Frisk is born with the taste for the dungeon in her blood, in her mouth. 

Her mother hides it from her for a long time — tries to, anyway.  But it’s there in her milk during the nursing, there in the way that all the paths that she takes seem to lead back to the dungeon, the deep hole of its entrance waiting like jaws among the greenery. 

When they come across the signposts — danger; enter at your own risk — Frisk watches the shadow of the wanting pass across her mother.  The flick of her ears.  The twitch of her hide, like shaking away a fly.  The first step forward.  Muscle memory. 

“Can I come?” she asks, crowding against her mother’s flank, and watches her expression shutter. 

“No,” her mother says, sharp in a way that she never is, turning with a flash of teeth.

The sharpness passes.  “Not yet, sweetling.  Let's go find a patch of clover."

---

Later, it occurs to Frisk that this isn't an ordinary wanting, her mother's.  It festers like a sickness, worsens in the early dawn hours, the dim twilights.

She starts to wake alone; the first times she screams for her mother into the thin morning fog, panic blooming in her chest, it doesn't take long before she just knows.  She flicks her little tail and straightens her spindly legs and trots along the familiar trails until, there:  The waiting teeth of the dungeon, framed in moss; the darkness of its throat in the ground; her mother, standing there so still that she barely breathes.

“Mom?"

Her mother comes to life again, a statue coming unmade.  Her breath fogs up in the cold air.  Her eyes blink and focus.  Her legs shift as if she's a foal herself, relearning to walk, bending clumsy joints.

“Is something down there?" Frisk tries.

“Oh, no, darling.  There's nothing down there."  Her mother's tail brushes across her back; her lips move across Frisk's shoulder, grooming away a stubborn stain.  “I was only a moment."

Trailing after her, Frisk looks back and sees the deep imprint of her mother's hooves, sunk into the mud.

Beyond them, something in the dungeon seems to thrum.  To exhale.

---

Maybe it's contagious, too.

---

While her mother's dozed off in the sun, Frisk creeps back alone.  She places herself where her mother stood, legs splayed to match the frame of deep prints in the mud, and stares into the dungeon, searching.

At first, there's nothing.  Just the stale air, the dead stone.  The creeping moss draping like a curtain across the mouth, lichen crawling in gray flakes on rock.  She can barely see into the dungeon, but what she sees of it is smooth and gray beneath the layer of plant life, still and silent, tilting downward into the earth.

And then something shifts.

Like a slow release.

Has there always been a light down there, flickering?  A little breeze of air, stirring the fronds of ferns, disturbing the hanging vines?

She can almost smell something sweet, something milky.  She can almost see the dungeon opening up before her, all its invisible underground veins and arteries.

She can feel it, the certainty that something is waiting for her down there, something beautiful and ancient, and—

“Frisk!"

Her mother's turn, this time.  Frisk jerks back, an ungainly scrabble of hooves across slick mud, and meets her mother's eyes, and beyond her, the dark, quiet hum of nighttime fallen around them.

Only now does she realize that she's missed hours of the day.

---

They do not avoid each other, Frisk and her mother, but it hangs between them.  Frisk stands quiet for her mother's grooming, and she can feel it even now, how her mother's attention slips away from her, the magnetic tug of the dungeon stretched across the forest, across the valley.

“Have you been down there before?" Frisk demands finally.

Her mother's pause is long enough to be an answer.

“Are you gonna go back down there?"

“Yes."

---

Frisk sticks around her mother even after she's weaned.  A matter of comfort, maybe, but she thinks it's a little fear, too, a fissure of worry wormed into her ribs. 

She has nightmares about her mother down there in the dungeon alone.  Standing so long in the thrall of the place that the moss crawls up her hooves, along her flanks.  She imagines other coursers walking past her without caring, not stopping, while the vines grow out of her mother's mane, the lichen across her molars.

Maybe it's selfish of her that the worse nights she dreams that it's herself down there instead.  She wakes up with the taste of dead air in her mouth. 

---

One day when she wakes, her mother is gone.

There is something about the morning that feels final to her.  Something fundamental has shifted during the night, but Frisk can't figure it out, or maybe just doesn't want to. 

At the mouth of the dungeon, her mother's hoofprints track mud across the cold stone and vanish.

Frisk waits a long time, but she never comes back up to the surface.