3k/mo! And reward for Patrons (Patreon)

Thanks to all my patrons, new and old, for pushing me above that mark!  While I still can't quit my day job, it's a massive help and certainly incentive to keep writing.

The following is a (dungeon core) story idea I had the other day - it's still first pass, and isn't likely to be my next story, but I figured I'd share it with my patrons.

Runic Dungeon

Chapter One

Anger brought him to his senses. It wasn’t a surface anger, the frustration of mundane things, but something deep and hot, a seam of coal smoldering under the surface. He didn’t know why he was angry, just that he was, and that it was the kind of fury that started wars.

Memories came next, out of order and not quite meshing. Youth, retirement, marriage, schooling. Magic. Grandchildren, then children. Aging gracefully. None of that explained the anger, though he knew who he was at least. Almir Gate, runemage.  Symbols slotted into the tears in his memories, a lifetime profession blossoming around him, the runes sketching meaning through threads of recollection.

The final one tried to manifest. It was something big and ominous and excessively complex, but before it could finish forming it collapsed under its own weight, opening a hole to somewhere else. More memories spilled from the hole, flooding into his mind in a messy deluge, and with these ones came the thread of rage.

Gods. Chattering, yammering, infantile gods, unimpressed with his lack of piety. It didn’t matter that he’d improved the lives hundreds, maybe even thousands, with utility runes simply to heat and cool. It didn’t matter that he’d saved heroes and commoners alike with the stasis coffin he’d made from runes that twisted time. What mattered was that he’d been indifferent in his obeisance to temples and churches and never really meant any of the prayers he’d mouthed.

Well, he hadn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in the divine, but he was more given to an abstract belief, some higher plan or greater being that was vaguely out there. None of the specific gods, even those of craft and magic, had much appealed to him. They’d taken offense to that. Magic and Craft, specifically, which had to do with why he was remembering things, and not wherever dead people went.

Faithless, accused Magic, a thousand faces all superimposed on each other. She looked over at Craft, the weight of a million tools hanging from his toolbelt. His belief was magic and craft, so magic and craft shall be his resting place.

Poor magic and poor craft, Craft agreed, and it was done. They were gods, after all.

The memories finished, and Almir woke. The moment he could see, hear, feel again he knew exactly where he was. What he was. If the bare rock room with the small white orb wasn’t enough of a tell, there were letters and numbers seared into his vision

Fractured Dungeon Core

-90% Health, Mana Cap, Mana Regeneration

Maximum Health

1/1

Maximum Mana

1/1

Mana Per Day

1

Rooms

0/5

He was in a lot of trouble.

Very few dungeons were wild. Aside from some ancient ones that had long ago dug so deep nobody even knew if there was a bottom, the rest were either farmed for materials or used to power permanent magical structures. They appeared, on occasion, where the magic was right, but were almost immediately harvested and employed to better use.

Clearly, the gods had intended for him to become someone’s eternal slave.  Or worse, simply locked in some building foundation and forgotten for all eternity, doing nothing but cycling mana. They hadn’t even had the decency to put him in a normal dungeon core, which, he was quite aware from his own travels, could become a thorny problem very quickly. No, they’d crippled him first.

The fury flared, but there was no way to work it out. Instead, he banked the embers and tried to reason things through. The strangest thing was the window. Normal people didn’t measure health or mana in numbers like that. It was far too complex. True, he’d used some measurements when putting together certain types of runes, but having one mana or one health was like having one water or one air.

Of course, normal people didn’t have text describing their state of being either. Almir wondered, briefly, at the lack of emotions other than anger. Fear, concern, hope, happiness…well, he didn’t have any reason for happiness, but everything else seemed faded away and burnt out. He didn’t miss his wife and children like he should have. Perhaps it was because he had made peace with his death, even if it hadn’t gone well afterwards, or maybe it was just that being embodied in stone meant he lacked softer sensibilities

Regardless, the numbers told him something he’d thought for a long time: dungeons were strictly controlled. The gods had shackled them into some sort of system that kept them orderly and compliant, which explained why even the deep ones were so predictable, even if they were too powerful to deal with. The cores he’d used to power his runes had always been almost too consistent in their mana cycling, despite lacking any sort of regulating structure he could see.

