The passage did not welcome him. It swallowed the light from his torch like a throat swallowing a morsel, granting only a few feet of grudging visibility. The walls here were different. The rough-hewn rock gave way to fitted stone blocks, ancient and massive, their seams tight as a crypt's lid. This was construction, not erosion. Intelligence, however malign, had been at work.
The laughter from the chamber behind him faded, replaced by a new silence. This silence was not empty; it was a listening silence. It had texture. It held the echo of the prisoner's final, knowing words: The yellow king likes shiny things.
Cahara walked, his boots scraping on grit-strewn flags. The torch was his heartbeat, its crackle the only proof he had not gone deaf. His mind, however, would not quiet. It worried at the recent transaction like a tongue probing a rotten tooth.
He had outsmarted nothing. The cold clarity of that truth settled over him. He had not solved a puzzle; he had spat on the board. The dungeon was not a machine that could be jammed with a foreign coin. It was an organism, and he had introduced an irritant. An organism would seek to expel it, or absorb it, or transform it. He felt, in the pricking of his skin and the tightness of his scalp, that the process had already begun.
The air changed. The sweet-rotten scent diminished, replaced by something drier, more mineral: the smell of old dust, of crushed slate, of void. And something else. A faint, acrid tang, like ozone after a lightning strike, or the smell of hot metal. It teased the back of his throat.
The passage ended at a choice.
It was not a branching path. It was a geometrical affront.
The corridor opened into a small, square antechamber. In the center of the floor was a circular drain of black iron. From this drain, three identical archways led onward. Left. Center. Right. Each arch was a perfect mirror of the others, down to the wear on the keystone. Each doorway was filled with an identical, absolute darkness that refused the torchlight.
Above each arch, carved into the lintel, was a symbol.
Above the left arch: A simple, stark circle.
Above the center arch: A vertical line, bisected by a shorter horizontal line—a crude, abstract man.
Above the right arch: A filled-in circle, a disc of solid stone.
They meant nothing to him. They were not letters. They were concepts rendered in stone. The Circle. The Man. The Disc.
A test. Not of strength, but of interpretation.
Cahara stood before the trio, the torchlight wavering. To choose blindly was to accept the dungeon's whimsy. He needed data. He approached the left arch, the Circle, and held the torch as close to the threshold as he dared. The light pushed against the darkness, revealing the first few feet of another stone corridor, identical to the one he'd left. Nothing. He moved to the center arch, the Man. Same result. The right arch, the Disc. The same featureless passage.
He stepped back, frustration a cold coal in his gut. His torch was a finite resource, burning away as he stood paralyzed. The First Hunger was patient, but it was always counting.
He looked down at the iron drain. It was scrupulously clean, no dust, no grime. A hole leading to nothing. Or to everything. He knelt, against his better judgment, and held the torch over it. The light plunged down a smooth, cylindrical shaft for perhaps ten feet before being consumed. A cold, updraftless breath rose from it, carrying that ozone-metallic smell more strongly.
Plink.
A single drop of water fell from the unseen ceiling high above and struck the center of the drain with a clear, singular note. The sound was absorbed instantly.
Plink.
Another drop, from a different spot.
He watched, mesmerized, as a pattern emerged. Drops fell intermittently into the drain, each from a seemingly random point in the ceiling's darkness. Left. Right. Center. Right. Left. They were not random. They were a sequence. A code tapped out in water.
He traced their origins in his mind's eye, mapping them to the arches. The first drop, left, had fallen directly in line with the left archway. The Circle. The second, right, with the right arch. The Disc. The third, center, with the Man.
The sequence: Circle. Disc. Man.
It repeated. Circle. Disc. Man.
A path. A suggested order.
But was it a guide or a trap? A sequence to follow, or a warning of the order in which dangers would manifest? The dungeon's kindness was a razor wrapped in silk.
As he pondered, a new sensation began. A faint, visual distortion at the edge of his perception. He blinked, attributing it to torch-fume and exhaustion. But it persisted. A faint, sickly yellow tinge began to seep into the periphery of his vision, as if he were staring at a bright light and seeing its afterimage. It was the colour of old parchment, of jaundice, of a sulphur stain.
The yellow king.
The phrase echoed in his head, now accompanied by this sensory ghost. It was not a seeing. It was a staining of his sight. The coin. His silver coin, given to the prisoner, was a shiny thing. Had his act of offering it summoned this attention? Or had it merely made him visible to a gaze that was always there?
The yellow tinge pulsed, faintly, in time with no heartbeat he possessed. It felt like being studied under a lens of bile.
He had to move. The silence in the antechamber was becoming resonant, as if the stones were humming a note just below hearing. The pressure was building.
The water-drip sequence was the only pattern in the chaos. To reject it was to embrace pure randomness. He was a merchant. He trusted patterns, even predatory ones. They could be analyzed, exploited.
"Circle first," he muttered, the words a pathetic ward against the creeping yellow.
He stepped through the left arch.
The geometry broke.
