Samuel Tolliver hated dungeons…

Pearl Wordsinger hunched forward over her desk in concentration and focus as the words appeared on the blank paper. The pen made quiet scritching noises, almost lost among the quiet hubbub coming from other areas of the house. It became completely lost when a pair of prepubescent voices hollered nearly at the top of their lungs as they came rushing into the library.

“Aunty Pearl! Aunty Pearl! Whatch’a doooooing?”

Pearl looked up towards the ceiling for a second before selecting and utilizing her second-best aggrieved sigh. Then, when she was sure that she’d sufficiently communicated her annoyance to the world in general and two very small persons within that world in specific, she set down her pen and turned her special writer’s chair to face her distractors.

The cherubic and totally-innocent-we-didn’t-know-we-were-interrupting-no-really-Aunt-Pearl-Honest faces of Tetra and Polly Tolliver stared up at her from below her perch atop her very own bookcase in the Tolliver’s house. Tetra’s blue eyes sparkled and her rosy cheeks dimpled in a smile, while Polly’s brown eyes were serious and searching and inquisitive.

“I’m working on the record of your father’s time in the Final War,” Pearl said, thinking that the blunt answer might satisfy youthful curiousity. Honestly, the Tolliver household was full of people, why did the twins have to ignore them all and bug her today, especially when everyone was awaiting the birth of the new baby and she wanted to get this account finished before that happened and—

She glanced up to see Bugruk peeking through the door into the library. The big orc ducked back almost as soon as they made eye contact, but not before Pearl made out a roguish twinkle in those dark eyes, and a grin on his toothy face.

Ooooooh, it was Buggers who had set the twins on her. He was going to get trouble for that one. She was going to hide his legs in the attic this time!

“What’s the Final War?” Tetra Tolliver asked, eyes wide. “Was that when Poppa met Momma?”

“No, dummy,” Polly said, nudging her twin hard with her elbow, “That’s when Poppa and his friends beat up the whole world!”

And that was when Pearl noticed a third face lurking behind the Twin Terrors—as she was wont to think of them from time to time—and in fact on the other side of the doorjamb, barely peeking a single eye around to watch events unfolding in the library.

“Hold it,” Pearl said imperiously, holding up a hand. Both twins fell silent. “Who’s your friend?”

The Terrors stared agawp at her for a moment, then as if psychically linked they both spun around and bolted to the door, grabbed the hapless youngling by both wrists, and dragged him into the library. He was a minotaur child, not much older than the twins unless Pearl missed her guess. His horns were just beginning to show through the heavy black headfur, and his big blue eyes shone with equal parts embarassment, curiousity, and mortal terror.

Pearl understood the feeling. She’d felt the same way when she’d first encountered the full force of Sam’s children and their larger than life personalities.

“This is Pondy!” said Tetra, clinging to the boy’s right wrist.

“His family just moved in down the street,” added Polly on his left.

“He looked like he needed a friend,” said Tetra.

“So we decided we’d be his friends!” Finished Polly with a flourish.

Pearl sighed and got up from her chair to flit down to a shelf near eye-level with the boy.

“Hello Pondy,” she said kindly. “I’m Pearl.”

“’Ullo miss Pearl,” he said shyly, fidgeting like he was trying to hide behind himself. "I’m Ponderon. Um. You can call me Pondy, I guess.” More fidgeting.

Pearl eyed the boy for a moment, taking in the signs. A little smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and after a moment she asked; “was there something you wanted to ask, Pondy?”

The boy hesitated for a minute, then, almost too quiet to hear, asked; “Um. What’s the final war?”

“Oooh, aunty Pearl, you should tell Pondy the story of the Final War,” said Tetra, swinging the boy’s hand back and forth in her own. “He’s from far away and doesn’t know it yet!”

“Yes!” Polly echoed the idea a moment later. “And tell him all about how Poppa blew up the boney capital and how he rescued Momma from the gods and how Uncle Quentin burned up all the bad guys with Uncle Nat!”

