Goblins toiled throughout my many floors; tending to crops and wounded, cataloguing the spoils of war, and all manner of other sundry tasks. Argent sat at a desk before me, a stone obelisk that grew wider and sprouted shelves as she required them. Slate after slate flew to her to be read and indexed, a ceaseless enterprise conducted under the light of my core. Curled in the broken shell of the 'Clockwork Man' Kelter slept with a toolbox for a pillow, exhaustion having finally triumphed over his fervor. To my sight I had seen the muse I had placed within him come to life when he saw the automatons, my most vicious goblin's mind filled with spinning axles, cogs and gears. It slumbered with him but the gears still turned, linkages quietly snapping into place like the assembly of some vast mechanism. Life bloomed along the aquifer on my third floor, crundle and snake carving out their borders amongst glistening moss and corpulent mushroom. I observed them all passively, barely registering any of their actions.
My attention belonged to a purple light on the lip of my fountain. My sibling lay where Kelter had placed it, purple mana spilling across the bronze. Freed from the scarlock's control I had hoped to meet it, to commune with another core, to learn from an older brother. The storm that had raged during the invasion had abated, the leaking mana occluding my senses but no longer disrupting my work. It was unguided and much like water it simply flowed around the rock of my will. I had tried speaking, rocking it gently, then firmly, until at last in desperation I had dived into the core itself. The jasper was cruelly etched with runes that hurt to look upon, bindings harsh and violent that still reeked of the blood that made them. I forced my way through the purple mana stream, as gentle as I could manage until I reached the rift at the heart of the core. The rings that comprised my brother were broken, spinning only where the eddies of mana touched them. Lifeless shards of burnt carbon were all that remained of my kin, tumbling in the current. A gleaming corpse.
I had expected to be crushed and left empty and desolate when I first thought of the possibility, or perhaps filled with furious rage and vengeance. Instead I was just...numb and lonely. How could I grieve an entity I never knew or take a wrothful vengeance against a creature I had already slain for my own reasons? I could not be truly angry or sad or intense in any shade of emotion, though pale shadows of them flickered. Feelings I almost consciously tried to feel, believing I should feel them but finding little fuel for the spark. Yet I had lost something with the death of this Core, something personal and more than the loss to Creation by its death and so I sat and stewed in melancholy while my minions toiled and slept and lived their lives. They were together.
And I was alone. The natural state of a Dungeon Core and yet...
I wanted more. I wanted to speak with an equal, to bicker and banter and learn and a thousand other things. I wanted the sense of family and friendship, that intimate warmth and bitter cold of the soul that could only be experienced through the fickle ambiguity of sapient interaction. I had pale memories stolen from the stones left of ancient dead, even experienced the intoxicating heights of genuine uncertainty speaking with Argent, negotiating the treacherous rapids of a burgeoning relationship with a unique child. Reaching for the right words to form a sentence in mortal tongue that would truly communicate my thoughts and intent was ordeal enough as a peerless creator issuing commands and edicts to a lesser. So much could be lost or inadvertently gained by a lack or surplus of knowledge in the other but when one tried to treat them as an equal? To be respected in one's own mind and actions as well as their emotions, those irrational whims that bent and filtered meanings or divorced them entirely to a message received unrelated to that sent?
That was a crucible I wanted to plunge into, to master its mysteries in much the same fevered madness that drives children to sprint to explore what's around the next corner or climb a height they can't get down from without thought or hesitation. Something was gained from the action, something hard to define or grasp for it was ever fleeting, lost the moment it was over. After each stumbling attempt I made with Argent, I could not help but play it over again and again in my mind, analysing each meticulous memory for every minute fluctuation in body language. Marginally deeper or faster breathing, a flex of claw or twitch of ear...each time I wrested my mind from the spiral of interpretation I found myself convinced I'd failed to communicate my meaning or worse, that I had hurt my friend. What utter madness it was to continue to struggle with and explore that relationship. Even the meager fragments of the History of Dungeons that could so far be read had revealed the world had been irrevocably changed by lesser insanities.
I would continue to plunge into that crucible of madness and savour every heady uncertainty and emotion but it could not be denied there was a gulf that could never be crossed, no matter how deep the plunge. Argent was something truly new and unique, a mortal my infantile fumblings had somehow made able to perceive and even speak Dungeon Tongue and use our magics but she was not a dungeon. She would never understand what it was to be a Dungeon, to parse Creation through the light that spilled from your very center and work wonders from the pure monochromatic mana that made up your very self. She would never see the branches between worlds that made up schema trees or navigate the intertwined galaxies of attunements.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
I craved that shared experience, craved it so much that now it had been stolen from me that it burned. The world was wrong and I would fix it, reshape it to my will...except I couldn't. There was a flaw in my domain and it was nothing I could fix myself. Perhaps the very same emotions that set my mana to a roiling tempest that span my rings and cast riotous shadows across the lay of light in my dungeon was the same that had led to Leshalinod's own madness. Perhaps it was this desperate, burning desire to be known and to know in turn that had seen it break free of the shackles of fate and tear the history of our species from time.
