Heat. 

A dense, heavy heat greeted the pale courser as he slid down the last of the sheer slope, barely keeping his hooves beneath him. He staggered and tripped on the loose stones at the base of the ramp, stumbling his way out of a narrow crack in the dungeon wall and into a proper corridor. He stood there, panting, finding it hard to catch his breath in the sweltering heat. 

Heat? 

Ghost’s head snapped up, and his heart hammered as he looked ahead into the chamber. A massive cavern lay ahead, but only a narrow path of black stone marked a route through the glowing magma that coated the floor. 

He wasn’t meant to be here. Ghost made his home in the upper levels of the dungeon, where it was soft and damp and mossy and a lot of things left him alone. After all, why would one monster attack another? 

But the furnace- that was different. The very real and ever-present threat of fire and magma that could burn any flesh not made of itself kept him far from the molten chambers. But the hole in the floor of the hallway above, the one that had called to him, had deposited him here, deeper than he’d ever been. He twisted and looked behind him, but though a corridor stretched out behind him, it sloped sharply downward. The cleft in the wall posed no aid, even as he bolted back into it and scrabbled at the loose stones. The slope was too steep to return the way he’d come. 

He was stuck.

“Courser.” 

Ghost jolted when a voice came from behind him, whipping around to see what beast he had to escape, but it was just a courser. Ghost shied back, and readied himself for the inevitable; the stallion would rear back from his ghostly appearance and flee the ghost of the dungeons- or worse, attack him. The fact he had called Ghost a courser at all was a common mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. It wasn’t Ghost’s fault he looked like them. 

But the stallion didn’t balk, and he didn’t draw his sword from the armor shining on his flanks. It was a tall, white courser; lean with muscle and fitted for adventure. “You are not from this realm.” 

Whether he meant the level of the dungeon or the realm of the living itself, the stallion was right. Ghost shook his head. “Come, then,” The courser said, jerking his chin. He was more compelling than the hole Ghost had plunged down to get himself here, and though anxious, he slunk out of the cleft in the wall to join the stallion at his side.