Brown roses rising from dirt. Life understood at its most intricate level. It curled, the incredible golden ratio playing out as life grew at a pace visible to the naked eye. Even among the rot, the life held infinite beauty, and it captivated Mark as he watched it twist, and uncurl, and rise from the dirt—

“What in the… fuck… are you doing?” Alverost’s voice was groggy, like someone awakening from a deep sleep. Alverost, Mark knew, without him ever speaking it. Everything that he was was reflected in that voice, a direct echo and connection to his soul.

“Making… mushrooms?” Mark replied to the voice beside him, talking into his own head.

“Hundreds of them???” Alverost asked, doing the soul equivalent of waving his arms wildly at the veritable forest of fungus. The fungus glowed in Mark’s perspective. He had edited some of them, chasing his curiosity as he lost himself in the work, bending and twisting them until they grew to towering sizes, spiraling and twisting around themselves, some great poles covered in shelves, others wide and flat and covering the ground. All of them still brown.

“Well I… needed to lure back the rat… things. Listen. Wait. Who are you?”

“I am Alverost, Heir Apparent— You know, it won’t matter to you—” Mark felt something like a tug at his soul, a similar sensation to when Alverost had tried to devour him. “I, oh. Well. That’s not good.”

“What’s not good?” Mark asked. He would have narrowed his eyes if he had any.

“It appears our souls have already healed and fully congealed. I cant absorb yours into mine since we’re technically already one soul. Theres no way to separate us here. We would need a whole lab.” Alverost groaned as if it was a huge inconvenience to him personally.

There was an awkward stretch of silence as Mark processed that Alverost had just tried to eat him again.

And slowly, ever so delicately, Mark forced mana to coalesce and created another mushroom.

“Would you stop that?”

“No. I have to lure the rats back.” Mark said.

“At least do it right, you cur.”

Mark felt Alverost working on something. It was a weird, ethereal tug, like someone grabbing one of your hands and moving it for you. With a pop, a new mushroom popped into existence. It was smaller than Marks for a second, but appeared to be made of pure shadow, the edges a glittering luminescent purple, and then Mark felt the mana in the air buckle around it. Dungeon roots twisted inside of it. Then the mana in the air crashed into it, a prismatic multicolored wave that bent and warped the air as the mushroom grew with extreme violence, tearing apart the ground as it stretched up to a few feet in height.

“What did you do?” Mark asked.

“I filled it with mana and corrected the obvious deficit in it. Someone had mutated it to make it not react to mana. All life forms need mana to reach their true heights.” Even as darkness spoke, purple, glowing spores began to float out from the mushroom, scattering through the already established mushroom forest. Though they didn’t grow nearly as quickly, the spores still grew at a visible rate. Minute enough to not notice if you were strolling by, but obvious enough if you looked. And as they grew, absorbing mana, heavy mana filled the air around them.

“Its true heights? The thing looks downright evil.”

“Of course it does. I filled it with dark mana. The best kind.”

“It sounds like its just your opinion that its the best mana.”

“The correct opinion.”

There was a tense moment of silence again. Mark reached out to the mushroom design, opening it. He could vaguely recollect what it felt like for Alverost to modify the mushroom.

In his minds eye the mushroom pulsed with darkness, emitting a savage and sinister aura. With a thought, he cleared it away, moving through the motions he felt Alverost make. It filled with mana, green and white swirling in a mushroom.

He placed one down, and watched the mana from the rotting earth swirl into it. It took a completely unique shape, no longer a rotting flower, but a bright, glowing white, covered in metallic green balls. It shown light across the floor as it, too, began to release spores.

“I told you to stop that. Waste of mana, really.” Alverost spoke, his attention turned away. Mark could feel what he was doing, and looked towards it. A small section of wall had been pushed away, and Alverost was etching lines of inane complexity in the floor. “Is there any silver around here?”

As mark watched, the complex ritual diagram painted itself into the stone like the work of a master carver, slow and steady.

