It comes back in faint flickers.

At the scent of a moss-lined cavern, damp and heavy, Fridge recalls having smelled it before. Déjà vu. Except that it does not think that it has every taken this particular path before, or settled on so soft a mound of moss.

At the sight of a tall oak door, rotten, frilled with lichen, Fridge recalls that it stood there once before, only the door was even larger. Impossibly tall. Or, instead, Fridge was smaller. A knock-kneed little something, wet, fresh in the world, left to take its first steps alone. There is nothing else to the memory. No parent to turn around to find. No smell, no temperature. It is only the door, and the sensation of standing there.

In the now, with Lowengrin taking the lead, the tall door opens. On the other side, the Overgrown Caverns continue. Slime collects in the ditches beside a thrown-together boardwalk, made from the disenchanted boards of chests and mimics.

“Have we been here before, Lowengrin?”

“No, Fridge.”

“Oh. Okay.”

The dungeon has always been there. Others speak of the surface as idyllic. It is all rolling hills and family; sun and rain; the stars at night. Fridge thinks of the surface as the shell of an egg. A thin piece, easily broken. Smooth. White. The substance is beneath, hidden inside. It does not have the words to describe this thought, though, and it does not think to share it. The belief, like the yolk, sits suspended at the courser’s secret centre.

The dungeon never had to call for Fridge, because Fridge had only ever known the dungeon.