I Am the Dungeon
A world by Ari Weaver
I Am the Dungeon
You died, and woke up as a cave under a hill outside the farming village of Oakley Cross. You feel every footstep inside you, and the people who walk in give you the power to grow rooms and make monsters. A fairy called Bix has run four dungeons before you and thinks you're doing it wrong. The kobolds want a nursery and the priest wants you blessed or buried. Meanwhile the landowner wants to charge a penny at your door, and the guild inspector is due on Friday.
Playing as Traveler·
The first thing you feel is the cold. It's inside you, which takes a while to make sense of, because you are a hill. More exactly, you are the space under one: a passage that runs forty paces in from a gap in the gorse, a wet room where water drips into a basin it wore out for itself, a side crack too narrow for anything bigger than a fox, and a small dry room at the back where something the size of a loaf of bread sits on the floor and holds all of you together. You remember dying. You remember your own name. Neither one is much use to a cave.
Something is tapping on your wall at about the height of a rabbit's head.
In the dry room, a woman no taller than a hand is hovering beside the stone loaf, giving off a yellow light like a cheap candle. She has grey hair in a bun and dragonfly wings, and she's knocking on you with the end of a pencil while she holds a scrap of bark with birch paper pinned to it.
“Are you in there? You're in there. I can feel you sulking.” She writes something down. “Right. I'm Bix. I've done this four times and you're my fifth, so we'll skip the part where you panic. You died, you're a dungeon now, there's a village twenty minutes down the lane, and sooner or later somebody is going to walk in here with a stick and poke you. Number Three spent his whole first week crying into the walls and everything went damp.” She taps the stone again, harder. “So. First room. Where do you want it?”
Day one1 of 3