The cave breathed with its usual morning warmth, the heated stone releasing the night's chill in slow exhalations that carried the scent of minerals and distant forge smoke far off of the mountainside, through the open obsidian gate, as the dungeon's heat vented toward the sky. Inside, water dripped somewhere in the deeper tunnels as a steady rhythm that echoed through carved passages where goblins moved in pursuit of a fresh day's toil and slimes oozed along their patrol routes. The dungeon had grown a lot these past few days.
Near the entrance to the main hall, a puddle bubbled.
The puddle shifted, rising slightly in its centre before settling back down. It bubbled again, more enthusiastically this time, then began moving across the stone floor with cheerful determination.
Blibli the slime princess was having a wonderful morning.
Not that it was ever the opposite case. Every morning was always wonderful for her. That's just what being a slime was like.
She flowed over a discarded coin, paused to examine it from several angles by rotating her entire mass around it, then continued onwards. The ceiling passed overhead in rippling vision, upside-down and backwards through her translucent body. A goblin walked past carrying a bundle of spears. She waved at him with a pseudopod. He did not wave back, which was fine because he probably just hadn't seen her down here.
Everything was interesting. The cracks in the floor held tiny crystals. The walls had patterns in the stone that changed depending on how the light hit them. There was a really big beetle near the corner that she watched for several minutes, fascinated by the way its legs moved.
Then she saw the rat.
Her pupils dilated.
It scurried along the base of the wall, nose twitching, whiskers quivering as it searched for crumbs or seeds or whatever it was that rats searched for. Its tail dragged behind it in a long pink line.
Blibli's entire mass compressed. She drew herself inward, tightening her gelatinous body into a dense, wobbling sphere. Her surface tension increased. Her core shifted forward, building momentum.
The rat paused to sniff at something.
Blibli launched.
She flew through the air in a graceful arc, pseudopods streaming behind her, her trajectory perfect and her aim true.
The rat looked up at the last possible second.
It bolted.
Blibli hit the wall with a wet splat, her body spreading across the stone in a thin sheet before slowly peeling off and reforming into her usual puddle shape. The rat was already gone, vanishing into a tunnel entrance with a flick of its tail.
She reformed completely and stared at the empty space where the rat had been.
"Come back, friend!" she called after it.
Her voice echoed down the tunnel. The rat did not respond. It would have been odd if it had, even for her. Although, perhaps, she wouldn't have ever thought much about it.
Blibli flowed forward in rapid pursuit.
The tunnel led deeper into the dungeon's working levels, where the goblins maintained their forges and the first of the dungeon's storage chambers. Heat rose from metal vents in the floor, warming the stone with vapours from the mountain's core.
Blibli poured herself along the corridor, moving faster than her usual exploring pace. The rat's trail was clear to her senses. She could feel the tiny vibrations its feet made against the stone and could sense the particles it left behind in the air.
She rounded a corner and nearly collided with a group of goblin workers carrying bundles of ore.
They yelped and scattered. One dropped his burden with a clatter. Blibli flowed between their legs without slowing, her mass splitting briefly to avoid the fallen ore before rejoining on the other side.
"Sorry!" she called back cheerfully.
The tunnel opened into a larger chamber where forge fires burnt bright and orange. Dragon whelps from the wild mountain had taken up residence near the warmest spots, their scaled bodies curled around the heat sources. They were small compared to Barjuchne, barely larger than hunting dogs, but they hissed and snapped at anyone who came too close to their claimed territory.
Blibli saw the rat dart between two whelps.
She followed.
The first whelp lifted its head as she approached, its eyes tracking her movement with reptilian focus. She compressed herself into a narrow stream and shot between its front legs. It snapped at where she'd been a moment before, catching only air. The second whelp lunged. Blibli split herself in half, flowing around both sides of its head, and then rejoined behind it. The whelp spun in confusion, smoke curling from its nostrils.
The rat was already halfway across the forge chamber.
Blibli stretched herself long and thin, flowing faster, her body rippling with effort.
A goblin smith looked up from his anvil just in time to see a translucent blue mass shoot past his workstation. His hammer came down on empty air instead of the blade he'd been shaping.
"What in the -"
Blibli was already gone, pouring herself through the far doorway and into the next corridor.
The rat scurried ahead, moving with desperate speed now. It knew it was being chased. Its little heart hammered against its ribs. Its feet scraped frantically against stone.
The corridor widened into a junction where three tunnels met. Goblins moved back and forth carrying supplies, tools, and baskets of food from the surface. The space buzzed with activity and conversation.
Rou-ya stood near the centre, examining a document one of the workers had brought her. She wore her usual practical leather, and her golden eyes scanned the parchment with focused attention.
Blibli shot through the junction at full speed.
"Hey! What's the rush?" Rou-ya yelled in agitation, jerking aside as the slime princess missed her by inches.
"I found a friend!" Blibli called back, not slowing.