“Silver? No? Why would you need silver?”

“Then go get the rats, and have them look for silver.” Alverost spoke without answering.

“What are you doing?” It was Mark’s turn to ask now, though he did have some vague idea just from the thoughts bleeding through the connection in their soul.

“Making a ritual to contact my family, so that they can make… us… new bodies.”

“Us?” Mark asked, noting that Alverost seemed to spit the word out.

“Yes, and then we can fling you back to whatever backwater shithole you came from. At this point, they’re like the only people capable of separating our souls. So, if you would, hurry up and find me that silver, would you kindly?”

“Can’t you just… make it?”

“No. Silver is mana-conductive— dungeons cannot produce it, save for in Aurie’s loot drops.”

“Aurie? Loot drops?” Mark asked again.

“Goddess of Dungeons, Adventure, Traps, Consequences, and Fortresses, yes, Aurie. Do you not know?”

“Goddesses are real, here, then? In Ispheria?”

There was a moment of silence.

“Yes. Now go get my silver.”

Mark paused, about to object. But then he felt the rat-kobold enter his Domain— the sphere of his sight and influence— as Alverost spoke. So, begrudgingly at first, he shifted his perspective to it. Then his dungeon instincts took over. The rat looked suspiciously at the mushrooms. Mark reached out to it and— stopped. He had no idea how to communicate with the rat.

“Alverost?” Mark asked. He got no reply. But through their connection, he knew Alverost heard him. “Alve?”

Still no reply.

Mark made another mushroom, feeling their mana dip precariously low. It felt like when you closed your eyes for just a second and then they suddenly had the weight of multiple tons behind them, like he didn’t want to open them again and could drift off to sleep at any moment.

“Stop—”

“How do I, you know, talk to the rat?”

Mark felt Alverost pause. Shift perspectives. Look at the rat. Examined it. He felt mana curl and move in odd ways, poking and prodding.

The rat was scratching at a mushroom, tearing it loose from the dirt.

“They’re simple creatures, really. Almost all creatures are. You just have to convince them to work for you. They’ll believe anything you say. This one isn’t even fully sentient, so you just have to communicate concepts to it. The same promises that work for humans will do.”

There was a pulse of dark mana, and a dungeon root reached up and stabbed into one of its feet. The rat dropped the mushroom, looking up. Shadows ringed its eyes, floating away, and Mark could hear Alverost speaking to it.

“Power. Food. Wealth. Mates. Serve me.” Alverost paused. “This is totally unfit to be a minion of mine. Its unacceptable. Terrible. It doesn’t even have a wisp of dark mana. Let me… just…”

The rat shuddered, and Mark felt Alverost begin to modify it. He could feel the changes— muscles, unwrapping themselves, metabolism accelerating, muscle growth, speed, losing its hair, making its brain bigger, fixing its eyes— Oh shit, and lots of lots of mana. Did the dungeoncore even have that much mana? Alverost was just pumping it with dark mana. That dick head. I mean, thats more dark mana than Mark had seen before—

Prismatic mana crashed into the Kobold, and it screamed as its flesh warped and twisted. Mark felt his consciousness shudder, and buckle, and fade to black as his mana reserves emptied.

Valeria’s feet pounded on rotting wood and metal scrap that made the ramshackle roads of The Hallow. The boards and metal gave way to the rot here and there, boards snapping or metal sinking, slowing her pace. It didn’t help that she was a member of the Kobold clan Longtail, the very thing they were named after slowing her down.

She had thought of cutting it off more than once.

The shrill screeching of the Kobolds chasing her told her she was still ahead by some lead. She dipped to the left, diving through the city made of rot and trash. She heard people moving away from walls through cracks in poorly fitting boards that made makeshift houses. Curious kobolds stared down at her from the roofs around her.

