On the Nature of The Dungeon

On the subject of the dungeon, there is but one comfort, and it is this: the dungeon is an entity, and, like all entities, it can be described.

The nature of the dungeon is that of subversion.

If you are lucky, the dungeon has been a known place.  It was your place once, a place that belonged to you, or to people like you.  Even if they were a very different people, they were far more like you than not, and their place was far more like the places you know than it has now become.  It was very likely built for a purpose, to be used and to exist in ways that are familiar to you.  It was a home, or a workplace, or a storage space; a defensible location, a place of strength and purpose.  The people and creatures in it were known, they operated by rules and laws that you intuit, that you can feel in your bones.  Rules and laws that wrap around you in a bustling marketplace- you feel them in a lecture hall- you feel them walking down the street, sitting in the theatre, pouring a glass of wine, pulling bread out of the oven.  Even when you pick the lock, when you slice the throat, when you lift the vase- even then, the rules and laws of the known blanket you in a soft comfort.  You are at home.

In the dungeon, you are not at home.  It may look like home- it may even try to convince you that you feel at home.  But you are not, and if you believe its lies, you will die.  The dungeon is anathema to you.  The creatures that live in it are not like you, the people in it follow a life at angles to your own.  But do not make the mistake of believing the dungeon has no rule, for if you believe that, too, you will die.

The dungeon follows a rule and a law that is utterly alien to you.  It is the rule and law of the abandoned school, of the marketplace suddenly empty and silent, of the zoological park at night as the animals stare you down, their eyes saying "we know what you are."  The entities that exist there, they move through the space in ways you can't.  They occupy hallways as if they were rooms, and move through rooms as if they were stairs.  They sleep in the lavatory, and eat in the study.  Their needs are wholly different from yours.  Perhaps they feed off of salt, slowly accruing it in vast pockets of alkali venoms stored in their pallid grey flesh.  Perhaps they desire only to insert themselves into a thought, returning and returning until no other thought remains.  But mostly, mostly, they have nothing to do with you at all.

The dungeon does not care about you, for the dungeon is beyond you.  It has become.  It is new, whole.  It is its own entity now, where once it was only a place to be used by you.  And make no mistake, like all entities, the dungeon lives.  It breathes, it eats, it produces waste.

It grows.

Above all, it grows.  The dungeon seeks ever to expand.  First, the worms move in, slowly opening cracks in walls where there were no cracks, creating doors where no doors should be.  The dungeon opens into the earth, reaching out, seeking to touch its companions.  Seeking to join with its kind.  Then the dungeon seeks sustenance.  The scavengers and hoarders move out, stretching across the land, stealing, devouring, returning, collecting.  Food, yes- but more importantly, power.  The power of gold, of capital- the power to bend the weak minded to its will, the power of greed.  The raw power of arcana- the ancient, the mystic, the reagent, the solvent.  It needs this to fuel its continual becoming.  Finally, the wastes begin to flow.  Inhabitants of the dungeon that straddle the boundaries between the known world and the dungeon begin venturing out.  They seek violence, predation, dominion.  And the psychic effluvia of the dungeon infests everything around it.  Ordinarily satisfied men and women turn their heads, looking at the horizon, unknowing, in its direction.  Surely, they think- surely it will be different for me.

It never is.

Let them come, says the dungeon.  They, too, are a part of me, now.

All this, of course, if the dungeon was, in fact, known.  There is another face of the dungeon, too- that which has never been known, but instead, was merely hidden, locked away.  It is the dungeon's oldest face.  After the known parts have been sacked, the treasures removed, the magics stolen away, the creatures slain, their blood sprayed across the walls, holy rituals intoned, mountains of earth and rock and mortar and blood sealed into place.  After the known has been reclaimed, erased, made clean, the fears soothed, calming words spoken, griefs expressed, and tears shed.

After all this, the dungeon yet lives- behind the wall, in the crack, in the blood and in the stone.  It grows away from its momentary defeat, opening itself inside the earth, reaching, searching.

The dungeon

IS.