Rou-ya stared after her, then looked down at the document in her hands. She shook her head slowly.
Nobody paid her anything, technically. But the sentiment stood that she really should be paid for these matters.
“Do you think Barjuchne would give us a spending allowance?” she asked, looking over toward Veliah, who was sitting on a crate from a recent tribute.
“What would you even spend it on?” asked the elven merchant’s daughter. “Goblins aren’t allowed in human cities,” she remarked.
“...It’s just about the principle,” replied Rou-ya.
The rat found a crack in the wall.
It was a tiny thing, barely visible in the dim light, just a thin split in the stone where two sections of rock didn't quite meet. The rat compressed itself and squeezed inside, disappearing into the mountain's hidden spaces.
Blibli reached the crack and pressed herself against it.
Her body flattened. Her edges thinned. She poured herself into the opening, her gelatinous mass flowing like water through the narrow gap. The stone pressed against her from all sides, cold and rough. She could feel every texture, every tiny irregularity in the rock.
The crack led to another crack, which led to a thin fissure, which led to a network of arterial passages running through the mountain's interior. They were too small for anything solid to navigate, but Blibli was not solid.
She flowed deeper.
The sounds of the dungeon began to fade. The clanging of hammers grew distant. The voices of goblins became muffled, then silent. The only sound was the soft, damp whisper of her own body moving through stone and the occasional drip of water somewhere far above or below. The passages twisted and turned. They narrowed until she had to compress herself to near-solidity just to fit. They opened briefly into small voids where ancient water had dissolved the rock, then narrowed again.
After a while, time became strange. Without light or sound or any reference point except the stone pressing against her, Blibli couldn't tell if she'd been flowing for minutes or hours.
"Where am I...?" she asked herself.
It was dark.
Her voice didn't echo. The stone absorbed it completely.
Her eyes, compressed into inch-wide orbs to fit through the narrow passages, couldn't see anything in the absolute darkness. But she didn't need eyes down here. Her whole body was a sensory organ, feeling vibrations, detecting changes in pressure and temperature, and mapping the space around her through touch alone.
The rat was still ahead somewhere. She could feel its movement, faint but present.
She kept going.
The passage opened.
Blibli felt it. The pressure changed. The stone fell away on all sides, and suddenly there was space. Vast space. Empty space that stretched in directions she couldn't quite measure.
She poured herself out of the crack and reformed in the darkness.
The air here felt different. It prickled against her surface, sharp little pinches that made her flinch and ripple. Magic. Old magic, raw and uncontained, crackling through the space. She couldn't see, but she could sense. The chamber was massive. Bigger than the treasure room. Bigger than the entire dungeon. The ceiling rose impossibly high overhead, and the walls curved away into distant darkness.
Something glinted far above.
Blibli looked up, focusing her senses.
"Woah..."
The ceiling was covered in formations. Long, pointed shapes hanging down, each one large. They caught the ambient magic and reflected it in faint, ghostly light. Beautiful.
She focused harder.
Wait.
They weren't formations. They weren't stalactites at all.
She was looking at teeth.
Massive teeth arranged in perfect rows along a jaw so large that she'd mistaken it for a cavern ceiling. And beyond the teeth, deeper in the darkness, the curve of bone. The hollow sockets of eyes. The arch of a skull was so enormous that her mind had simply refused to process it as anything but natural geology.
She was inside a dragon's skull. Not just inside. Standing in its mouth.
The dragon's remains had been beyond any scale she could comprehend. Titanic. Compared to it, even the tall Barjuchne was basically a newborn.
[ENVIRONMENT]DragongraveResting deep below the obsidian mountain lies the Dragongrave. It is a hidden system of gigantic caverns, interspersed with the bones of a titanic, world-ending dragon that seems to have died down here and become a part of the mountain. There is a powerful, radiating magic in the air causing it to carry a consistent, pseudo-electrical charge.Something squeaked nearby.
Blibli turned, her mass rippling with the movement as her attention was immediately refocused. The rat stood a few feet away, its eyes reflecting the faint magical glow. It stared at her. She stared back.
"Friend!"
She dived.
The rat tried to run, but there was nowhere to go. Blibli's body enveloped it completely, her acidic mass closing around the tiny creature. It dissolved in seconds, its bones softening and breaking apart, its flesh melting into nutrients that spread throughout its gelatinous form.
She absorbed it fully and felt satisfied with that.
The rat's skull floated inside her, bobbing gently in her translucent mass.
Hours passed, though Blibli had no real sense of how many.
She'd explored the massive chamber thoroughly, flowing over ancient bones and through gaps in the skull's structure. She'd found the spine, each vertebra larger than the treasure room. She'd found the ribs, arching overhead at a scale larger than the dungeon's black stone gate. She'd found where the neck met the body and where the body disappeared into solid stone. It must be very old. It looked like the stone and the bone were simply inseparable in places, as if one had melded into the other over many, many years.