Slipping into the old academic mindset was easy. He’d been a researcher and a teacher and a dabbler all his life, all the way up to death. With the cobwebs of failing flesh wiped away, the only thing that prevented him from thinking clearly was the slow-burning anger deep inside. Which certainly didn’t help, but he could still focus on the screen, and on what senses the gods had deigned to give dungeon cores.

Requirements for next floor:

- Summon two monsters

- Create three rooms

- Create thirty feet of hallway

- Create an entrance

Focus on the blazoned text made more appear, confirming the hypothesis. While the men and women and beasts of Cairfel were free to do as they wish with magic, improve themselves or not however they liked, dungeons had no such freedom. Suddenly the close walls seemed suffocating, the mana cycling around the core choking his nonexistent lungs. His mind shoved at his confines and the walls slid further away, then stopped suddenly as backlash hit him in a wash of pain. His mana had dropped from 1 to 0.

It at least shocked him out of his mood, the sharp shock easing into a low-grade ache. Whatever he’d done, however he’d spent his mana, he wasn’t going to have any more for a day, if his status was to be believed. Which was ridiculous. He could see the mana cycling around him and through the core, and despite that the mana on the status stayed at zero. Insanity.

If he couldn’t do anything with mana, he could at least explore the frustratingly restrictive status.

Summon Monster

Cost

Cave Snake

3 Mana

Fanged Bat

3 Mana

Goblin

5 Mana

Kobold

5 Mana

Cave Spider

8 Mana

Stone Spirit

10 Mana

Summon Critter

Cost

Brown Snake

1 Mana

Small Spider

1 Mana

Small Bat

1 Mana

That didn’t help much either. Or rather, it drove home how badly off he was. Putting aside the mechanics of how dungeons created creatures out of pure mana – or perhaps they pulled them from somewhere? – it made it obvious that it was impossible for him to qualify for the “next floor.” Which was the only way to increase that mana cap, that much was obvious at least. He didn’t know if he still qualified as old but he definitely didn’t qualify as stupid.

“The gods are bastards,” he decided, though the speech didn’t actually ring aloud. It merely resonated in his head.

The only saving grace he had was that being so small and weak and pathetic, his core barely stirred enough mana to register inside the little bubble of space he had, let alone outside it. Unless he was directly beneath a mage tower – which he wouldn’t put past the gods considering everything else – he was probably safe enough for a while. At least long enough to think.

Item one was that he had to survive. He could do nothing, remain small, and hope nothing stumbled across the rock chamber. Which might work, even. Assuming his core was the size of the smallest ones he’d worked with, he had a two and a bit foot wide sphere with a grape-sized rock at the bottom. It was rock, not dirt, so he wasn’t likely to be uncovered by a farmer or a mole, but depending on where he was there were things that swam through solid stone as if it were air so that wasn’t really much defense.

He could do that, but it wouldn’t be surviving. It’d be cowering in a corner and hoping nothing saw him. That never worked. Besides, it’d only been a few minutes and he was already starting to feel the weight of sameness. He couldn’t even rub his eyes or stroke his beard the way he used to. Without doing something to pass the time he’d go mad.

Item two was that if he were to do anything, he couldn’t do it through the frameworks imposed on dungeons. Not only did he resent that control to begin with, but also his core in particular was utterly crippled. Focusing on it, he could see the cracks that shot through the gem, turning it from clear the cloudy. Repairing a dungeon core was not something he’d ever considered, nor did he have any idea how he’d even start.

Item three was that he couldn’t cast spells. Despite all the mana around, the dungeon core and therefore he didn’t have a casting matrix. It was a small but vital aspect of spellcasting, the thing that moved from simple mana manipulation into an actual effect. Trying to conjure up even the simplest cantrip went nowhere, no matter how much it stirred the mana around him.

So, item four was that he could still manipulate mana. Theoretically he could manipulate it better than any human, since one of the major things dungeon cores did was intake old, spent mana, mana with twisted or locked elements, and fix it up, push it out again as fresh, clean, unaligned mana. Incredibly useful for powering long-term runic constructs and helpful in magic academies, but they weren’t exactly mobile. However, nobody had figured exactly how dungeons did that and his new incarnation as one didn’t exactly give him insight into it.

Conclusion: raw mana manipulation was his best tool. Even if he couldn’t cast spells he knew a lot about mana from a lifetime of work, and there was a big grey area between no spells and no effects. After sixty years of magical research he was sure he could come up with something useful.

