The glow that Bro had seen ahead of him and past the swarm of potentially monstrous bats wasn’t torches it turned out, but a room lined with fantastical fungi; large mushrooms of all different colours and shapes that pulsed with bright alluring light. “Woah-!” He gasped, recognizing some of their shapes from other dark and dank corners of the labyrinthian depths in his years of traversing them.

He stepped carefully, trotting with enthusiastic whimsy, marveling at the cascade of colours playing off the carved walls. The stone had a strange pattern in it, rows of lines with small symbols here or there, wrapping around the room. As the courser scanned it, he began to notice that the symbols were in a pattern, rising and falling in a set of twelve.

Bro was so focused that when his hoof nudged a particularly large and golden glowing morel and it emitted a solid clear ring through the air, he nearly tripped, shrill shriek from his own mouth scaring him maybe more than the sound had. He was still on guard from the bats, nerves, what a fucking pain.

He shook himself out, steadying his footing when he realized it was nothing more than a sound. But then, ears perked with curiosity, he pressed his nose against a large cluster of chicken of the woods to produce a lower tone. He touched another, and another, and started to laugh when he realized it sounded like music, soft chimes reverberating through the stony space.

Bro stopped then, frozen as the sounds faded and he focused again on the strange pattern in the wall. A symbol at the bottom… he touched the mushroom that played the lowest note, then a symbol a little ways up- with some trial and error he found what might be the next highest.. and so on and so forth.

By the fourth note something stopped him, a strange tickle at the base of his neck. There was no way… this wasn’t that, was it?

But then he stumbled through the rest, slowly connecting the dots until… he stood, ready to start from the beginning. One note at a time, slowly, carefully, he touched the soft fungi, playing out the very melody that had drawn him into the dungeons all those years ago as a young stallion.

There was a heavy pause, heart racing; why? Then there was a rumbling. To his left something shifted, a section of wall sliding down into the floor to reveal a path that turned almost immediately. There was no telling where this might lead… but would it finally answer the questions he’d had for all these years, could it take him home…?

He stepped forward, leaving the room behind.