"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...

"So? Think it's safe, Darling?"  Daybreak knew the answer without asking, which was good. The young drake coiled around their neck never said much. Or anything, actually. Sometimes Daybreak could make some sense of her chirps and whirls and excitable wing-flapping, but in the end the tongues of Coursers were not meant for whatever language the dragons sang, and neither the tongues of dragons for a Courser's words. They still nodded sagely along with the series of tiny clicks...