Since the dungeon framework claimed, erroneously, that he had no mana, he couldn’t experiment with anything inside that framework, but trying to exert his will on the mana flowing about started to yield results almost immediately. Unfortunately, those results were underwhelming compared to the forces he was used to controlling. The amount of mana he could shove around was enough to power a small illusion or heat a cup of tea, neither of which were very fearsome.

Without anything to judge time by he didn’t know how long he spent grabbing mana and knotting it up to try and make things work, but since his mana didn’t replenish it was less than a day. Assuming he could trust the status, which was probably a poor assumption to make. In that short time, though, the concentration of mana in his tiny room had increased. Not much, but just enough to worry him. Enough trapped mana would start spontaneously manifesting its own effects.

Usually it wasn’t much, a little bit of lightning discharge, things spontaneously lighting on fire, plants growing at an accelerated rate, whatever was the most convenient way to convert the concentrated energy to something more harmless. With how fragile his core looked, any stray discharge of any element would probably turn it to sand. Almir didn’t fear death; after all, he’d already died. But the anger and the knowledge that he’d just be giving himself back to the idiot gods gave him more than enough incentive to avoid that fate.

“First order of business, break the cycling,” he said to himself, his mental voice sounding as it had in the later years of his life. A little bit frail, but still holding vitality.

Under normal circumstances that would be easy enough. Either vent the excess or funnel it into something handy. A storage stone, a defensive ward, whatever. Under the current circumstances, it was a little trickier. He only had raw mana manipulation to deal with it.

Well, mostly raw mana manipulation.

Even under stress he’d noticed that he’d managed to push the stone walls around, and he knew – not firsthand, since he’d never been inside one, but from reports – that dungeons left to themselves could dig and alter their layout. It stood to reason he could, though with only a single mana point to work with the dungeon system wasn’t going to let him do much. Expanding the size of his room from something like one foot diameter to two feet diameter had taken everything he had.

Still, the dungeon system was obviously wrong about no mana, so as long as he kept his changes below the scale that had drained him, it might be possible to sneak around the limitations. Almir focused on the stone directly above his core, if for no other reason than it was easier to think in cardinal directions when starting runework.

Even the smallest child – well, his smallest child, or even grandchild – could make a gathering rune. Pulling raw mana from the surroundings and containing it was simple, though the less pure the surrounding mana was, the less useful the gathering rune became. It also had some strict limits on how much it could hold, depending on what it was made out of, but the amount his core was cycling was so pathetic he didn’t have much worry.

Getting small bits of stone to move was more difficult than it should have been. The dungeon system really wanted him to use his nonexistent “one mana” rather than manipulating things directly, which whiplashed back into a very unpleasant sensation. Something to force dungeons not to experiment, perhaps.  He really hoped none of the cores he’d used for his own crafting had been like him, because that was a horrific idea, but none of them had shown any attempt to do anything creative.

It took hours to get the rune scribed on the ceiling. Mostly because in order for the rune to actually be a rune and not a pretty design every stroke had to be filled with mana. Which he could manage with raw mana manipulation, but the amount he could do at a time was severely limited because making tiny and precise changes in the stone took three times the amount of concentration the mana manipulation did. If Almir hadn’t been an old hand at such things, it would have been an issue.

With the last stroke the rune energized and began pulling in the excess mana. He couldn’t do anything with it, but at least it would buy him time. It also proved a point, and that was that he was not limited by the dungeon system. Not entirely.

By the time he finished the rune he was tired and yet not. Without a body there was no such thing as physical exhaustion, but his mind remained prone to some weaknesses. Normally he would sleep, but he wasn’t even sure that work as a core, so instead he turned to meditation. Not that he’d bothered with such a thing since he was a wee sprout and just learning to tap into his mana pool, so it took him a while, but it helped to sink into something approaching relaxation.

The return of the single point of mana jolted him out of the meditation, and while he didn’t feel so overstrained, neither did he feel properly rested. Clearly he would have to make adjustments, or at least figure out a better damn meditation method than the mirror pool.

The collection rune had done its job and seemed to be about a quarter of the way to capacity, while the mana density in the tiny room wasn’t anywhere near dangerous. Even if the stored mana was released it wouldn’t be particularly dangerous, so Almir decided he’d try to push out the room again and see what that did to his runes. The best case was that they were preserved, but if they weren’t, it was better to know now.

