Suffi Halfhand was preparing for coronation. There would be no ceremony, no crown, but in the quiet company of Those Who Mattered she would be made queen of the city today; she wore her hair braided and her best tunic of crushed red velvet, with dark ruffled sleeves and a dress of pleated white. A glove covered her unsightly hand. Her mother fussed at the smallest of details.

All of it was deeply unnecessary. If she had it her way, she would wear platemail and a sword.

To her mother, today was a day about finally being accepted back into the world of power. To Suffi, today was about the blunt fact she had beaten them all. So she wore a fancy dress and an iron glove, riveted at the knuckles, a brute instrument. A threat of the reign to come.

She held out her arm, and two birds made of thin twigs and stretched leather fluttered down. They were macabre little things. Skeletal, the framework of their bones jutting out against the thin layer of ‘flesh’. They had singular, cyclopean eyes, gawdy jewels set in their coffee-colored skin.

But undeniably they were the work of a Dungeon. No mortal mage could design a golem that worked without every inch of its body being imprinted with spellwork. Here, not a single golden line was evident to give motion to the false flesh and artificial bones.

They perched on her gauntlet, obedient to her orders.

That too would be an excellent example.

Trivelin heard the coins scatter to the ground, and braced himself for the worst. But no attack came, no trap descended, there was only a retreating sound of claws scraping and coins clinking.

Which… worried him more than anything.

“You idiot.” Umi hissed, punching the door. That was when the lights went out. The constant, pervasive glow that had followed them for the last three days was suddenly gone, and what was left?

Only a faint luminance coming from the doorway. It was a pale, eerie light, bringing out some cold and cruel in the glint of the gold. Trivelin paused, and then began to stuff his pockets frantically with coins.

“Really? That’s where your mind is?”

“Either they vanish when we leave the Tower or I’m the richest man in Caltern tonight. I’ll take those odds.” He draped a necklace over his head, plucked rings and put them on, made himself a clanking armor of gold.

And they settled him against the sudden dark, and the knowledge he would have to go out there- that the only way out now was to face down that awful skinless corpse. It felt good to know that he was fighting for something better than his life; he was fighting for the life of a rich man.

“Wait a second.” Recollection flashed through his mind in a sudden sparking moment, and he turned back, to the octagonal socket that had opened in the door. “I saw- come with me.”

He crept down the hallway, every step taking him farther from the door’s thin light and deeper into the shadows. As he peeked around the corner he half expected to come face to face with the thing, with its awful lipless smile.

Instead there was only emptiness, and a collapsed mountain of coins spread across the floor. He rushed over and sifted his fingers through the scattering of treasure. Nothing. Gone. Taken.

“Dammit.” Trivelin muttered.

“Care to tell me what’s going on?”

“The test wasn’t to ignore the treasure, it was to keep our senses in the middle of it. The key was right here. A little octagonal thingie, made of gemstones, there was a dragon on top. I saw it and-” He raised his hands and let gold rain down between his fingers in despair. “That little cretinous thing took it away. It’s not coming for us, it’s making us come to it.”

“Well.” She cuffed him across the head, hard enough to make his ears ring. “If you do something stupid like that, I’ll strip you naked and tie you up for monster bait. Understand? Now let’s move. Unless that table shows up again, there’s only so long until we starve.”

She stormed past, fishing rod cast over her shoulder, and Trivelin was left blinking.

Strip and tie him, eh?

Did he senses the ticklings of affection in her tone?

Climbing to his feet, he took a jeweled ceremonial dagger from among the riches, stowing it through his belt. It was time to hunt.

There was a reason I chose kobolds, despite not having the kindest of thoughts towards them. When my creatures approached the earthen Mana wells, the presence of so much foreign Mana completely overwhelmed my control of them. Even creatures imbued with Shards quickly lost their connection to me.

Despite this, I’d had no trouble getting creatures to delve into the geode-lairs and be changed by the Mana. In fact I was having the exact opposite problem. By the time the first stone-spinner spider emerged, burrowing its way up through a gap it was no longer small enough to fit through, the greedy creature had devoured the entirety of the Mana reserve.

Being Dungeon-creatures, I suppose it made sense they had a natural hunting instinct for Mana.

If I wanted to experiment further then, I’d need creatures capable of following orders and not reliant on crude instinct, creatures with opposable thumbs that could bring me back samples of the earthen Mana to experiment on. I even hoped to mine away some of the crystals and see what could be done with them.

In short, I needed the little runts. Even as they drove me half mad with their incessant hooting and playfulness. They were like children. Slightly less hideous, but just as loud.

Irritated, I turned my attention away, focusing on other aspects. The fourth island was the middle one, the low point of the u-curve formed by the chain of seven. On it, two enormous trees of rusting iron held back the earth-lizard, the beast slumped in captivity. Not even breathing caused to move.

From a distance, it looked like nothing more than a spike-ridged hill of stone and dirt, lashed by chains for some mysterious reason. In the dark of the nightvein trees, by the time they saw the draconic form hidden inside the rubble it would be too late.

A trophy and a defender. This floor, with its blessing of revenant spirits, would come to bear the marks of all those who tried to conquer my domain. This beast was just the first.

The next island was the fifth, split completely in half by the deep crevasse from which the earth-lizard had erupted. The sides of the chasm glittered with earth crystals. Somewhere below, a motherlode of earthen Mana awaited.

Unfortunately, it’s very presence interfered with my powers, so I was unable to build a way down for my creations, much less a way back up. For now, I merely needed to defend it.

I had the salt golems prowling this area, but they hardly fit the theme. The strange mournful atmosphere of weeping trees and night-fruits, of creeping flesh-vines and rust-red undertones among grey flowers, they required something more.

I needed something truly frightening to dissuade greedy hands from my treasure-trove.

I began by selecting a blightclaw rat as my fourth Schema. The sudden rush of clarity encoded every detail of its form into my mind, and allowed me to shape it much more cleverly. What I would do next would blur the limits of the rodent form.

First, I needed to make it big. The size of a large hound at least. I stripped away the fur and turned the flesh to a bruisy electric blue shade, layering over it with patchwork scales of dark dull red. What resulted was a repeating diamond pattern of the two colors, a latticework. I made spines rise from the backs of its elbows, elongating each limb until it could move with lithe grace and swift as an arrow. A ridge of long spikes protruded from the line of its back.

But that wasn’t enough.

I added tendrils, long waving things tipped by flat, oar-shaped pads where tiny hooks allowed it to grasp things by curling the pads inwards. The overall effect was like the mouth of a venus fly trap. I pushed back the skin of its face, letting its long, sharp jaws protrude out in a display of pale bone. It looked as if its face was a poorly made mask, being peeled away to reveal the horror of teeth and yellow ivory beneath. I gave it tusks. I gave it a long, slavering tongue.

I gave it a name.

[Rat-Hound of Lament]

Born of strange inspiration, this beast carries itself with predator’s grace. It’s unwieldy form invokes terror in all those who see it.

And then I felt oddly… dizzy.

A wrenching, churning sensation, as if the world was spinning around me and I had nothing to hold onto. No doubt if I’d been human, I would have done something messy and horribly organic.

What was that?

As I came to, I looked on in horror at what I had made. What had possessed me to do such a thing? Where was the beauty, the art? It was a horror.