The thirty-third thing that surprised Malric about dying was that it hurt less than he expected.
The first thirty-two surprises had come in quick succession over the past two days — the ambush on the stairs between floors twenty-eight and twenty-nine, Daven's apologetic expression as he'd handed Malric's enchanted sword to Lord Castovar's men, the way his party of four years hadn't even looked back as they climbed toward the surface and left him stripped to his boots on a dungeon floor that would kill him by morning.
He'd made it to the thirtieth floor on stubbornness alone. No gear, no rations, just the muscle memory of eleven years spent in dungeons and the absolutely furious refusal to give those bastards the satisfaction of knowing where his body landed.
The thirtieth floor of the Abyssal Dungeon was called the Drowned Gallery by the adventurers who'd mapped it from a safe distance. Black water pooled in every depression in the stone. The air tasted of iron and old magic and something else — something deeper, something that hadn't been breathed by any living thing in a very long time. The creatures here were rated Class Seven. Malric was currently a Class Seven adventurer with no weapons, no armor, and a gash along his ribs that had soaked through the linen of his tunic three hours ago.
He'd lasted longer than anyone would have predicted.
He was still going to die. He knew that. He'd accepted it somewhere around the twenty-ninth floor, in the quiet between sprinting and hiding, in the space where rage lives when it runs out of fuel and becomes something colder and more honest.
What he hadn't accepted was dying in a corridor.
So he'd pushed deeper, into the heart of the floor, through chambers that hadn't seen a human footprint in what the moss patterns suggested was centuries, until he found the room.
It was enormous. The ceiling was lost in darkness above him. The walls were carved stone — not rough-hewn dungeon construction but something deliberate, something architectural, enormous reliefs of figures he couldn't quite make out in the dim bioluminescent glow of the fungus patches colonizing the lower walls. In the center of the room, on a plinth of black stone that rose from the flooded floor like an island, sat a crystal.
It was about the size of a human heart.
It was also completely, utterly dead.
Malric waded toward it. The water was cold enough to make his teeth clench, cold enough that it probably had something to do with the way his legs had stopped hurting — which was either merciful or deeply worrying. He climbed onto the plinth, sat down next to the crystal, and pressed his hand against his ribs.
The bleeding had slowed. He didn't know if that was good news.
He looked at the crystal. It was dark grey, almost black, with veins of something running through it that caught the fungal light and fractured it into colors that had no names he knew. It looked ancient. It looked dead. It looked, in some way he couldn't quite articulate, lonely.
"Yeah," Malric said, to the dead crystal in the abandoned room on the floor that was going to kill him. "Me too."
He leaned back against the plinth and looked up at the darkness where the ceiling was hiding.
He thought about Daven's face. He thought about Cassia and her refusal to meet his eyes. He thought about eleven years of work, of reputation built callus by callus, of trusting the wrong people because he'd been so determined to prove that dungeons could make families rather than just business arrangements.
He thought about Lord Castovar, who'd apparently decided that the best way to secure the mineral rights to the upper floors of the Abyssal was to simply remove the adventurer whose exploration maps were the most complete — and who'd had enough evidence of the noble's illegal resource extraction to make that removal worth the cost of bribing an entire party.
Malric closed his eyes.
He breathed in. He breathed out.
He thought: I should have seen it coming. I should have—
The crystal touched him.
He hadn't moved. He was certain of that. His hand was still pressed against his ribs, his back was still against the plinth, his eyes were still closed. But something had touched him — not physically, not the way cold stone touches skin, but the way a sound touches you in an empty room. The way you feel a word before you hear it.
He opened his eyes.
The crystal was glowing.
Not brightly. Not dramatically. It was a thin light, grey-blue and uncertain, like a candle flame behind fog. But it was alive in a way it hadn't been thirty seconds ago, and when Malric slowly turned his head to look at it, he had the absolutely disorienting sensation that it was looking back.
You are dying, said something that was not a voice.
"That's the current working theory," Malric said.
This is not acceptable.
He stared at the crystal. The crystal pulsed once, very gently, like a second heartbeat finding its rhythm alongside his first.
You are angry, said the not-voice.
"Accurate."
You were betrayed.
"Also accurate." He paused. "Are you the dungeon? Is this — am I talking to the dungeon?"
The sensation that came back wasn't exactly a yes. It was something more complicated than that. It was: I am what remains of what this place was. I have been waiting. I did not know I was waiting. But you arrived and I remembered.
"Remembered what?"
What I am for.
The light was stronger now. Not enough to see by, but enough to feel — and Malric was beginning to feel it in his chest, not in the mystical sense he'd have laughed at a week ago but in the entirely literal sense that the cold was retreating from his extremities and something warm and structural was threading through his ribcage like a second skeleton asserting itself.
The wound at his side stopped hurting.
He looked down. Through the shredded linen, he could see the edges of the gash pulling closed — not healing the way a potion healed, pink and gradual, but closing the way a mouth closes, with intention, as though his body was receiving instructions.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
Offering, said the not-voice. Not taking. There is a difference. I want you to understand that first.