“Uncle Quentin’s a dragon,” Tetra said to Pondy by way of abbreviated explanation.

The minotaur boy’s eyes went huge. “A dragon?” he squeaked.

Pearl eyed the three of them now with a growing certainty. “You’re not going to go away and let me work until I tell you the story, are you.”

The Terrors grinned at her and in unison shook their heads. Pondy just looked back and forth between them like a cat suddenly realizing he’d been befriended by two of the largest dogs in the city and he wasn’t quite certain what their motivation was in doing so.

The narrator fairy sighed, pulled up a comfortable encyclopedia from the shelf to sit on, then sat and folded her arms under her breasts and gave all three of them a Look.

“Okay,” she said finally, “but only if no one interrupts. Okay?”

“Okay!” The Terrors both said at once. After a moment, Pondy nodded silent assent as well.

“Okay,” Pearl said. She took a deep breath, waggled her fingers in an arcane gesture, and activated her Voice Of The Narrator power. It would give her words more weight, and actually paint mental images of what she was talking about in her listeners’ minds.

“So.”

It all began when Samuel Tolliver got himself killed.

“Actually,” a voice from the doorway said, interrupting, “it started before that.”

Pearl took a deep breath, counted to three, and turned her best glower on Annie Tolliver, Sam’s mom, who stood in the doorway watching with a twinkle in her eyes.

“Do you want to tell this?” Pearl demanded.

“No no, you’re doing fine dear,” Annie said with that cheeky grin of hers. “But be sure to get the start right. It really started when my Jack was hired on to build that bonebag’s dungeon for him.”

Oh. Right. That made sense.

Okay. Let’s try this again.

It all started when Jackson Tolliver and his Dungeoneers were hired by Lich King Araxesendenak to build a dungeon.

Dungeons are big business in the world, you see, and the quickest way for a nation to build up its infrastructure in an area. And Jack Tollivers Dungeoneers were the best dungeon builders on the continent, so of course Lich King Araxesendenak hired them.

Now Sam was working for his dad, but also secretly working on ways to make dungeons obsolete, because he’d lost someone very important to him to a dungeon a long time ago and so he hated dungeons and wanted to destroy them all.

“I bet his dad was real mad about that,” Pondy said in a quiet voice.

“Nah,” said Tetra, “Grampa doesn’t get mad. Not really. Poppa says he’s flemmatyg. ”

“Ahem.” Pearl glared at the younglings. “No interruptions, remember?”

“Sorry miss Pearl,” the little minotaur said. The twins just looked smug.

“Where was I?”

“Bonebag had hired Jack,” called Bugruk from somewhere in the other room.

Pearl blinked, rolled her eyes, and continued.

One day, about halfway into the construction, Lich King Araxesendenak visited the job site. While he was there, he killed a kobold named Rakun who was protesting the dungeon construction, because the lich had kicked them out of their homes in order to build the place. And Sam was there when it happened, because he liked the kobolds and was bringing them coffee when the lich appeared.

Jack and Bugruk and Sam took the lich into the dungeon to plant a dungeon core and to see a strange room they’d found while digging out the rooms. One thing led to another, and Sam and the lich wound up fighting during a tour of the dungeon—

“One thing led to another,” Annie snorted. “The fu—“ she turned the curse into a cough and continued; “the lich struck your aunt Pearl and tried to kill my Sam for defending her.”

ONE THING LED TO ANOTHER, and a fight broke out. Buggers and Jack fought to save Sam, but the whole thing spilled into that strange room I told you about. And that room turned out to be some weird kind of ancient magic, that when the dungeon core Sam had been carrying crossed into the room something woke up and possessed the core and caused a big earthquake that killed almost everyone for miles around, Sam and Jack and Annie included.

Pearl paused and took a breath, remembering again the rocks coming down, the airless blackness closing around her like a vise, and the crushing aloneness.

It had not been fun.

