Preparation for my first grand expedition as Ashfall’s Dungeon Mistress lasted fifteen minutes, which sounded impressive until I realized most of those fifteen minutes consisted of Lyra finding two waterskins, enough dried meat and bread for the day, a battered leather pack, and a weapon that didn’t look as though it would disintegrate the moment I hit something with it.
"Do we have horses?" I asked while Lyra tightened the straps on my pack.
Her hands stopped moving, and the silence stretched long enough for me to remember the thirteen silver and forty-two copper sitting inside Ashfall’s treasury.
"Right... we’re fucking broke."
Lyra offered me an apologetic smile before handing over a short iron sword in a worn leather sheath. It wasn’t particularly impressive, but considering my Strength was seven and I had absolutely no idea how to use a sword, giving me anything better probably qualified as wasting resources.
Seraphina had received considerably better treatment. She stood near Ashfall’s entrance wearing dark trousers, sturdy leather boots, and a fitted gray tunic Lyra had somehow found among the dungeon’s remaining supplies. A longsword rested against her hip, and while the weapon had several scratches along its guard, Seraphina carried it as if it weighed as much as a piece of paper.
I stared at her sword before looking down at mine. "Favoritism."
"Competence," Seraphina corrected, adjusting the belt around her waist. "You nearly fell over the first time you cast that flame."
"I can cast magic, and that happened once."
"Yesterday."
The smug curve of her lips made me seriously consider testing whether Blighted Radiance could singe eyebrows without killing someone, but Lyra saved Seraphina’s face by stepping between us.
"Please remember what I told you, my Lady," Lyra said, her earlier amusement disappearing beneath genuine concern. "If the Core Bond begins causing pain or severe fatigue, return immediately. We don’t know what effect prolonged separation might have while your bond remains incomplete."
"I’ll be careful," I promised, although the doubtful look Lyra gave me suggested she’d already learned enough about me to recognize how little that promise was worth.
Leaving Ashfall felt strangely anticlimactic. I stepped beyond the weathered stone entrance, walked another ten paces down the narrow trail, then stopped and pressed a hand against my chest.
Nothing hurt.
My heart wasn’t exploding, my mana hadn’t vanished, and the Dungeon Core wasn’t dragging me backward through some invisible magical leash, so I took another ten steps while paying close attention to every sensation in my body.
"Are you going to do that the entire way?" Seraphina asked from behind me.
"I’m establishing a baseline."
"You’re counting your steps."
I glanced over my shoulder and gave her my most serious expression. "That’s how science works."
Seraphina’s mouth opened before slowly closing again. She shook her head and walked past me without another word, leaving me grinning as I hurried after her.
The Demon Frontier I’d described across hundreds of Chapters looked very different when I had to walk through the fucking thing.
Calling it a wasteland had been convenient while sitting behind a keyboard. In reality, the land surrounding Ashfall was very much alive, just not in a particularly welcoming way.
Black-barked trees twisted upward from patches of gray soil, their crooked branches supporting clusters of dark violet leaves that whispered whenever the cold wind pushed through them.
Thick crimson moss crawled across boulders beside the trail, while tiny silver insects scattered beneath our boots whenever we disturbed the undergrowth.
A massive shadow suddenly swept across the ground, swallowing both of us for several seconds before disappearing into the trees.
I instinctively looked upward and caught sight of something enormous gliding between the clouds, its leathery wings wide enough that I couldn’t immediately tell how high above us it actually was.
"What the fuck was that?" I asked, quickening my pace until I was beside Seraphina.
She glanced upward with considerably less concern than I thought the situation deserved. "Probably a Razorwing."
"Probably?"
"There are larger things."
I stared at her for a moment before moving slightly closer.
Past Me had spent an alarming amount of time inventing creatures Present Me wanted absolutely nothing to do with.
The route itself wasn’t helping. I remembered describing the ancient burial site as being east of Ashfall, beyond Blackroot Ravine and somewhere near the remains of an old imperial road. At the time, that had sounded like perfectly acceptable geography.
Now I was standing in several hundred square miles of hostile wilderness with no map.
’Past Me decided "east" was a fucking map. I want to strangle her.’
Fortunately, Seraphina knew the region better than I did. She recognized my description of Blackroot Ravine and redirected us southeast toward a narrow game trail that cut between the trees, occasionally pointing out landmarks that meant absolutely nothing to me but proved this world contained considerably more detail than anything I’d put on the page.