Malric had been an adventurer for eleven years. He'd dealt with cursed artifacts, with monsters that spoke, with ruins that thought and traps that learned. He had a comprehensive working knowledge of how bad decisions felt in the moment — the seductive warmth of them, the way they answered a question you'd been carrying so long you'd forgotten you were carrying it.
He knew this was probably one of those.
He also knew he was dying on the thirtieth floor of a dungeon with nothing to his name but soaked boots and an absolutely comprehensive list of people who deserved to be ruined.
"Tell me what you're offering," he said.
The crystal didn't answer immediately. When it did, the not-voice had something different in it — something that in a human Malric would have called careful. Careful the way you are when you are about to say something that cannot be unsaid.
I am a Dungeon Core. The last of my original sequence. I have been dormant for three hundred and twelve years because my last Lord died without a successor and no one came who was — compatible. What I am offering is the bond. The full bond. You would become what he was. What the ones before him were. You would become the Lord of this place.
"And what exactly does that mean?"
It means, said the ancient thing in the dark, that this dungeon becomes an extension of your will. Its roots become your roots. Its strength becomes your strength. What raids it, you feel. What feeds it, you grow. A pause. It means you would not die tonight.
"And in exchange?"
You stay. You build. You become what this place needs. Another pause, longer this time. And you let me show you what was buried. What the System tried to make the world forget.
Malric was quiet for a long moment.
Outside this room, in the flooded corridors and collapsed chambers of the thirtieth floor, something large was moving. He could hear it — the wet percussion of something enormous navigating stone and water, the subsonic rumble of it that he felt in his back teeth. A Class Seven, probably. Maybe higher. He'd been lucky to avoid everything on the way down but luck, in his professional experience, was a resource that depleted without refilling.
He looked at the crystal.
He thought about Daven's face.
He thought about Castovar, and the mineral rights, and eleven years.
He put his hand on the crystal.
It was warm.
Yes? said the not-voice, and under the careful there was something that sounded, improbably, like hope.
"Yes," said Malric.
The world ended. Then it began again — larger.
It was not like anything he had words for, afterward. It was not like wearing something or becoming something or absorbing something. It was like remembering something — a memory so large and so old that it had no images in it, only structure. Geography as sensation. He felt the floors above him — twenty-nine of them, pressing upward toward the surface — felt them the way you feel the bones in your own hand. Familiar. Integral. His.
He felt the floors below him, too, and those were different. Deeper, darker, stranger. Things moved down there that he had no categories for yet. But they were his as well, or they would be, and the thought of them didn't frighten him the way it should have. It interested him.
He felt the walls of the chamber around him like a held breath. He felt the enormous thing in the corridor outside — a Tide Serpent, the name arrived complete and immediate, because the dungeon knew its own and the dungeon was him now — and he felt it stop. Turn. The Tide Serpent pressed its broad flat head against the chamber door and held very still, and Malric understood without needing to test it that it would not come in. That it recognized the shift in ownership the way a dog recognizes a new hand on a familiar gate.
He breathed.
Class assigned, said a voice — different from the not-voice of the Core, this one crisper, more mechanical, the voice he recognized from eleven years of hearing the System announce itself inside his head. DUNGEON LORD. Restricted class. Notation appended: this class assignment has been flagged. For your safety and the safety of surrounding territories—
Override, said the Core, in the not-voice, and the System notification cut off with a sound like a door closing.
Malric blinked.
"You can do that?"
I am older than the System. It incorporated me. It did not replace me. A beat. The System will try to discourage you. It will flag your class. It will limit what information it volunteers. It is not malicious — it is simply following instructions written by people who were afraid of what Dungeon Lords become. Another beat. We will discuss that history. Later. Tonight, you should eat. You should sleep. You are still human. The bond does not change that.
"Where am I supposed to—"
Floor twenty-seven. Northeast chamber. The dungeon has been maintaining a cache of materials since before my dormancy. Some of it will be useful. The passage is clear — I will see to it.
Malric stood up. His legs held. His ribs didn't scream. He looked down at the closed wound under the ruins of his tunic, at the skin there that was new and slightly pink but entirely intact, and he took a breath that went all the way down to the bottom of his lungs for the first time in two days.
"What do I call you?" he asked the crystal.
The crystal pulsed. I have not had a name in a very long time. The last Lord called me something in a language that no longer exists. You may call me whatever you wish.
Malric thought for a moment. He was standing on a plinth in the middle of a flooded chamber on the thirtieth floor of a dungeon that now, in some fundamental and irrevocable way, belonged to him. His party had sold him out. A lord wanted him dead. The kingdom thought he was rotting.
Every single one of them was wrong about where he'd ended up.
"Core," he said. "Simple. Accurate."
Core, the not-voice repeated, and in it was something that might have been satisfaction.
Malric stepped off the plinth into the cold water and waded toward the door, and behind him, the crystal blazed suddenly bright — not grey-blue but gold, a clean and ancient gold that lit the carved reliefs on the walls and showed him, briefly, the figures there. Warriors. Architects. Lords of something vast and deep and forgotten.
He didn't look back. He had work to do.