He pushed, the room expanded again before the mana point vanished and the backlash headache hit him again. That was going to get old real quick. Unless he could somehow improve what the dungeon system thought was his mana regeneration or mana cap, he was going to be stuck in whatever underground prison this was for weeks or months or years and he’d go insane first.

The change in rock eroded his rune, freeing the mana back into the surroundings with a bright flash. Annoying, but not world-ending. It simply meant he’d have to be more careful about expanding things in the future. Making it the second time was far easier, since he’d gotten used to the process, and while doing so he saw that noticeably more mana being cycled through the core.

Had the gods planned for that? If he couldn’t divert the mana, he’d end up being destroyed by a stray manifestation long before he could open up this chamber and divert it elsewhere. It seemed a lot of extra work on their part to find a damaged dungeon core and throw him into it just to watch him come back a few days later. Then again, they’d thought it was worth their time to torment him with it in the first place so they were exactly the kind of beings who would do that.

The banked embers at the back of his mind flared and he lost control of the rune he was carving, forcing him to pause and meditate for a moment to regain his emotions. When that didn’t work, he simply started cursing the gods in all four of the languages he knew until he started to repeat himself. It wasn’t like any punishment for blasphemy would make things worse.

He carved the gathering rune on the floor, to one side of his core, instead of the ceiling because he had an idea. Cores emitted clean, usable mana and took in the useless stuff, so obviously he wasn’t going to get much value from trying to corral normal mana to his core. That was going against the flow. But the actual flux going through might satisfy whatever arbitrary requirement the dungeon system had for mana regeneration, and so the ortho-inverted gathering rune might have some actual use. Trying to guide spent mana into the core.

Not that it would help if it all incremented at once, given his maximum, but surely not even the arbitrary dungeon system would be that obtuse. Even the hard limit of mana was strange, since for normal spellcasting a person’s mana capacity was more of a soft limit. There was a certain amount that was normal and natural, but with sufficient strain anyone could pull in extra, though not too much extra. Really what annoyed him most was that the dungeon system was so limited and delimited compared to the joyous freedom of real spellcasting.

Since he didn’t have much he could do aside from wait once the two runes were in place, he sank back down to fix up his meditation. Normally he just used the mirror pool visualization, mostly because he’d been blessed with a better-than-average spell matrix and frankly he didn’t cast too many spells anyway, given his specialization in runes. Almir needed something better than that, under the circumstances.

Visualization techniques were beaten into every mage, literally if need be, so it wasn’t difficult for him to summon an internal mindscape, arranging it into his old study. And arranging him into his old self. Mentally, he ran his fingers through a nonexistent beard, and touched fingers to the tip of his oversized, if purely imaginary, nose. No, that wasn’t quite right. At that age he’d been content, and there was too much anger for contentment.

Almir wound back the clock a little bit, changing himself to be middle-aged, in the middle of his fight with the city council about paying for the runic protections on the walls. His hair was salt-and-pepper instead of pure white, his beard slightly unkempt and bushy rather than long, his head shaved bald due to certain incidents with his youngest’s spellcasting. Perfect.

He shifted the study a little bit. The window, he enlarged and changed to offer his actual perspective, looking out on the tiny stone room he was bound to. The door led there too, though he could simply drop the visualization instead. The books became indices of the runecraft he’d learned throughout his life, easily accessible and clear to his disembodied mind.

The impact of mana regenerating jolted him from his work, and a glance through the window showed the screen claimed he had one mana again. The actual regeneration number hadn’t changed, but he could swear it hadn’t been as long as the first time. He mentally thumbed through his rune knowledge, but timekeeping runes were both very complex and relied on access to the sky, so they would have to wait.

He pushed up and out, winced as the mana hit zero, and was glad to see that his floor runes were so far unaffected. The gathering rune was starting to get a little overfull, and he didn’t want it to explode, so he linked it to its ortho-inverted cousin for the moment. Plain stone was not the best medium for containing mana so nothing he was doing was particularly impressive. If he’d been using metal or, better yet, sapphire, he wouldn’t be a hundred or even a thousandth of the way toward filling up even the simplest rune.

Almir had powered more than a few rune arrays with small cores, so he knew their limitations. Now that he was one, he had a little more insight. Instead of someone else enslaving him to power their rune arrays, he was probably going to have to enslave himself for that same purpose. There was no other way to break the limitations the dungeon system put on him. But since he was the core, and he wasthe mana source, he had more options. He’d been passably clever in life. He didn’t see why death ought to change that.