Then a voice came to Sam, and offered him a Deal.

“Oh!” Polly piped up, grinning. “That’s when Poppa met—“

Pearl swiveled her head and gave Polly a wide-eyed glare.

“…Sorry Aunt Pearl,” the terror subsided.

Sam woke to darkness, and to a voice. The voice offered him a deal; become the guardian for a new kind of dungeon core—actually a really really old dungeon core but no one knew that yet—and build her a dungeon and she would bring back everyone he had lost in the earthquake. He really didn’t have a choice, being dead and all, so he said ‘yes’.

The voice turned out to belong to the dungeon core, the one that had woken up when it crossed into that weird room. And it took Sam through Creation, where he became something called an Unaltered Human. None of us knew what that meant until lots later, of course, except that it gave your daddy access to all the skills and abilities in the world!

“Is that why Poppa sometimes sounds like a dwarf when he swears?” Tetra asked, eyes wide and round.

“Naw,” said Rashun the kobold who had wandered into the library sometime in the last ten seconds. “That’s because dwarf swears are really fun swears, and big bro likes to do the best work he can in everything.”

“Don’t you be teaching my grandchildren to cuss,” Annie’s voice hollered from somewhere within the large house, making Pearl realize only now that she’d wandered off at some point.

“Yeah,” Polly said in a loud whisper to the minotaur boy. “That’s Granma’s job.”

Pearl closed her eyes and cussed at the world in general for a couple seconds, then opened them up to find at least seven sets of eyes watching her; the twins, Rashun, Ponderon, and a couple of the dungeoneers from Jackson’s crew had wandered in and were leaning against the back wall.

“So what happened next, aunty Pearl?” asked Tetra.

Well, at least they were interested in the story.

What happened next was Sam began to build the dungeon. He rescued me from where I’d been trapped by the cave-in, and we fought a tutorial golem together, and saved Bugruk too, although he was hurt really bad—

“The rocks chopped his legs off,” Polly said with the kind of glee only a seven year-old talking about really disgusting things can manage.

“Gross!” said Pondy with the kind of fascination only a seven year-old hearing about really disgusting things could manage.

And he named the core Cora, because he didn’t want to just keep calling her ‘dungeon core’, and—

“He named a dungeon core ‘Cora’?” said Pondy, raising an eyebrow. “That’s kinda dumb.”

“Hey! Don’t talk about her like that!” Tetra said indignantly.

“Yeah!” added Polly, glaring. “It’s a pretty name!”

“Even if it was a little unoriginal,” added Rashun, rolling his eyes innocently.

The twins, given a new target for their wrath, rounded on him immediately, leaping on the teen and tackling him to the ground.

Anyway, Pearl continued, ignoring the scuffle and addressing Pondy and the others with as much dignity as she could. He also found out that Araxesendenak had somehow gotten copied, and now that copy was in the dungeon with him. But he was level one, and had no power, so Sam was able to keep him under control and nothing bad happened after they’d killed each other a few times.

“WHAT?” Pondy stared.

“Oh, yeah, Sam’s Guardian bond with Cora basically made him immortal,” Pearl said, coming out of her Voice Of The Narrator. “If you killed him, he’d just come back five minutes later all better. Which came in really handy a bunch of times, like when he was eaten by the dinosaur skeleton, or when he was crushed under the mountain by the tutorial golem, or when—“

“Getting a little ahead of yourself, Pearl,” said Bugruk.

“Oh. Right.”

Ahem.

Sam also saved the kobold tribe that had survived the earthquake from a bunch of undead frogs and a big dinosaur skeleton that Araxesendenak had had delivered earlier that day. And he brought them into the dungeon and asked them for help, and they said yes, because Sam said he’d give them the dungeon when it was all over. And they said yes, so they spent the next few days trying not to starve and to make sure everyone had a place to sleep.

“Don’t forget to tell them about that goat-fucker Apollyon,” said a cheery feminine voice, and Pearl looked up to see a gold metallic woman with hair the color and shine of star sapphires saunter into the room.

