Darkness.

Mark knew seconds of it? Years of it?

Darkness without time.

Not darkness. Not even darkness. The absence of darkness.

Then pain, burning and bright and absolute, consuming everything Mark was, another soul wrapped around his, bleeding into him, giving him— sight.

And then the darkness was gone, replaced by a flowing river of souls and an itch that permeated everything he was and a tug— and he saw that he and the soul that had clearly just tried to eat him were one. It stood away from him, almost abashed, still tugging at the thread of soul woven between them.

And their thoughts bled, and intermingled, and suddenly Mark knew. Lots of things. Things that didn’t make sense. Things that Mark never learned. Information about a world that wasn’t his; flickering and fading memories of old, dusty school rooms and history tomes. Memories of magical experiments going terribly, terribly wrong.

The backdrop of a world that wasn’t his own.

The fact that he was floating in a river of souls, and that for some reason, he desperately, very badly, terribly, needed to move.

But he didn’t know how.

What he knew instead is that it was too late, and that he was now falling, down, down, down. Past a stratosphere of a world he had never seen with roiling storms and weather very different from earths.

Deeper. Through clouds. Past a maze, going by in a blur. His new senses must have been confused, because he could swear he saw a forest and a swamp, deep underground, before the dizzying sensation stopped and his perception tried to right itself with a harsh, clinking noise.

Mark struggled for a moment, trying to find right side up, spinning, turning, and still only finding upside down, and behind him. Panoramic. He was looking at a panoramic image, a perspective that saw all around him simultaneously, and his mind stretched and bent and itched at the idea before it suddenly righted itself and felt normal, like he was a floating three dimensional camera in midair.

He tried to let out a shuddering breath, but had none. Or no body. Because he had died.

Years ago? He felt surprisingly calm about it, like he had time to process it, but he still felt the burning scar on his soul, and shifted his perspective, looking down at himself.

A tiny gem in a pile of rot. A dungeoncore, a magical race from this world, Ispheria. Mark knew the memory bled into his mind from Alverost— that was his name. The name of the soul that had fused itself to him, exchanging memories in a blinding and painful torrent.

For a second, he wasn’t sure where his memories ended and these other memories began, and then they were gone. Or at least distant. One half of the gem was deep, dark purple, all sharp edges and multifaceted faces and wicked aura. The other side was green and swirled with white like clouds above a world covered in forest. It emanated peace, and Mark felt a sense of self in it. In the middle they were fused by what looked like a terrible weld of shifted and wavy gemstone.

Between the two gemstone and the weld, it was shaped like a heart. It was a heart shaped dungeoncore.

He was a dungeoncore.

But why was he a dungeoncore?

He reviewed what he knew. His soul had been plucked from the river of souls, the afterlife, essentially, and flung downward into the world of Ispheria.

A magical, fantasy world, in the middle of a conflict between classes of magical users. He was a dungeoncore— a race of magical creature that was made to kill and eat people.

The soul next to Mark seemed temporarily inert, and he could sense a dreamlike pall covering its mind.

Mark wasn’t sure he wanted to wake it, so he waited. Sitting in the dark, alone, in a cave. Eventually consumed with boredom and in need of questions answered, Mark poked at the soul fused to his own through the connection they shared. Even though he knew it just tried to eat him.

Mark tried to wake it.

“Hello?” He more thought than spoke, feeling stirring within the stone next to him. And with speaking, he felt a pulse of mana leave him, a primitive way of direct communication between souls. And then he felt something else— an instinct, entirely like the feeling of hunger, or the need for a breath, instead inside a body of stone.

Dungeoncores had very different physiologies, and very different instincts. The memories that had bled into his own from the soul he was attached to had told him some of them. Like, for instance, that dungeons would absorb “heavy” mana, an ambient, unusable mana with a tendency to sink.

And with a single, instinctual movement that all dungeoncores had, Mark did the equivalent of opening his “mouth”, causing all of the ambient mana around him to rush into his gemstone body, which glowed brightly.

Then, like exhaling, he breathed out, filling the world with fresh mana that permeated through the stone. And along with his mana, he gained sight. Like an echolocation of magic energy, it bounced off the stone and vibrated through the air.

His area of sight grew, from a dungeon stone on a nitrate rich rot pile, to a view of a cave floor. In the distance, he heard the drip of water, falling down a stalactite. Nitrate; he could sense the chemical in the rot pile. Carbon. Organic matter. Sedimentary and metamorphic stone.

And he felt it then, like a cross between the feeling of a mosquito buzzing in your air and the feeling of heat on your skin. Mana at the end of his influence. He resisted the urge for a second, but it felt like forcing himself not to breath, like sitting underwater, like the burning of lungs begging for air, and then he pushed again, absorbing the mana and expanding his influence.