The corridor beyond was not identical. It was a slope, descending at a sharp angle. The walls were no longer square blocks, but rough, bulging stone that glistened with a slick, organic moisture. The ceiling dipped low, forcing him to hunch. The air grew thick, humid, and the sweet-rotten smell returned with vengeance, now mixed with a pungent, animal musk.
The torchlight danced over the walls, and the walls seemed to ripple in response. Not a trick of the light. The stone itself had a strange, fibrous texture, like petrified muscle. Veins of a darker material ran through it, pulsing sluggishly with a deep, internal rhythm.
This was not a hallway. It was a duct.
The yellow tinge in his vision strengthened, painting the slime on the walls in putrid highlights. It was leading him. Or herding him.
He pressed on, the slope steepening. His boots slipped on the mucus-covered stone. The sound of his movement changed—no longer echoes, but damp, muffled squelches that were absorbed by the living walls. The sense of being inside something was overwhelming.
After fifty agonizing paces, the duct opened into a small, round chamber. The ceiling was a dome of the same fibrous stone. In the center of the room was a pedestal, and on the pedestal sat a single object.
A book.
It was small, bound in a leather that was oddly, disturbingly smooth and devoid of pore or grain. Its colour was a pale, creamy yellow.
The exact shade of the stain at the edge of his vision.
Cahara stopped at the entrance. The book sat in a pool of absolute stillness. No dust touched it. The humid, foul air seemed to part around it. It was an island of perverse order in the chamber's organic chaos.
The yellow king likes shiny things.
This was not shiny. This was the opposite of shiny. It was matte, absorbent. It would drink the light.
But knowledge was a currency, too. Perhaps a more valuable one than silver. This was clearly a temptation, a bait laid on a trap of yellow silk. To approach was to accept the hook.
His torch, held aloft, revealed the walls of the chamber in greater detail. They were covered in shallow, intricate carvings, almost worn away by moisture and time. He moved the light closer to the wall beside him, ignoring the book for a moment.
The carvings depicted a procession. Stylized human figures, their faces expressions of ecstatic agony, carried aloft a palanquin. On the palanquin sat a being of impossible geometry, a tangle of limbs and eyes, rendered in a way that made Cahara's mind ache to look at it. Surrounding it were symbols: the circle, the disc, the bisected line… and a new one. A jagged, laughing crescent.
Rher. The name surfaced from some deep, atavistic memory. The god of madness, moon, and mockery.
The figures in the carving were offering things to the being on the palanquin. Not treasures. Not gold. They were offering their own eyes, their tongues, their sanity, represented by spirals carved from their heads.
And the being, the god of madness, was laughing.
A sharp, clear click echoed in the chamber.
Cahara whirled, torch sweeping.
The book on the pedestal was now open.
The book lay open on the pedestal, a silent shout in the fungal dark. No hand had touched it. The pages, visible from where Cahara stood frozen, were a uniform, creamy yellow, devoid of any text or illustration. They seemed to swallow the torchlight rather than reflect it.
The click of its opening still echoed in the domed chamber, a sound too mechanical for this place of pulsing stone. It was an invitation. A command.
The yellow tinge in Cahara's vision intensified, no longer a peripheral stain but a gauzy film over everything. The slick walls glistened with a sickly, buttery light. The carvings of the mad god Rher seemed to squirm, the figures' ecstatic grimaces twitching in the unsteady glow. The air itself thickened, tasting of burnt sugar and static.
Do not look, screamed every survival instinct honed in back-alley deals and betrayed contracts. Knowledge gained freely was worth less than the paper it was printed on. Knowledge offered was a leash.
But the dungeon did not deal in freedom. It dealt in compelled choices. To refuse to look was a choice with its own consequences. What if the book held a map? A warning of the traps ahead? The secret of the sulfur? The prisoner had spoken of the Yellow King. Was this his ledger?
Cahara remained at the chamber's entrance. His torch, his defiance against the First Fear, now felt like a beacon drawing attention. He set it carefully into a crack in the wall, freeing his hands. The circle of light shrank, deepening the shadows around the pedestal, making the open book the sole focal point.
He drew his sword. The steel, a familiar, cold comfort, looked tarnished and dull in the yellow light. He took a step forward. Then another. The humid air clung to him like a second skin. His boots made no sound on the moist floor.
He stopped three paces from the pedestal. From here, he could see the open pages clearly. They were still blank. A trick. A joke in poor taste.
A whisper began.
It did not come from the book. It came from inside the yellow tint in his own eyes. A sibilant, paper-dry voice, threading itself through the pathways of his optic nerve directly into the meat of his brain.
Closer… it sighed. The voice was avarice given sound. Such a… shiny mind… full of sharp edges… and soft, wanting places…
Cahara gripped his sword tighter. "Show yourself."
A dry, rustling chuckle. I am… in the looking… To see me… is to be… my canvas… Come. Read.
"The pages are empty."
Your eyes… are empty… the voice countered. Fill them… with truth. Look… properly.
Against every screaming synapse, Cahara leaned forward, peering down at the left-hand page. Nothing. A void of pale yellow.
Then, he blinked.
