THE WORLD ON THE SURFACE is bathed in red-tinted light. It reminds Cervus of light through wildfire smoke – shifted from cool and clear to something warmer and heavier. The turning leaves, so colorful during the day, now look washed-out. Rain had fallen earlier, and the puddles caught between the leaves reflect the bloody red of the full moon high above.  

    Cervus shifts their weight from one back hoof to the other, tail sweeping an endless back-and-forth rhythm behind them. They remember the stories of the Harvester from their youth. They had shivered with fear at first, until their brother had strutted between the coursers gathered with his head high, claiming that he wasn’t afraid of anything. Cervus ruthlessly smothered their own fear after that.

    They do the same thing, now. It’s just the moon, they muse quietly, lifting their nose to observe it. It’s pretty, in a way. Bigger than they’ve ever seen it before, craters dark and lower edge lit to near white.

    A shifting weight in the packs strapped to their back distracts them. Turning to peer over their shoulder, they see the fuzzy black face and twitching whiskers of their cat, Obsidian. Her jaws stretch wide in a yawn.

    “What do you think of this?” Cervus asks her. When she turns her gaze on them, the yellow of her eyes are a mere sliver around her pupils. Cervus points their nose back to the moon, and then to her. She doesn’t even glance at it, instead worming her way out of her comfortable pouch to drop to the ground and stride ahead of them, tail waving. She stops in front of a crack in the hillside, turning around to sit facing them almost expectantly.

    Cervus sighs and draws in long, deep breaths of surface air, savoring the taste of it. Down in the dungeon it won’t be nearly as sweet, nor smell quite as good.

    The entrance before them is one that they come through frequently; a jagged cut in the earth warped with the seeking, gnarled roots of the trees above it. They suspect it wasn’t an entrance into the dungeons, at first, and that it was nothing more than erosion or a natural split, but as time wore away at it the natural walls of the surface gave way to the Buried Kingdom beneath.

    A twig snaps in the forest behind them. Cervus jerks up into alert, turning to peer into the shadows. They see nothing. Their mind, briefly, is filled with what the Harvester may look like. Never having seen him themself, and unsure he isn’t anything more than a foalhood story, they imagine him as something vaguely humanoid and topped with the grinning skull of a pumpkin, moving in that unhorse-like way that sends shivers down their spine.

    “Come here,” they murmur to the alarmed Obsidian, who hauls across the clear to leaps deftly onto their back, her gaze and pricked ears fixed on the trees still. There’s another twig crack, and Cervus prances towards the dungeon entrance. The shadows of it seem even darker than usual, and the roots that hang down look more like waiting snakes.

    Turning so that they face the forest, Cervus ducks their head and carefully pulls a long match from a pouch on their chest. Next to it is their lantern. Using a jut of stone nearby, they light the match and then arch their neck again to light the lantern. It flickers to life, and they drop the match, stomping it out in the mud with one cloven hoof.

    “Alright,” they murmur to themself. With thoughts of the Harvester still in their mind, they duck into the dungeon’s entrance and flee the blood-red moon.

    Darkness swallows them immediately, and the path before them slowly comes into focus, edged in the flickering light of their lantern. The dungeon always grows dark quickly, but at least when it’s day, the light lingers with them for a little while. Those feeble, clinging rays are more comfort than Cervus would ever let on.

    Slowly, the earth gives way to stone and softly glowing plants. The cool, crisp air of the surface turns to damp and laden with the smell of cave-plants and dank water. The path through this part of the dungeon has long been memorized into Cervus’s mind, and they tread it with ease.

    Onwards and… downwards. With the dancing light of their lantern to light the way.