alfric. He didn’t say ‘we should get this over with’ or ‘we should see what’s going to get us this time’ or ‘please, please be careful, but not overly careful, and don’t overcompensate, and Verity just try to generate us something good’. He thought those things though, privately, and tried to hold himself up as the leader of the group.

The dungeon entrance was well-maintained and surrounded with different flowers, as though someone had tried to pretty it up and make it seem less like a decaying maw of monsters and death, as some of the dungeon entrances seemed to be. Alfric had visited Laver Marsh and a single look at the entrance had made him not want to go in.

They made sure that everything was ready to go, then Alfric, as usual, went first. He said a prayer to Xuphin, that they would find treasures, then a prayer to Kesbin, that the monsters would be weak.

After the tunnel, there was a small room with cream-colored walls and no monsters, for which Alfric was grateful. He called the all clear as Isra and Hannah dropped the chest, which scurried after them.

asked Mizuki.

They were all on edge. There was no helping it. Alfric didn’t know if he had it the worst of them, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. They hadn’t seen each other die, they’d only heard his cold, clinical descriptions of what had happened to them. He was keeping it together, he was maintaining his professionalism, but he needed a win. If he didn’t get one, he would pick himself up, dust himself off, and try again, that was what an Overguard did, but he would be torn and frayed by it, and might need to take a break.

The thrum came suddenly, loud enough to make him wince. It swept through them, and they clapped their hands to their ears, but it was over after five seconds, leaving the dungeon silent once more.

asked Verity.

Alfric replied.

The earplugs were wax, formed to their ears earlier, and they all put them in, then waited for the sound to happen again. The party channel bypassed normal hearing, meaning that their communication wouldn’t be impacted.

They waited.

The sound came through again after five minutes, vibrating everything around them, and it could still be heard through the wax plugging up their ears, if much more dimly. Sound could conduct itself through bone, and Alfric wondered whether that was happening. He could feel the sound. It passed quickly though, and then there was silence.

said Alfric.

asked Hannah.

said Alfric with a shrug.

said Verity. She had a hard look in her eyes.

said Alfric.

The only exit from the room was a wooden door, and Alfric opened it slowly. Beyond was a hallway, and they moved down it. There was no light but his lantern and the lanterns of others, which he didn’t particularly like. It would make them stick out, and also meant that they might be hampered in a fight.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric. They had talked about it already. She knew.

The hallway had a single door leading off to the right, then opened up fifty feet beyond that into what was clearly a larger room. If at all possible, Alfric wanted to handle the right room first, but the open end of the hallway was a worry, and the right room had a door. There was no particular standard procedure for this, and it was something he’d heard people argue about before. What you didn’t want was to go past a door and then get pincered. You could get pincered either way, of course, and get caught fighting a battle on two fronts, but Alfric thought it marginally safer to take the door and hope that nothing rushed them from where the dungeon opened up.

He did, however, wait until the thrumming sound had passed, and tried to mark the time to see if it was getting faster or slower. The volume, at least, seemed to be about the same.

The door creaked open, pushing in, and Alfric braced himself for a monster, his bident held in front of him, his armor practically vibrating with his pent up desire to throw it up and protect himself.

The room was filled with crafted wooden things, and as his lantern cast its light, he saw that there was nothing obviously monstrous in nature. His eyes were skipping from shape to shape, trying to find the claws, the fleshy bits, the hair, anything, and so it took him a moment to realize, once he was done jumping at shadows, what the wooden things were.

They were lutes.

There were dozens of the things, hung up on the walls, laid across benches, and a few of them in the process of being strung or put together. The place almost had the look of a workshop, but Alfric didn’t think that someone who actually made lutes would have such an abundance of them. There were more than a hundred of them.

said Mizuki as she came into the room.

