Exhaustion creeps up on a courser easy in these parts of the dungeon. It’s easy to get lost in the lush upper caverns and feel a sense of awe and wonderment at what has reclaimed the old kingdom. Before you know it, you walk further than your legs can carry you, and collapse is imminent.

It’s half of the easy prey that’s available here. Naive coursers that wander too far. Arcturus watched far too many noble greenhorn knights and disparate false-god worshippers make their way in and never return to the surface.

It was far better to adapt here, anyways.

The stallion sighs with a different kind of tiredness – comfort, almost. The coursers that lived and breathed these dungeons found no fear in resting here. He’d been waiting for something interesting to cross his path before abandoning that search and instead seeking out a place to call the day.

The creaking of wood draws his attention, lifting his gaze upwards. Sunlight barely speckles in from the crumbling surface, just enough to illuminate the green leaves and twisting bark of a large tree which takes root in the dungeon’s cobblestone. 

The small bat, which Arcturus had picked up on his travels, claws out from the mane it had tangled itself within. He hadn’t named it yet – something which came to him on a whim, normally, if at all – but the courser always found himself enjoying the company of the dungeon’s fauna more than anything from the surface. Its eyesight might be blurry, but its ears perk to listen to the rustling of leaves. 

“You wanna go up there?” He knows he’s talking to nothing, and knows well enough that the animal probably doesn’t have the same level of cognition he does. Still, it brings him some kind of joy when he shakes his pelt out and the bat takes flight immediately – he watches curiously as it finds a branch to cling to not too high from the ground. 

A non-committal hum leaves him. He wonders what the sun-knights would do in this situation. Take it as a sign that their reconnaissance was going somewhere? That these caverns could return to what they once were? He laughs at the thought under his breath as he clambers into the claw-like roots and finds a relatively comfortable patch of moss to lay upon.

As his head leans against the gnarled roots, he listens to the ambient chittering of the bat up above, the creaking of the wood as the tree sways in a strange breeze, and closes his eyes.