The fury left me, my focus resting on the polished, lifeless, jasper that lay before me. This one was not known, even having seen to the very heart of it I didn't even know its name. The few surviving broken shards of its rings did not hold even that. It had been obliterated by its murderous enslaver, either by malice or incompetence. If the Scarlock or Thaumivore had slain me or I had detonated from mana compression I would never be known again either. Lost to time - but for the History gifted to my care. I turned my focus to the slender slates and fractal tablets but hours later when Argent finally staggered to her chambers to sleep, when Kelter woke and left in search of food, days later as my tribes restored my domain and bound their wounds and followed absent-minded directions I found no trace of it. Even if I had, I knew too little to know it. All I knew was its composition and slayer.
Leshalinod's madness must have been truly magnificent and without peer. I had viewed the History as a tool, a way to obtain the knowledge of every other Dungeon and use it for my own desires. I had sought immortality by the most mundane means - to simply never die. It was the greatest form of immortality but also the least. Anyone could not die, the basest forms of life in my domain were managing it with every passing second. How uncreative it was to simply put off a little longer the moment when the music stopped and we died?
How truly, magnificently mad must it have been to realise one could become immortal in death? To not just be remembered but to leave a legacy and a burden to a chosen successor? How much madder still to choose a successor that had never been known, never been chosen? A successor marked purely by a series of traits.
That gloriously insane core had cast its magnum opus through time, precisely to me and even taking up its charge and legacy and accepting the burden as my own life's work I had still not understood it's purpose. To be remembered. To be known. Not just itself, not merely Leshalinod the Mourngates but every Core that had ever been. Leshalinod sought not just this bizarre lunatic immortality for itself but for all Dungeons. That was the true worth of the History, not a simple tool but an obituary to an entire race. My core room, the Chronicle Vault, Tasglann Nilavarai was more than a library or a simple chamber to behold and glorify me. It was a cenotaph to every Dungeon there ever was, dead and lost to time and from Time Leshalinod had stolen them.
As Argent had commemorated the goblins of the Sundered Hold, etching them into the stone of my fountain, so too I would commemorate each Dungeon recovered - either their names and deeds or their cores. We would each gain immortality, even if it took all eternity - which, naturally, it would. As long as there was time, there would be Dungeons to be remembered and to remember.
The Chronicle Vault shook, it's lower quarter sinking further into the earth to make way for a deep cut niche. I shaped alcoves into the stone, simple flat walls and floor with a gently arched ceiling. Into each I shaped a small plinth and a blank plaque. I spent hours shaping one in particular, embroidering patterned columns into its walls, creating mosaics and smoothing them all again, every decoration, over and over. I settled on a simple silver mirror for the interior with a clear glass plinth and steel plaque. When Argent interred the jasper core, its purple light lit the mirrors and spilled gently from behind me, broken only by the steel plaque, upon which was embossed:
The good news, Artifice Core is going to continue and is going to be completed. Life has calmed down significantly but the bad news is it's not yet calm.
In short, we will see more chapters, I promise to eventually reach an ending and not just disappear, but unfortunately I'm still not yet able to promise a consistent schedule or predict when one will be possible. It's not all bad chaos, I've been to weddings and Tankfest and even driven a friend's life's worth of crap belongings across five countries, which was all thoroughly enjoyable. Work has also calmed significantly, leaving me less utterly worn out. Truthfully the last month or so has mainly been delayed by the length of time since I last wrote Artifice Core presenting an ever exponentially larger barrier to resuming for my ADHD.
But we're here! With a new chapter at last. Hopefully it was worth at least some of the wait. I can at least confirm the next one will be up before winter rolls in.
While I continue scraping my shit together, anyone who hasn't read and/or absolutely should. I'd also recommend reading which has just been a blast. It's funny, surprising, twisty and turny and full of evil murder hobo robots and good evil murder hobo people. Good times and unlike certain fics, it reliably updates on time.
before I post so we should see some improvements in technique & grammar going forward :)
huge thank you to Jesus Perez for my first review! Please give it a like & don't forget to follow for notifications of new chapters when I get them up. Thanks to everyone who's followed so far and continues to do so, your patience and investment means the world to me.