It filled him with a sense of satisfaction, the kind that would make you curl your toes and groan, like eating your favorite food. He wanted more.

He stopped for a second, trying to remember his chain of thought. He was a dungeoncore now. And his dungeoncore instincts demanded that he— he reached out, expanding his sight again, swallowing deep of stagnant mana. Each breath brought Mark’s sight a few feet further. Again he felt that sweet satisfaction.

And a new instinct.

Danger, his whole body tingling and screaming alert.

It stemmed from an acute awareness of the room he was in. Before he could only see a shadowy bubble around his core. Now he could see where he was. It was less a room, and more a vast, stretching cavern, cloaked in pitch dark, the ground covered in feet of dirt and rotted waste. Dark. Open. Exposed. The ceiling was unrealistically far away from the ground, and there were at least two holes in it that lead into winding tunnels beyond Mark’s sight. Marks influence had expanded dozens of feet, enough to know that this chamber was huge. Distant scurrying could be heard across it.

Down, Mark’s instincts screamed at him to duck, to go lower, to bury himself away. So he did. Veins of mana that he didn’t realize he had pushed the earth open, and away, and down, and his core sunk several feet into the ground, only open to the world by way of a small hole leading up to the cavern.

Safety. He felt himself relax, his basic instincts now fulfilled. He still felt that desire to expand his sight at the edge of his senses, but he left it be for now, thinking.

He was deep in some underground cave, in a stone body, glued to the earth. And glued quite literally— the memories bleeding into him from his attached soul told him that the veins he had seen were dungeon roots, which attached them to the earth. A dungeon could only be separated from the earth for so long before they would go completely dormant.

He felt the consciousness in the dungeoncore fused to his own stir, almost awake, turning over in its sleep.

He could interrogate it for answers when it awoke. Until then, Mark had nothing else to do.

He tried to resist that feeling of euphoria he knew was at his finger tips, waiting to talk to someone, anyone, about what was going on, to question the soul next to him about where they were, and why.

He lasted approximately five minutes alone in the dark, his only company the drip, drip, drip of water.

He reached out to the mana, pulling it in again and expanding his influence. It wasn’t as effortless as the first few times anymore. Each push was now giving inches instead of feet, but Mark continued nonetheless.

Soon it felt like he was pushing uphill, and the saturation of mana in the air had rapidly dropped. He felt like he would be panting if he had lungs to breath with, but there, in the final push, he saw the foot of something scaled and twisted. With effort, he pushed again, revealing its leg and the bottom of its body. It scrambled into his sight from the wall of darkness beyond his sight.

It was a sad, twisted thing, and Mark realized that even while looking at it, he could see inside of it. Even its organs seemed… wrong. Compacted. It moved slow, like a turtle, and chewed on the rot it found in the soil with misshapen teeth. They looked like they should be the long, carnivorous teeth of a predator, but they ended in flat tips that chewed apart the dirt around them.

It had scaled flesh, but hair follicles had been inserted to the areas between scales. Its muscles were twisted and stunted, malformed as to never fully develop, and its metabolism was slowed. It had the face of a small lizard, hidden under fraying hair. It made him itch on a fundamental level, another dungeon instinct. He wanted to fix it. This rat like monster in his domain. No… he wanted to improve it. But before he could figure out how to do anything, it scurried away with the rot from the pile.

Mark looked into the dirt to figure out what it had taken. Misshapen fungus had grown in the dirt, now mostly ripped apart. He sat and waited for the rat to come back. Seconds. Minutes. He lasted almost seven this time before the boredom and his dungeon instincts overtook him.

He could just lure it back. He had nothing better to do while he waited for the soul next to him to awaken. So he reached down towards the mushroom, perceiving it. If only he could make more of them—

At the thought, his perspective shifted. The world fell away to a pane of blue. He saw a perfect mental image of the fungus, spinning in white, made of infinite points. Knowledge of it scrolled through his mind, and more and more information slowly filled the pane. Information like what it’s mycelium absorbed, the ideal substrate for growth, its maximum size. Its DNA rolled out before him, its growth patterns and ideal climate.

There was something wrong with it though, that caused it to be malformed. A mutation in it that crippled its growth, but not excessively so. He was unsure what it was. Mark decided to try growing a few of them as they are first, reaching out with mana roots and causing them to sprout. They took form quickly, blooming in the dirt like muddy roses, and he realized that each one that grew left him feeling lost for something inside; growing them consumed some of his mana.

It was instinctive, and he fell into the pattern before he could realize it, forgetting what he was doing and what he had planned.

He grew more, and more, and more, all throughout the area in his influence. He felt the air around him become enriched with mana as more and more life grew around him. A few seconds of growing mushrooms to lure back a pseudo-kobold turned into a few minutes, and then a few hours, and before he knew it, the soul beside him was waking.