“Pascal!” Duke shouted as he entered the old barn they called home. “I’m back, and I found the moss you were looking for!” Pascal backed out of the stall he was working on, and Duke heard a pained grunt come inside the stall. He knew the wounded Courser who Pascal had happened upon in the dungeon was still there, having been escorted out by the small medic. Pascal trotted up to Duke with a grave face, immediately going to Duke’s pack to sniff at the gray-green moss bursting...

“I TOLD YOU IT WAS A TRAP!” THE SKULL’s maniacal laughter cut through Pascal’s shouting, drowning out the Courser as the entire party sprinted through the hallways in a mad dash to escape THE SKULL. Its chattering bounced through the dungeon, reverberating in the bones of every Courser present. “Left!” Hadal shouted, suddenly veered to its left. The other Coursers followed on instinct alone, THE SKULL hot on their heels as everyone rushed into a wide cavern, lit up b...

“... this can’t be as easy as it looks, right?” Sangria’s voice cut through the silence as all four Coursers stared down at the ground, where dozens of tiles were laid out in a multiple of colors. At each corner, four squares of white were laid out in the exact formation of a Courser standing still. The Coursers looked at each other, back to the dead end, back to the tiles, and back at each other. “This has to be a trap,” Pascal said nervously. “I’ve read all abo...

“Did you hear something, Hadal?” Pascal asked, pawing on the ground with a nicker as he swore he heard barking, and barking that was getting closer to them. The straightway they were on was marked by a small fort on the end, the doors cracked open just enough that they could reasonably squeeze in. But between them and the fort stood about two miles of open, black brick road sandwiched between pools of glowing, pulsating lava. But we could fit through and close the door…...

“You should go under my door!” “Absolutely not, I think we should take the other door.” “Look, that one’s smiling. It knows something’s up down there.” “Just because I frown doesn’t mean my door is dangerous.” “Well I think-” “You shouldn’t-” “This isn’t about-” Pascal gasped at the sudden noise overlord as everyone spoke at once around him, creating a cacophony of voices that were impossible to pick out. E...

Pascal’s eyes crossed as the world around him shifted and rotated, the stone underneath his feet quaking from the walls grinding against each other as the entrances they had trotted through closed off. In their place, four new doors revealed themselves, each corridor dark and dank, giving away no information of what lay beyond them. A musty smell exploded forward from the hallway nearest to Pascal, forcing him to cough. ...

"So what made you want to explore the dungeons?" Pascal's question exchoed off the moss-lined walls of the caverns, punctuated by a water droplet dripping down into a puddle below, somewhere in the distance. Hadal whinnied as it thought. Pascal and Hadal had been wandering for some time through an area that Pascal knew well, hoping to find a crevice or unturned stone that could yield loot. Yet, even though they were fixated on finding treasure, both Coursers sensed there was more to th...