And in the fractional darkness of that blink, the page was no longer empty. A sentence had appeared, written in a fluid, obsidian script that seemed to swim just beneath the parchment's surface.
"The First Truth: You are already food."
Cahara jerked back as if struck. The words seared themselves onto his retinas, burning even when he looked away. The voice giggled, a sound like rats in a wall.
Do you like it? it whispered. It is a gift. A foundation. All other understanding… is built upon it. Now… the Second Truth. But it requires… a token. A down payment.
Cahara's breath came fast. "What token?"
A memory… the voice hissed, delight dripping from every syllable. A shiny one. The shiniest you have. The one you polish in the dark.
His mind recoiled. It wanted her. The memory of the sunlit room, of her face unlined by fear. The core of his stupid, fragile dream. That was the shiniest thing in the vault of his skull.
"No."
Then you will starve… the voice replied, not with anger, but with the serene confidence of a vendor who knows the customer will be back, hungrier. And you will never know… why you are being eaten… or by whom. The next page… explains the digestion. It is… fascinating.
Cahara stood, trembling. The yellow film was inside his head now, coating his thoughts. The lure was unbearable. To understand the nature of the trap—was that not the first step to escaping it? But the cost… to give it that memory was to surrender his reason for enduring this hell. It would be a spiritual amputation.
"A different memory," he bargained, the merchant rising in him, desperate.
Tsk. A poor counter-offer. The quality… must match the commodity. But… the voice paused, feigning thought. I am… a generous king. A compromise. Not the memory itself… but the sensation of it. The taste of the hope it gives you. Let me… sip it. You may keep the dregs.
It was a devil's deal. To let this thing taste his hope. It would be a contamination. He knew it. But the need to know, to have some scrap of power in this powerless place, was a fever in his blood.
He thought of the scale at his hip. Weight for weight. What was the weight of a sensation? What was the value of a truth?
"The Second Truth," Cahara said, his voice hollow. "For a taste."
A contract! the voice sang.
Cahara focused. He did not bring forth the full memory—that he guarded like a dragon. Instead, he brought the feeling. The fleeting, quiet warmth in his chest when he allowed himself to imagine a door closing on the darkness, a fire in a hearth, a hand in his that was not clawed around a weapon. A simple, human peace. He offered the ghost of that feeling.
The yellow in his vision surged. It was ecstasy. A long, shivering sigh filled his skull.
Ahhhhh… it moaned. So rare… so precious… the hope of the damned… It tastes of future grief… and present folly… Delicious.
As the voice reveled, the right-hand page of the book bloomed with text.
"The Second Truth: The Digestion is a Process of Enlightenment. You will be unmade not into nothing, but into a purer understanding of your own insignificance. The pain is the engine of revelation. The fear is the flavor. The hunger is the god."
The words were a psychic blow. They spoke of a cosmos without mercy, where agony was not a byproduct but the purpose. His knees buckled, and he caught himself on the pedestal's edge, his sword clattering to the floor. The cold, smooth yellow leather of the book's cover met his palm.
The contact was electric.
Vision exploded behind his eyes. Not images, but equations. Vast, geometric proofs written in light and suffering. He saw the dungeon not as tunnels, but as a multi-dimensional sigil, a spell of unimaginable scope designed to transform pain into metaphysical fuel. He saw the gods not as beings, but as vortices in this process, personified concentrations of specific types of agony. And he saw, for a fleeting, sanity-shattering instant, the thing at the bottom. Not a monster. A principle. A black, recursive hunger that fed on the fear of itself.
He ripped his hand away, falling back onto the damp floor, gasping. The vision vanished, leaving only a screaming headache and the cold, simple words on the page. The yellow tint had receded slightly, satiated for the moment.
The book snapped shut with a final, decisive thump.
The voice was a contented murmur now. A fair trade… little morsel. You have paid… and you have learned. Remember… all accounts come due. The Yellow King… always collects his debts.
The torch sputtered. A third of it was left. The practical world reasserted its own, simpler demands.
Cahara scooped up his sword, his movements clumsy. He felt violated, hollowed out. The hope it had sipped from him was gone, leaving a cold, ashen place in his soul. He knew the truth of the digestion now. It was no comfort. It was a deeper despair.
As he staggered back to retrieve his torch, his eyes caught the carvings on the wall once more. The figure of Rher, the moon-god of madness. Its laughter seemed directed at him now. He understood. In this place, enlightenment was the madness. To see the truth was to break upon it.
He fled the round chamber, back up the sloping duct, the ghost of that awful, geometric vision etched into his mind. When he stumbled back into the three-arched antechamber, the choices seemed trivial. Meaningless. He was food being processed. Which path he took only changed the seasoning.
The water drips continued their sequence: Circle. Disc. Man.
With a numb, mechanical resolve, he turned toward the second arch. The Disc.
As he passed under its lintel, a final whisper trailed him from the yellow-stained air, a postscript to his purchase:
**When you meet the others… tell them… the Yellow King has appraised you… and finds you… deliciously solvent.
He did not look back. He carried his new, terrible truth into the dark, a truth that weighed more than any gold, and offered no light at all.