[Archived Short Story] Raising A Dungeon

Dassil Sandual sighed as their master continued the debate into the ninth hour. They didn’t really understand why whether a dungeon was a living creature or not mattered. Dungeons just were. Still, it seemed pretty important to the five grand mages currently sitting around the master’s table.

At least, Dassil hopes it is important because they’ve spent the last three months having the same argument for at least five hours every day. Honestly, they didn’t care, it would make all the time the various apprentices had spent standing around worth it.

Still, Dassil would have preferred to go off and meditate. These grand mages have more than enough Mana to live for hundreds of years. The apprentices? Not so much.

At least tomorrow would be their monthly break. Or more to the point, Dassil would finally have a chance to put their plan to end the debate into action. It seems so simple after day dreaming with the old mages droning on about it.

Dassil didn’t even need to learn anything new. The only roadblock had been the need for a defeated dungeon core. Expensive, but if it could be used to finish the argument once and for all, more than worth it.

So Dassil, the apprentice mage and dabbling necromancer, held out a few more hours before the meeting adjourned. Then it was just a matter of setting the ritual up. Sure, they hadn’t ever personally cast Create Greater Undead, but that was what the ritual was for.

No free hand casting for Dassil. They could make a simple skeleton dance a jig with the best of them, but advanced spells worked better if you didn’t do all the math in your head. Well, at least until you became a grand mage.

Still, all those codgers wanted to do was debate things. Want to find out if a dungeon was a living creature or not? Dassil figured the easiest way to answer that question was to try to raise a core as an undead.

If cores were living creatures, it would rise as an undead. If they were instead some form of natural artifact? Well, a bunch of expensive spell components would be wasted, but that’s about it.

Such simplicity! Dassil wishes that such an obvious solution had been tested already, but it hadn’t. The grand mages were all too caught up in esoteric nonsense to see it.

The next day arrives and Dassil finds the tower empty. All the other apprentices had gone off to stretch their legs after having to stand for so long and the grand mages were off somewhere getting drunk.

Not that Dassil was supposed to know about that last bit. Except it was sort of an open secret among the apprentices at this point. Once might be chance, but taverns and pubs in the surrounding kingdoms kept getting destroyed or changed by magic on the day off.

Dassil did feel a bit bad for those affected, but it did make casting the ritual a lot easier. No one to interrupt, after all. So, without further ado, Dassil begins the ritual.

And it works! At least, that is what people centuries later figure out when the undead scourge is finally vanquished. Dassil had forgotten one very important detail.

A dungeon wasn’t just its core. Rather, the entire dungeon is a part of the whole. Now, if like most undead all the parts had stayed inside the ritual, Dassil would have maintained control or at the very least been able to return it to death.

It is unfortunate for everybody within a few hundred miles that, upon turning undead, the core claimed the entire tower and thus escaped control. The only upside is that this wasn’t a serious tower for in depth magic experiments, but rather a neutral ground for mages to meet. So the undead dungeon only started with the basics and not some crazy experimental spell or magic items.

The basics were sadly more than enough though as Dassil had cheaped out on the core. You might think that would be better, right? A cheap core to most would mean some newly born one room mess.

However, even those cores are worth an absolute ton, despite having less power than an older dungeon’s core. More from rarity, though, as all kingdoms require a dungeon to be an actual threat before they’re destroyed. After all, a kingdom’s entire economy can be propped up by their dungeons.

No, the cheapest cores available are the shattered cores. And what cores end up shattered? Not the new dungeons, that’s for certain. A one room mess can be killed by some peasant walking in, grabbing the core, and walking out. In fact, since a complete core is so valuable there is only one type of core that gets shattered. Those old enough that the last floor can challenge a grand mage and are a threat.

There are sadly more of those around than you would think and so core shards can be bought easily enough. The only challenge Dassil faced at the time was getting a mostly complete core and that just meant buying it at a slight mark up from a collector. So this wasn’t some spring chicken that got revived as an undead.

Oh no, this was a gnarly old dungeon that had decided the threat to its life from delvers was too high and so tried to counter invade, or as most know it, caused a dungeon break. This undead dungeon? As soon as it formed, the thing spread out from the tower, claiming the lands up to a day’s walk away as its own.

Then the horrors started. Mind you, even a normal dungeon doing this would cause horrors. It is just that there would be kobolds or giant spiders being summoned and people are at least used to those.

No, what spawned were, of course all undead. Worse, all the normal dead rose as well after a miasma so thick it could block out the sun billowed out from the tower. All the while an eerie silence permeated the area.

Not a single magical alarm went off as the dungeon engulfed them before any warning could be given. People died in their homes without knowing what was coming and only those on the very edge managed to get out as nearby areas detected the problem. Even then, it was hard to warn people as the undead dungeon had fully turned into a field dungeon by this point and was blocking communication.

Though despite all that, in theory this shouldn’t have been a problem. After all, there were five grand mages in the area. With a field dungeon, it should have been trivial for them to fly over and knock the core out.

Let alone centuries, it shouldn’t have even taken days to clear. However, as later research would show, an undead dungeon acts more like a lich than any other undead. The “soul” of the dungeon no longer resides in the actual core, which will happily repair itself like any liches body would.

Though even after this breakthrough, it still took almost a hundred more years to finally destroy the first undead dungeon. After all, the challenge with fighting a lich was always in finding the phylactery and not the physical body. So where did the dungeon hide its soul?