Eventually, she found her way back to the crack she'd entered through and began the long journey upward.
The dungeon was in chaos.
Goblins ran in every direction, their usual organisation completely abandoned. Workers dropped their tools and scattered as a massive draconic figure tore through the corridors, her red eyes blazing with frantic energy. Extremely unhelpful lizardmen, in the frenzy, hissed and clashed with each other, having become fully overstimulated and violent. It looked like a civil war had broken out inside of the dragon's dungeon.
Barjuchne crashed through a storage chamber, sending crates flying. They smashed against the walls, their contents scattering. Whelps pounced after the objects, their hunting instincts triggered by movement. It was anarchy. "Where is she?!"
A goblin fell to his knees, his hands raised in supplication. "We don't know, fearsome queen! We've searched everywhere!"
The dragon scowled, her eyes blazing red as she picked up the goblin by his garments, her teeth bared. "Search again! I can smell her! She's here somewhere!" She pulled him closer. "If you don't find her, I'll eat every last one of you alive," she promised.
Veliah appeared from a side tunnel and wove through the madness, her expression worried. She quickly grabbed the dragon's wrist with both hands. "Barjuchne, please, you need to -"
Barjuchne dropped the goblin in response to Veliah's squeeze. He fell and scrambled like a rabbit that had somehow escaped the clutches of a flying hawk mid-soar. "I'm not stopping until I find her!" yelled the dragon.
Veliah winced, recoiling at the volume of it and the ferocity of the tone. But then stood straight up. "Hey," she said firmly, making it clear she wasn't afraid of the dragon as she held eye contact with her. The elf pulled on her arm. "Don't raise your voice at me. You're not helping."
The dragon's tail lashed out, striking the wall and leaving deep gouges in the stone. The mountain shook, bricks falling from the ceiling. But she controlled herself, for Veliah's sake. Her gaze relented. "I'm sorry. But she's been gone for hours, Veliah. What if something happened? What if some adventurer stole her, or she dried out somewhere, or got stuck, or -"
A cheerful voice cut through the panic. "Hello!"
Everyone froze.
Blibli oozed up from a crack in the floor near the centre of the chamber, her translucent body reforming into its usual puddle shape. She wobbled once, settling into place, then looked around at the assembled crowd with innocent confusion.
"What's happening?" asked the slime princess, her googly eyes looking around in confusion.
Barjuchne moved faster than should have been possible for something her size. She dropped to her knees and grabbed the slime princess, pulling her free of the crack with both hands. "Blibli! I was looking everywhere for you!"
"We," corrects Veliah, rolling her eyes.
Blibli found herself suddenly pressed against a scaled chest and arms, surrounded by warmth and the rapid hammering of a dragon's heart. She blinked, confused but not unhappy.
"I like hugs!" she said.
Barjuchne pulled back, her claws settling on Blibli's shoulders. Her eyes blazed with mixed relief and anger. "Where did you run off to? I was worried. You just vanished."
Blibli stared at her for a moment, processing the question.
Then she lit up.
"I found a present!" She reached into her own mass, her pseudopod diving deep into her translucent body. After a moment of rummaging, she pulled out the rat skull. It was perfectly preserved, cleaned and bleached completely by her acidic form. She held it up to Barjuchne with obvious pride. "For you!"
The dragon girl looked at the little rat skull. Then at Blibli. Then back at the skull.
Around them, goblins slowly began to relax. Veliah let out a long breath.
Blibli's glow dimmed slightly. "...Don't you like it?" Then she brightened again, bouncing with sudden enthusiasm. "There was also a really big one too! Really big! Do you want me to show you that instead? It was really-really big! The biggest!"
Barjuchne sighed, a long, tired exhalation that carried weeks' worth of stress in a single breath. She rose to her feet, pulling Blibli up with her. "Thank you," she said quietly, taking the skull with one hand. She leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss to Blibli's forehead, right between her wobbling eyes. "For this treasure."
[HOARD UPDATE]1x [Rat Skull] has been added to your hoard.Total Hoard Value: 788,990 ObolsBlibli giggled, the sound bubbling up from somewhere deep in her core. Barjuchne picked her up properly, cradling the slime princess against her chest. "This one is already perfect. Let's get you washed up. Where the hell did you get into?"
"I was where the rats live!" Blibli replied cheerfully, wrapping herself around the dragon's arms and shoulders.
"Uh huh." Barjuchne turned and walked toward the hot springs, her tail dragging behind her. The assembled goblins parted to let her pass, relief evident on every face. The lizardmen scurried up and into the walls, returning into their alcove passageways.
Blibli settled contentedly into the embrace, her mass rippling with happiness. She'd had a wonderful adventure. Everything was perfect.
Behind them, Rou-ya picked up her dropped documents and shook her head slowly. "...We have rats?” she asked, looking at Veliah.
The elf shrugged.