“Hi Aunty Sally,” said Tetra, not turning away. “Granma says not to teach us new swears.”

“That’s not a new swear, bug,” Sally said, plonking down beside the twins. “That’s an old one. What’s all this, storytime?”

“Yes,” Pearl said between gritted teeth. “It is.”

“Cool. I’ll fill in the gaps on stuff you miss. And you shouldn’t grind your teeth like that. Bad for you.”

RazzafrazzastupidstinkinglittleANYWAY. What none of us in the dungeon knew was that the Shapers Of Reality had noticed Cora’s awakening, and had sent a bunch of their agents to come and see what was going on. One of them was named Diana, though she hadn’t always been.

“Oh!” Polly bounced up, raising a hand. “Don’t tell Pondy who she was yet! That was a super secret surprise that no one knew about!”

Pearl grinned at the girl. “That’s a very good idea, Polly,” she said in approval. “You’re going to make a great storyteller!”

So Diana and the others, sent by a being named Apollyon who I’ll tell you about later, came and camped out on a ridge outside the dungeon, and they watched to see what would happen.

“And what did happen?” Pondy asked, eyes wide.

“My father,” said Rashun, and Pearl winced at the old note of sadness still in the teen’s voice.

“Huh?” Pondy blinked.

“Uncle Rashun’s poppa was Rakun,” Tetra said softly, leaning over to hug the kobold teen. “The bad lich took him away and made him come back as a really really bad man.”

Lich King Araxesendenak hadn’t just killed Rakun the kobold, he had turned him into a revenant, which was like a powerful kind of undead monster that Araxesendenak had wanted to wake up and kill all the kobolds. But then the earthquake happened and changed everything.

But before I get to that, you need to know that Cora, when she woke up, was not complete. Most of her had gone into the dungeon core, but other pieces of her had split off and gotten away and had entered into a couple other dungeon cores that Jack had at the construction site. And one of those cores—

“Me,” said Sally, raising a hand. “I was the other dungeon core.”

Yes, Sally was the other core. She was found by Rakun, and she was forced to make him her guardian, and he got lots of power and he got strong and smart and he came into Sam’s dungeon with an army of undead and said surrender or die, but Sam unleashed the Tutorial Golem on him and collapsed some of the dungeon on him and killed him and his stupid undead! Well, most of them. Some of them. Enough of them.

“But the revenant was a Guardian now,” Sally interrupted, “so he had access to the White Room now.”

“What’s the white room?” asked Pondy.

“It’s like a big dressing room,” Polly said. “Poppa went there when he died, and waited to come back to life.”

And this time the revenant was there too, Pearl said, taking back control of the narrative. And he and Sam fought there. And this time, Sam died in the White Room, which was never supposed to happen.

Everyone was quiet now, even the twins. They’d never heard this part before.

Instead of death, Sam found himself in an Anomaly. Something created long long ago by allies of Cora to help her in her war against the shapers of reality. And there Sam found a caretaker, someone who answered a lot of his questions. Sam found out that Cora was actually an ancient weapon, created to fight the people who had put the System in place in the world. And that now that she was awake again, those enemies—who now called themselves The Five—would be coming to kill her again, like they’d done a bunch of times over thousands of years.

Only this time, if they killed her, the caretaker wasn’t sure if she’d ever come back. Because Sam had woken her up too early, and then she’d split apart into different cores when she woke, so maybe she would just disappear if she was killed this time.

“I used to be part of her,” Sally interrupted again, then ducked under the book Pearl hurled at her head. “Me and Cora and Seffie all used to be one person, way way long ago. But when Sam woke us up, things kind of got out of hand.”

