"Must we Sisters?" Veda sighed, glaring baleful at the stone doors which had been her vexation since they three were all but fillies. Pythia and Polaris both knew how she hated these riddles. It was just like them to put her on a path through one, but there were five wayward lives at stake-- surely they did not find it so amusing that they would commit five sacrifices to the dark to have their joke? "There is no time for this! Or would you have Daybreak...

They passed this way. Dzvezda smelled them in the dust, heard the echoes of the hoofbeats on the stones all around her. They were not the first... not even among the first to lose someone in this chamber. Veda picked her way delicately over the grooves of liquid gore. It wouldn't hurt her, of course, but that did not mean she enjoyed viscera clinging to her gilded hooves. Pensive, silent, she approached the deepening pool in the sarcophagus to stare at her own rippling reflection. ...

There were traps and pitfalls galore in the dungeon. Daybreak was no stranger to them. He had scars wrapping the circumfrance of his hock from a ring of spikes he'd stepped into as a foal, and a sizable gash across one side of his neck where a swinging blade had caught him just high enough to be anything other than lethal. He had been lucky for a few years, all spindly limbs and knocking knees and wild-eyed fright. Then, in time, he learned to recognize the warnings. What had been l...

"Take a deep breath, li'l one. We'll be out of this soon enough." Daybreak lowered their head to whisper into Marinell's ear, as though in confines this tight everyone could not hear what he was saying. The others, at least, had the good grace not to comment. That was Jasmine's influence, no doubt. God-Prince Cyneric had found it less than productive to snark and snipe around his lovely fiance. She had a bite about her, particularly since her dear Melite vanished into the smoldering ...

"But what is it?"  Dahlia stood before the gaping, empty eye socket of a massive unknown thing. For a second they all thought the thing might come to life, as so many Courser skeletons had done in shallower chambers, but after an extended pause of tight-held breath they heard... nothing. The skeleton did not twitch, did not glow. This one, it seemed, was precisely what it appeared to be. An ancient beast slain by the strike of a single massive blade to the brow. Da...

Daybreak had never known home, in the way the other delvers oft discussed it. A familiar place of warmth and comfort to which one could reliably return, perhaps shared with those who were dearest in the world. The world Daybreak always knew was not warm, nor familiar, nor comforting, and certainly was not safe. Daybreak was the spawn of the dungeons themselves, and so there was nothing unusual to them about encountering bloodthirsty treasure-thieves who marked no differenc...

That voice... they'd all heard it a dozen times, now, shrill with fear and sourceless. Taunting. The first couple of delves after the disappearances of Cyneric's loyal knight and Jasmine's dearest friend, every hint of a scream in the distance had sent them careening through the halls in a harried search. They never found so much as a hair of either of their friends. Now, they knew better than to chase the dungeon's voices. It wasn't worth getting lost in search of ghosts-- and the...

They had been searching for hours. No one dared ask whether anyone else knew where they had come from, where they were going-- down the featureless spiraling halls no longer familiar to any of them. They set out with a mind to find their missing comrade, whatever condition Melite might be in. Privately, Jasmine feared her lady's maid had been eaten alive. Sucked into the floor of this strange, haunting place, or dissolved into a pile of goo. She tried not to let that stifling fear consume her...

When the echoes of screaming died, they found nothing. No trace of flesh or bone or scattered gear where a delver might have fallen, no blood on the walls. At least, they were fairly certain that the rivulet running thick between the cobblestones could not be blood. It came from nowhere, trickling through a groove they swore up and down hadn't been there before, pooling in the basin of an old sarcophagus-- and that was where the 'nothing' became a major concern. Everything...

The silence which followed that echoing, agonized shriek could have been cut with a blade. Whatever they had been arguing about-- and they did spend most of their time together arguing-- died unacknowledged as they stood, four statues in the dark and staring toward that unfamiliar voice. There was no mistaking the source. Or, at the very least, what the source was meant to be. Somewhere deeper down the twining tunnels a Courser cried out in pain, in desperation, and unspoken among t...

"RAJINDER!"  Cyneric's own voice echoed back to him-- and only his own. He shuffled anxiously where he stood, peering back and forth down the corridor and finding only the sickly glow of fungi to peel away the shadows. How long had it been? An hour? Two? Cyneric had never been any good at keeping time, or direction, or... or any of that. It was his knight's job to know where they were going, when, why, to keep them both on track and find some glorious treasure to bring back ...

Covered in damp and with one leg soaked in slime, Cyneric should have been grateful to cross paths with a blooded dungeoneer like Terrence. He was not. Certainly, Terrence had managed to stop Cyneric careening full-tilt off the edge of a cliff into the roiling magma below. A job Rajinder wasn't there to complete, as usual-- and most certainly it was beacuse of Terrence that Cyneric was now clean of slime and not so lost as he had been when he f...

"... What are you looking at?"    Cyneric had thought the creature little more than a lump of electric green fungi, piled up in one corner of the cavern. He had been down here no more than a day and already he'd encountered more than enough such heaps. Everywhere he turned, it seemed, there were mushrooms or mosses or slimes. Not one single surface in this place remained dry. Rivulets of browning water ran from ceiling to floor, and he felt filthy. Itchy, w...