It had been a successful run, so far, by any and all accounts. The dungeons were gracious in that they’d been free of their usual dangers along the path that the Courser had chosen, nary a peep from any sort of golem or slime or what-have-you as hoovesteps led further and further into moss-filled depths. It was quiet, save from the occasional drip, drip, drip from those stone ceilings; peaceful, almost suspiciously so; and completely and utterly wrong.

Leighton knew better than to question it. In face, the mare took it in stride — as she did with almost everything — and continued onwards without pause nor hesitance. She’d yet to find anything of use, yet to find any sort of treasure; but, that was okay, for surely whatever awaited her at the end of her chosen path would more than make up for the glaring lack of anything else…

Right?

The Courser would find out soon enough, shouldering her way through the mossy-curtain and finding herself in an old, long-since abandoned chamber.

A crack in the ceiling allowed for a sparse amount of moonlight to shine through, near angelic in its beauty and drawing her eyes to what awaited in the centre: a pedestal, aged and moss-covered, with a bejewelled chest of gold. Her eyes brightened, ears perked, and she readied herself to take two steps forward —

CRUNCH.

Leighton looked down, raised her hoof, and blinked. 

Beneath where her hoof had just trod, bones old and yellowed now lay in a pile of shrapnel. Her ear twitched and a plume of air forced itself from her nostrils, and she took a moment to properly assess more than what was just in the middle of the chamber: piles upon piles of Courser bones, moss-covered and yellowed and, as her eyes trailed back towards the pedestal, bleached from over-exposure to sunlight.

“Oh,” She murmured, the first that she’d spoken since entering the dungeons, and gingerly took a step back to have all four hooves on the ground once more. “… Well, that isn’t the sort of sight you want to see.”

She considered her situation with a tad more thoughtfulness than she would, perhaps, ordinarily. To move forward and claim whatever lay hidden within the chest, or to back out and pretend that she hadn’t stumbled upon it in the first place?

There was no knowing how long these bones had lay in the chamber for. Leighton didn’t quite fancy trying to find that out, nor how they ended up so in the first place.

“Damn it all,” came the decisive grumble.

She would need to warn the others of this chamber once she made her way out.