Saga of the Soul Dungeon

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

-Heraclitus of Ephesus

==Zidaun==

My dungeon appeared to enjoy making changes, whenever it could get away with them. Since Caden was more or less unconscious now, and presumably Exsan was the same, unresponsive to any attempts at communication, I assumed all the changes had been done today or yesterday.

Well, we did take a day off yesterday. Is it because of my people? Or something else?

Honestly, I couldn’t know anything for sure.

Seems common enough with Caden. Wish we could have talked properly.

Still, it wasn’t to be. He wouldn’t have gotten the title, otherwise.

“Izradi, send someone to prepare my team to delve. Ask them to join me in the Antechamber when they are ready. You,” I pointed at the person who had delivered the news, “follow me.”

“Yes, Ancient,” he replied.

For the moment, I simply went out to look at the changes myself.

The doors to the dungeon glittered with the same luster as always; the feathers of the phoenix burned with shimmering imitations of flame. Each half slid into the wall, and I stepped through into the hallway.

The doors shut behind me as I walked down the short corridor.

Everything was the same until I reached the room at the end.

It was no longer a circular room, though the black and white pattern of the floor remained. I counted the sides. Including the entryway, it had sixteen sides. Fifteen identical doors were set into walls. Each door was a dark polished wood with silver filigree. In the center of each door, about a hand-span across was a crystal. All of the crystals were gently glowing green.

I approached one of the doors, but nothing happened. I checked the other doors, but nothing happened, so I decided to wait for my team.

“It was the same for your team?” I asked.

“Yes, Ancient,” he replied.

“Okay, you are dismissed for now.”

With an acknowledgment and a bow he left the room.

Need to learn his name. Need to start memorizing all their names… if I can. This is going to be so tedious.

Once again, I wondered if I was really the right person to be an Ancient. I sighed, nothing I could do about it now. Not even dying would fix the issue.

I shook my head and waited impatiently, pacing back and forth across the room.

Finally the others entered and I smiled.

They looked around the room with varying degrees of mild interest and slight annoyance.

“How often is the dungeon going to change everything?” Gurek grumbled.

“Once we can ask it again,” I said, “we can ask.”

“Just think of it as good thing,” Inda said. “If it changes frequently, then scouting teams will be needed all the time. They might even start getting specialized teams to do different sections. Whenever their part changes, they go in and do a quick reevaluation. Honestly, if this place is large enough, they will be forced to have a team on hand all the time.”

“Well,” I said, “for the moment it’s just us, so we should get to it. I tried approaching the doors, but nothing happened. Let’s see if it opens for a group.”

We gathered together and approached a door, but nothing happened.

“I am going to touch the crystal, okay?” I said.

I did just that after the others agreed, reaching out my hand and touching the cold surface of the crystal.

The entire door vanished, showing a small square room inside. It was more than large enough for us to fit inside comfortably. Perhaps a dozen people could fit inside if they were willing to be cramped.

We entered and the door reappeared behind us. It was identical from this side, except the crystal was now glowing yellow.

I reached out to touch it again and the crystal flashed green for an instant before the door disappeared again. After waiting a few moments the door reappeared.

“Looks like it is easy enough to leave,” I said, the others nodded, letting me take the lead.

I went to the far side of the room, where another yellow crystal was embedded into the wall. Around the larger crystal were twelve smaller buttons, eleven of them silver, surrounded by thin rings of glowing crystal in green or red. Above, was a strip of dark blank crystal. The buttons contained Caden’s numerals for zero all the way through nine, as well as a small line, and one button that was blank and pure red crystal.

The rings around the numbers one through four were green, but the other rings were red.

“Any guesses how this is supposed to work?” I asked

“Try the large one in the middle again?” Gurek suggested.

“Might as well,” said Inda. “If that doesn’t work I think I might know what it does.”

Firi just shrugged.

“Okay, why not.” I said, and touched it.

It flashed red and a brief annoying sound filled the room, before the crystal went yellow again.

“We went to doors with each of those symbols already, right?” Inda said as she pointed at the four symbols in green rings.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “They correspond to one, two, and so on…”

“Okay, I am not sure what those two buttons are for,” she pointed to the line and the red one, but the others probably let you pick what door you are going to.”

“Why do a whole new room for that though?” Firi said.

“Maybe it’s so you can’t hold open a door for people who haven’t been somewhere already.” I said.

Inda furrowed her brows.

“Maybe,” she said. “However, it was using portals before, but it still had a bunch of doors. Maybe it made it so that it doesn’t need all the different doors anymore. We plug in where we want to go, and it opens a portal so we can get there.”

“Honestly, as good a guess as we are going to get,” I said. “Only thing to do is test it.”

I pressed the number one, and the crystal in the center turned green. All of the outer rings turned red, except the one around the red button, which was now green. The blank crystal at the top now has a green glowing number one in the center of it.

“Maybe the red one activates the portal?” I said. “We good to test?”

I waited a for nods and then pushed the red button.

The one on the panel disappeared, leaving it blank again, and the four rings from before turned green again, the others red. The crystal in the middle turned back to yellow.

“Oh,” I said.

“Smart,” said Inda. “Looks like it lets you start over in case you make a mistake. That way you don’t need to leave the room entirely. Might let you close a portal if you pick the wrong one, too.”

“Right,” I said with a chuckle. “That means that like the doors, the central crystal is meant to activate it. We ready to do it for real this time?”

Gurek grumbled impatiently a bit, but we were all ready.

I pressed the one again, and then pushed the green crystal.