About forty minutes after leaving Ashfall, a faint pressure began developing behind my sternum.
I slowed as the sensation strengthened, pressing my palm to my chest and focusing on it.
There wasn’t any pain, but something inside me felt stretched, almost like an invisible thread connected to my body was being pulled tighter with every step I took away from the dungeon.
More strangely, when I turned around, I knew exactly where Ashfall was despite the dense forest completely blocking it from view.
"Something wrong?" Seraphina asked, immediately noticing that I’d stopped.
"The Core. I can feel it pulling toward Ashfall, but it doesn’t hurt." I took several more seconds to examine the sensation before lowering my hand. "It’s actually kind of strange. I know exactly which direction home is."
A translucent message materialized in front of me before Seraphina could respond.
[CORE BOND]
[Distance from Dungeon Core is increasing.]
[Bond Stability: Stable.]
[Warning: Extended distance may weaken Core functions available to Dungeon Mistress.]
Stable was good enough for me, and the fact that I could still feel Ashfall from this distance eased some of my concern about leaving it behind. If anything changed dramatically, I hoped the connection would give me enough warning to turn around before my mysterious magical bond decided to kill me.
We continued east until the forest gradually thinned into a rocky stretch of uneven ground where shattered stone pillars protruded from the earth.
Several were covered in vines, while others had been split apart by thick roots that had spent centuries forcing their way through the masonry.
I didn’t remember writing any of this.
Seraphina explained that the ruins belonged to an old border settlement destroyed during one of the wars between humans and demons nearly three centuries ago. She even knew the settlement’s name, although I’d never heard it before in my life.
That bothered me more than I expected.
I had probably written something stupid like ancient ruins littered the Demon Frontier before moving directly into Roland killing whatever monster I’d placed nearby.
Yet someone had built these homes. People had lived here, raised families, fought in a war, and died centuries before the first Chapter of my novel was ever supposed to begin.
I hadn’t written any of them.
A guttural snarl tore through the ruins before I could follow that uncomfortable thought any further.
Seraphina’s hand snapped toward her sword as a four-legged creature lunged from behind a collapsed wall.
Its muscular body was covered in coarse black fur, six yellow eyes lined its elongated skull, and two curved tusks protruded from its lower jaw as it charged directly toward us.
I stumbled backward and forced mana into my palm. Black-gold fire sputtered across my fingers as Blighted Radiance answered my call, and excitement surged through me when the flame formed without nearly knocking me on my ass.
"Got it!"
Seraphina moved before I could fire.
Her longsword hissed free of its sheath as she stepped into the creature’s charge, twisting her entire body through a single vicious swing. Steel flashed through the air, dark blood sprayed across the broken stones, and the monster’s momentum carried its headless body several feet before it collapsed.
Its head landed somewhere behind me.
My Blighted Radiance continued burning uselessly around my hand while I stared at the corpse, then slowly turned toward Seraphina.
"I was going to help."
"You did," she replied, flicking the blood from her blade with a practiced snap of her wrist.
My eyebrows rose. "How?"
"You carried the food."
The satisfied little smile she gave me made my eyes twitch. "You’re becoming significantly more annoying now that you aren’t dying."
"I feel significantly better now that I’m not dying."
I couldn’t argue with that, so I extinguished the flame and approached the monster instead. Those tusks looked valuable, its hide was thick, and most of its teeth were still intact. If monster parts worked anything as they did in every fantasy economy I’d ever written, somebody somewhere would probably pay for at least part of it.
"Could we sell this?"
Seraphina stared at me as though I’d asked whether we should invite it to dinner. "It’s a corpse."
"It’s an asset."
Her gaze dropped toward my feet before one eyebrow slowly rose. "It’s bleeding on your boot."
I glanced down and discovered a dark stream creeping toward the edge of my leather boot. I immediately shuffled sideways before looking back at the corpse with considerably less enthusiasm. "An inconveniently positioned asset."
A short snort escaped Seraphina before she turned and continued down the trail. I reluctantly abandoned my first potential business venture and hurried after her, although I made a mental note to start learning which creatures around Ashfall were worth money.
If monsters were going to keep trying to kill me, I was damn well going to figure out which pieces of them I could sell afterward.
Nearly another hour passed before the ruins disappeared behind us and the trees grew dense enough to swallow the road again. Seraphina had been unusually quiet for several minutes, and I caught her glancing toward me twice before she finally released a slow breath.