Verity stared at the surplus of lutes. They came in all shapes and sizes, most with marks of a dungeon’s sense of design. Some were fat-bellied and others had necks so long that you’d need a second person to play them. The number of strings ranged from one, which hardly seemed like a lute at all, to eighteen, which was so many that even a many-fingered hand would have trouble with it. The woods came in every color, and Alfric suspected that many of them had been stained or dyed, unless there really was a tree that had bright blue wood. It was possible, in a dungeon.

asked Verity.

said Hannah with a laugh.

said Verity.

asked Isra. She was bringing up the rear, and closed the door behind them after the chest had come in, which was proper procedure when you were worried about a pincer. He’d been shocked by the lutes and forgotten to tell her, and it was a relief that she had done it without being told.

said Verity. She looked at the abundant supply of musical instruments. She looked at Alfric.

Alfric nodded.

said Mizuki. She was looking around.

Alfric looked around the room. He wished that he could see magic. You could get a piece of glass from a wizard, enchanted to allow it, but those were expensive, and not worth it if you had a sorc.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric. He was feeling cautious though. To take more than a dozen entads from a dungeon of this elevation was a rarity. To take a hundred wasn’t unprecedented, but it was the sort of thing that only happened at higher elevations and in more dangerous territory, with dungeons that took weeks or more to clear.

asked Mizuki. She was looking at the lutes.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric. Sometimes entads could come in parts, especially common for those with a communication effect. A hundred, and all lutes, would be extremely odd.

The sound came, and they cupped their hands over their ears, in those cases where their armor allowed it. Alfric had the plates down, and pressed his hands against his ears. It was bearable without doing that, thanks to the wax, but still not pleasant for the five seconds the sound went on.

asked Isra. She’d moved further into the room.

asked Hannah.

Alfric felt that like ice in his chest, in part because he’d been thinking the same thing. If they got a hundred entads at the very start of the dungeon, it felt like they were compelled to leave right away.

But that felt like it would be a failure, in a sense. They would come out rich, certainly, with plenty of lutes to show for it, but they wouldn’t really have done a dungeon. They’d have taken the windfall where they could and punted to another day.

said Alfric. That was the responsible thing to do, even if it hurt.

said Mizuki.

asked Verity.

said Hannah.

said Verity. She looked around the room.

asked Alfric. He looked around.

said Verity.

asked Mizuki.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki.

said Hannah.

said Alfric.

said Verity.

The sound came again, even through the door, though it was a touch quieter.

said Alfric once the thrum had passed.

said Mizuki.

asked Alfric.

said Hannah.

said Verity, looking at the lutes.

said Alfric.

said Isra.

said Mizuki.

Alfric knew, in his heart of hearts, that they were leaving because of the failures. It was sensible to leave, but if they’d been normal dungeoneers without chrononaut backup, they’d surely have done the whole dungeon anyway. A full clear was the ideal, and when you didn’t do a full clear, it wasn’t because the first half — first room, in this case — was wonderful, it was because you came across something you didn’t think you could handle. They were kicking the stone down the road, and all the mounting pressure was just going to increase. It had been almost three weeks since the rest of the party had experienced a dungeon, which meant that they were getting out of practice, even with the drills they occasionally ran.

They put the lutes into the chest. Alfric was mildly concerned that one of them would react negatively to their touch, and for that reason, they did the lutes one at a time. It happened seven times that they found the lute’s power by touching it, but the effects were minor each time: two sensory powers, three physical alterations, one bit of telekinesis, and one time the lute vanished and was never seen nor heard from again.

It took them a bit to do it, mostly because they were going slowly and trying to avoid accidents. The first time they’d gotten a ‘live’ lute was a bit of a shock, but after that they settled a bit, and Alfric had to remind them not to get too complacent.

Every five minutes, almost like clockwork, there was another sound. The interval was more or less constant, as was the volume, and they could almost get used to it, though Alfric could feel his body start to involuntarily brace as the time came near.

Alfric said once the room was virtually bare. There were only a few supplies left, and nothing worth taking.

He went to the door and opened it, bident ready, just in case.

It wasn’t the hallway that they’d been in before. Instead it was a small room with red walls, not much larger than the one they’d left. There was a table and some chairs, made of walnut, and a single book set next to a vase of flowers. Two doors led out of the room, one a thick door of brass, the other a modest sliding door of wood.

asked Verity, who was bringing up the rear.

said Alfric.

said Isra.

asked Mizuki.

said Alfric.