The room filled with a dense mist, completely obscuring our sight.

We all fell into battle positions, and I paid close attention to my senses.

The room vanished and we appeared on top of a different stone surface. The mist still thick around us. The mist quickly dissipated, revealing a familiar tower, amidst less familiar surrounds.

“I think it is safe to say it made some changes,” Firi said dryly.

“You mean besides teleportation?” Gurek said as he smiled.

The area we were in was still called the Final Refuge, but everything else was different.

The sky was overhead, a sun shining with the light of mid-afternoon. A cool breeze contrasted the warmth of the light, and clouds scudded overhead with no end in sight. There were no signs that we were in a dungeon at all.

The town spread out below us, larger than it had been before, and I could see numerous entrances to the town leading to various roads going through the walls.

Outside the town, the aqueduct had grown larger. I couldn’t see any ruined sections from here either, though I did see places where streams moved between the hills. And there were larger hills now, which combined with larger sections of trees to obscure much of the view. I could still see where the ponds and the mist were, though. They and the monstrous millipede island looked unchanged.

Around us, seven other towers rose up toward the distant sky, in sufficient repair to stand firmly, though each was weathered and cracked, with sections eroded away and occasional stones missing. Vines, moss, and small trees and shrubbery grew in profusion. A wall extended between each tower, forming an octagon with a ruined keep at the center. From the midpoint of each surrounding wall, another wall formed a “T” shape and extended toward the middle, where they met the keep walls.

There were four towers attached to the outer portion of the keep, each taller than where we stood, with a much taller one extending up from the middle.

Each interior wall between the outer wall and keep, save one, had a rusted portcullis in the middle, with a small gatehouse structure above it. Off to our right, I could see the exception was much thicker, a little taller, and lacked the portcullis. It had a large structure where it met the exterior wall.

I pointed toward the structure.

“Think that is the main gatehouse?” I asked.

“Probably,” Inda said, “doesn’t matter much, either way.”

“True,” I said. “Guess we should do it.”

The trip down proved unremarkable. The exact ordering of the monsters changed slightly, and I made a note to find out what my people ran into. It was possible there was some slight randomization.

We destroyed everything in our path without any issues, not particularly concerned about being overly thorough. Entering the wedge courtyard below triggered the same small unlabeled mini-boss battle. Inda threw an enhanced dagger at it and it keeled over. The loot in the chest was about the same.

Too generous. Probably have to have him reduce that a bit.

Finally, we took the door at the end of the courtyard into the keep. Dust lay thick upon the ground, each step raising tiny sneeze inducing clouds. A quick exploration of the rooms we passed showed more of the same, with the minor exception of some ruined cloth and broken furniture. The monsters were more of the same, but they only attacked if you opened the door to the room that they were in.

The most exciting thing we encountered was a larger room which appeared to be a ruined barracks.

Finally, we entered the grand hall.

A stone throne sat against the wall to the left. A tattered and faded pillow of purple sat on the throne, its threadbare holes allowing ruined feathers to poke out.

The hall stretched upward, and rusted chains held up almost a dozen circular chandeliers. It would have been a full dozen, except one lay twisted on the floor, a broken length of chain extending from it. A matching length of chain hung forlornly from the ceiling above it. A second layer balcony was on each side of the hall.

Three ancient rectangular tables in a “U” held broken fragments of colorful stoneware. The open end of the “U” was toward a large set of double doors to our right. Wooden cups, showing rot, or cracks, lay beneath the same thick layer of dust that covered everything in the room. Large fireplaces were scattered around the edges of the room with rusted spits sagging within.

Stairways spiraled up and down in four places around the room. I could see where they exited above onto the balconies. though they continued into the ceiling after that.

“It’s tempting to explore all of this,” I said.

“Yeah,” Inda said with a wistful smile, “but we should probably leave the details for others.”

“Yeah,” I replied, nodding. “I will get some of the Adar to record everything for now.”

“Well becoming their leader had to be useful for something.” Gurek muttered.

I took one last look around the hall, and we circled around the tables. No monsters appeared for the moment, so we continued on.

We exited out of the hall through the double doors and ended up in another hallway, though this one was larger. Tattered moth-eaten strips of cloth hung on the walls in places, ruined remnants of some former decorations.

We exited through another set of double doors and into a fully stone enclosure. The end of the hall was open to the air. The walls were solid stone, and faint light came from above through small holes. Four portcullises were rusted into askew positions above our heads as we walked through the shadowed path.

We reached the end to find a large drawbridge down and crossing over murky green water that slowly flowed between its banks. On one side a chain led up to a hole in the wall and connected to the end of the drawbridge. There was no sign of the chain for the other side.

We crossed and went into the town. There were more roads and buildings, and some were larger, but overall the experience was much the same. We soon reached one of the exits. It had the two doors off to each side, like before, as well as the exit from the town.

The only difference was that now it said “2-5” on the door to leave.

We tested it, and it presented us with a room identical to how we teleported in. A room that was too large to fit into the wall. It made my senses twist oddly at the boundary. Inside, the ring around zero was lit up now as well.

“I am guessing the zero brings us back to the entrance?” Inda said.

“As reasonable a guess as any. And it looks like we know what that symbol is for,” I said, pointing at the short line.

“Yeah, the other exits probably have different, uh… secondary designations.” Inda said. “I bet if we walked around the outside of the town here were would find all the entrances have a different number after two.”

“Keep going or mess with this some more?” I asked.

“We can always mess with it later,” Firi said quietly.

The others agreed, so we headed out the entrance and into the meadow.