She held it close— the brightest gem she had ever seen— as she dashed through the city. She could swear it just seemed to pop into existence in front of her. She was almost there now, she could see the tattered flags of her clan in the sky before her. They were hung loosely, painted on tattered cloth and strung from wooden poles that leaned over the top of squat, rotting, wooden shacks. If she could bring this gem back, her and her brother would be well taken care of for the rest of their lives.

She had seen the clans horde before. Only at a respectable distance. The amount of shinnies they had amassed paled before this unstained gem. So she ran, as fast as her tiny, scaled legs could carry her, claws digging into muck and dirt as she barreled through the rot-streets.

Then a Kobold stepped out in front of her. She bumped into him, falling backwards, still clutching the gem as she stared up angrily. The long tailed Kobold laughed, a bubbling, rotting thing, like something was stuck at the back of his throat.

“What do you have there, little Val?” His voice was the scrape of metal against stone.

“You want to see?” Valeria asked, her voice pitched in hysterics. She felt the stares of the two Kobold’s behind her as they crept up from the street. An ambush from her own clan. Sic had been a pain in her ass since she was young, always bullying her. She had no time for him today.

“Why don’t you just hand whatever you’re running around with over, and we’ll let you go?”

“But… I need to bring this to… to the clan… for my brother…” Val worked faux panic into her voice. She had let this asshole push her for too long. After today, she would be one of the greatest treasure-bringers in the clan. Nobility. She could eat fish after this. True, most of the fish found in the Hallow were rotten, delivered already dead from the Swelltide, but still… fish. She wondered what it tasted like.

So when Sic leaned down towards her hands, he got an eye full of the rusty knife Valeria kept up her sleeve at all times. He didn’t even scream as his body fell, limp. She pushed Sic off, pulling her knife out with his eyeball still on it, and continuing to run. The two Kobolds behind her stood like statues. She heard the mob of Kobolds chasing her crash into them and she snickered while they screamed.

She ran forward, stopping at the edge of Longtail territory only a few streets away, and turning back. The Bighorn Kobolds, heads hung heavy with their namesakes, stared daggers at her. They lifted up the two corpses of the Kobolds she had left behind, mistakenly believing them her friends. She flipped them off as she continued her stroll at a more leisurely pace.

Violence inside the bounds of Longtail territory would mean reciprocation. Here, she was under the clans protection— even from her own clan members.

She made it the rest of the way without complication, arriving at one of the biggest residences in the Hallow. The guards stared at her, holding rusted and chipped weapons. They were still treasures. Any piece of metal was here.

“Halt! Who comes!” One of them asked.

“Valeria Longtail, comes as treasure-bringer for the hoard!” She knelt, presenting the stone in her hands.

It was a trihedron, bright lavender, the flat side against her hand. She looked up. The guards knelt to her, pushing open the door, and announcing her.

She stepped inside. Around the far wall of the room, built into the Hallows walls, was a pile of treasure. Glinting gold and silver and rusted irons were piled against it. Wood that hadn’t rotted was piled in a corner. There were a few scraps of brightly colored cloth, not stained or bleached by the Swelltide. She nearly drooled looking at it.

“Attention, Valeria.” Raeph spoke. At once, she looked to him, kneeling again. She hadn’t even noticed him over the allure of the clan horde. He sat in a throne of unrotten wood.

It was a pristine gray, the graining still visible despite the years of wear.

“Valeria greets Lord Raeph, bringing treasure for the horde.”

Raeph stood, using his cane, and hobbled over to Valeria.

“A finer treasure I’ve never seen.” He nodded sagely. “We saw your coming through the city. You did well to keep this from the hands of the other clans. As reward, I will allow you to add this to the horde yourself.”

Valeria looked up, eyes sparkling. There was no greater honor. With trepidation, she stepped towards the horde— gleaming silver, untarnished metals and copper, and even scraps of gold. She looked back at the elder Raeph, who nodded, before stepping forward to add her addition.

Beside the overwhelming thought of how much treasure was here, she was thinking of how this would ensure her a cozy life in the clan.

She could have no idea how badly it would backfire.