Even to this day, scholars aren’t certain. While it has been confirmed that the dungeon is dead through various divinations and questions asked to various deities. The final solution to clearing the undead hordes it spawned as well as the dungeon itself, was less than precise.

In the end, the solution was as simple as the poor misguided Dassil’s original idea. Why try and figure out the specifics when you can just destroy everything and let the hells sort it out? The only reason it took that extra hundred-ish years to was because the miasma stopped spreading early on, only covering around five kingdoms.

A horrible tragedy, no doubt, but those with power easily left and those not from the area didn’t want to poke the bear. In the end it took the build up of miasma along the southern divide to force someone’s hand. Four entire kingdoms ended up paying for a collaboration of 300 grand mages and an archmagi who specialized in cooperative rituals to end the threat.

It took the archmagi five years to carve out a ritual as well as even more wealth, but finally they were ready. The 300 grand mages took their places and everyone channeled Mana into the ritual. That would become known as the day the sky fell.

Impossible clouds formed above the sky and then lightning bolts as wide as entire cities fell from the sky. The cursed land literally screamed as gaping maws formed in mountains of corpses, formed by the dungeon’s never ending spawning of new fodder. Archaic beings lost in the past rose up as the miasma tried to escape deep into the ground, turning all that it came across.

Titanic beings, some of which are even rumored to have been literal titans, rose up as undead to fight the lightning only to be reduced to dust. Observers even swear that ancient beasts so large that one city sized bolt wasn’t enough to fully vanquish them. Whatever the case, after five days and five nights the lightning would clear and nothing was left.

Whether horrors of the deep did get dug up or not is honestly just a guess at this point. After all, on average, a hundred feet of land was gone afterwards, with some areas much deeper. Not a speck of the undead remained within the area and in the place where the tower originally stood, there was a vast hole that pierced more than one layer of the deep places.

Now most of the land where this took place is underwater, what with having the land lowers by so much. This is honestly a blessing, as the raw power left behind by the ritual has caused a warping of the natural order. It is predicted that for a long time to come, the only animals that will be able to survive there are monsters.

Which, since the place is now basically just a giant inland sea keeps the problem mostly self contained. Remember, the rumors of sea serpent sized electric eels are not in fact tall tales, but rather the stark truth. The small clan of lightning dragons that have taken up roost there are not the top of the food chain.

Though it is thanks to them that we are able to keep an eye on the situation and how we manage to cull any amphibious monsters that may show up. While we suspect that before the power weakens, a primordial will be born. As long as it comes from an aquatic, the situation will remain controlled.

Now, speaking of monsters, not all of the first undead dungeon’s spawn are gone. Many over those hundreds of years have left the dungeons territory and ended up in all kinds of places. Nevermind the ones extracted by curious necromancers looking for a leg up, even if they have to use literal legs.

Three of the most well-known apex undead that formed within the dungeon are as follows. The mammoth gnawer, the skeleton gathering bone centipede, and lastly, the hills have eyes. Each one was more disturbing than the last.

Our first example is simple enough, imagine an obese mammoth. Not just fat, but bursting at the gut. Their stomachs are distended and drag on the ground. Then there’s the head.

Instead of a normal mammoth head or even just a skull, this undead monstrosity goes the extra mile. They use between six and 16 de-tusked mammoth skulls with the nasal section facing inward to form a horrific gnawing orifice. The variability comes from the fact that their primary prey are normal mammoths and they try to add to their collection.

If not for how bad these undead are at hunting mammoths, the nearby tundra would likely be empty of them. Still, the undead beast’s amazing capacity to store material for a necromancer’s undead made it a popular export.

Next is the skeleton gathering bone centipede. It shares a main feature with the previous monstrosity in the fact that it likes to add its victims to itself. The difference here is that the entire monster is made of humanoid bones. A horrifying thing to consider when you learn that each one starts out at least as tall as a building and three times as wide.

It is rumored that one new section of one takes over 3,000 complete human skeletons to create. The only saving grace is that while always up for a fight, they prefer to source their parts peacefully and do not go on killing rampages. Though in turn, this relatively peaceful nature allowed them to spread and there are even rumors of some specimens being seen on other continents.

The last undead beast isn’t technically unique to the dungeon. Similar beings have existed before. The difference is in scale. While piles of corpses have been known to form into one undead, most believed the limit to be around fifty human sized corpses and nothing larger than an auroch.

Too many bodies causes the magic to become too diffused. Too big a body in the pile and the magic will concentrate on that body instead of changing the whole pile. The answer to this is you just need more of the big bodies to even things out.

While they are called, the hills have eyes, a hill is just the size they start as. They take on all bodies and while there are theoretical limits on their size, all the ones from the first undead dungeon that are still out there likely won’t reach it. After all, the upper limit on size is based on the original body size of what was in the pile.

Suffice to say, mammoths weren’t the biggest bodies hanging around in there. As for their name? These monstrosities tend to rest in one place for long periods of time and end up covered in dirt and plant life. Only various sensory organs can be seen sticking out so that the beast never misses a chance at something of the right size.

Of course, it is rumored that by the end there were much worse things hiding in the central region of the undead dungeon. If there was though, they have now all either been reduced to less than dust or under a necromancer that so far has kept things secret.