So Sam finally got back to the Dungeon, and the revenant tried attacking a bunch of different ways, and Sam and everyone fought back and fought him off. The dungeon started generating mobs, and after one of the Revenant’s attacks Sam discovered that Cora didn’t just generate mobs, she freed them too. See, regular dungeon mobs are kinda like robots. They don’t think, really, they just do what they’re told. But after a little while in Cora’s dungeons, her mobs started to think and speak and live. They became real people, which was kinda impossible back then.

That was when we first met Sally too. She contacted Sam through a dungeon channel, and asked for help, because she didn’t like the revenant and wanted Sam to blow him up so she could be free and so Persephone, the other core, would be safe from him. And Sam said ‘sure!’ and so we teamed up with Sally to take down the revenant.

We found out that the revenant was going to make some big ritual spell that was going to kill everyone in the town, because a bunch had survived thanks to a seismage in town named Nathaniel who I’ll talk about later. And when everyone died, they’d come back as an evil ghost army that the revenant was going to use to kill us all, and then go on and kill everyone else he possibly could!

“He would have, too,” Sally said quietly. “He was a jackass, but he was a motivated jackass.” She turned to look at the twins, smiling crookedly. “If your pop hadn’t done what he did, a whole lot of people wouldn’t be around today.”

Sam and the dungeon put together a plan of attack. The revenant had all kinds of bad guys outside the dungeon, prowling around, just waiting for us to come out. But Sam was smarter, and our troops were stronger, and we hit them in ways they weren’t ready for! The whole dungeon fought, even Araxes! He wasn’t able to do a lot, but he helped, and after the battle he helped heal a bunch of people who’d gotten hurt, which was when we started to realize that maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all.

I mean, he was still a jerk, but maybe he could get better.

“We lost some good people that day,” another new voice came from the doorway. Pearl looked up to see Leiliana, one of the original Shield Maiden mobs from the dungeon, smiling softly in remembrance. “But they gave their lives for their friends, and for the innocents that would have died if they hadn’t. Heaven is richer for their presence now, I daresay.”

Pearl tucked that phrase away for entry into her official record. That was a really good phrase.

Sam and the dungeon beat the revenant. Sam actually teleported the entire ritual circle way up into the air at the last second, along with the revenant, and then he blew all of them up. And he fought the revenant in the White Room, along with Cora who he summoned there with his guardian powers! That’s when she got her new body, because she had to go through the same Creation process that Sam had gone through back at the beginning of it all. And together they fought and beat the Revenant, and saved the world!

“And after he’d done that,” Tetra said, wriggling with pent up energy, “he brought Granma and Grampa back from the dead! Right?”

“Right,” said Pearl. “Because by then he’d gotten enough Essence saved up to pay the cost the Dungeon required to bring them back.

In the end, Sam got his parents back. But the war was only just beginning. Because now the Five were watching him, and planning his destruction. And the real lich king Araxesendenak was still out there, and still really mad that Sam had accidentally killed him. And he still had to build the dungeon to defend not just against the enemies he knew about, but against things he didn’t know about. Because something else was out there, and it didn’t like him very much at all.

Oh, and that was when he discovered he’d gained a new subrace, too. Free’d Unique Mob. Which he didn’t know at all what that meant! Aren’t mysteries cool?

Pondy stared at Pearl, and Pearl winced. She recognized the just-got-hit-with-a-brick look in those eyes. Information overload. Too much too fast.

“You all are weird,” the little minotaur boy said weakly.

“Yup!” Tetra agreed.

“The weirdest,” Polly added, grinning.

“Alright you all,” Annie’s voice hollered from somewhere. “Lunchtime. Find a stopping place and come get fed!”

“Come on!” Tetra squealed, grabbing the minotaur’s hand and pulling him to his feet. “Granma makes the best sandwiches! She always puts too many pickles on and they crunch really good!”

Pearl chuckled as the children fled away, a stunned minotaur boy being led by the Tolliver Terrors. Poor kid, probably felt like he’d dove headlong into a thunderstorm.

Oh well. He’d get used to it. He’d have to if he was gonna hang around this family for any length of time.

He hadn’t even met the dragon yet.