The Heart Grows

The fascination Northridge had for the dragon dungeon was akin to a scientifically minded teenager with an ant colony. While it still held back the mild horror that the ants could very well swarm and hurt it, the city was careful not to disturb them.

Its own workers were building a new protective tower around the dungeon entrance, which while concerning to its pre-awakened self, Northridge could recognize as essential to defending what had probably cost the dungeon significant resources.

Northridge had significant resources itself, though all it could do was track them. It couldn't force its minions to do particular things, but it could nudge them. But, for the moment, it observed and studied—learning how its own economy functioned. The biggest thing it learned was there was a huge pile of gold in the one big building owned by the dungeon. That gold slowly seeped out into the hands of workers, merchants, and even the guards that tended its own walls.

And, when resources flowed into that dungeon, more of the gold flowed out of the dungeon's building. It wasn't a hard cause-and-effect to follow. Northridge, like all genius loci cities, was intensely interested in trade, and trade was what this dungeon seemed to breathe. Giving the builders and guards working on the new tower some boosts, it noticed something new.

A kobold had left the dungeon and was conversing with the workers. Instincts were strong, and like with the dungeon's boss it felt the aching desire to drive the kobold away—but it recognized them. Checking its desire to cause them anguish, Northridge did what it could to send aid to Tannyr. Though it couldn't boost her directly, it did send all the encouragement it could to its workers.

Tannyr, having learned what it felt like to have the genius loci's attention when she'd lived in Northridge, was dreading being anywhere near the city again. But she felt the lightest touch before it was gone, and the workers she'd been talking to about aligning a wall extension with the city practically glowed. "Are you feeling okay?"

"Great. Better than ever, actually," one of the workers said.

"Reminds me of working on the new outer wall at the capital. Do you think Northridge's loci has evolved?" another asked.

"Couldn't have," the first replied. "It's nowhere near big enough."

It ran through Tannyr's mind that the city might have evolved. "I need to check something." Leaving the workers looking a little surprised at her capriciousness, she headed over to the dungeon entrance in the middle of the growing ward. The moment she was inside she felt warmth and support. "Trav?"

"What's up? How are the walls going?" Travis asked.

"About as well as can be expected—Wait, no. They're going fast, actually, and that's what I want to talk about. You know how cities form a genius loci when the dungeons around them quicken?"

The language was thick with recently acquired words, but Travis worked his way through it. "Yeah. You said it doesn't like you very much."

"It hates—hated—me. That's the thing. The work is going faster than it should, and when I felt the city's touch just now, it wasn't angry at me. The guys up there thought it might have evolved, but it's way too early for that."

"What do you mean, 'evolved'?" Travis asked.

"Oh. Sometimes it's easy to forget you don't know all this. As cities get bigger, they evolve. At first they're barely even noticeable—I guess unless you're a monster trying to live there. Then, when they have a few thousand people in them, they evolve. Get smarter. You'll start to notice them affecting people working around the city with magic. It raises the morale of the whole city and makes them better at defending against dungeon attacks and—worse things."

"What's worse than disease-carrying goblins?"

"We're not exactly the only kingdom, Trav. It's peaceful here only because there is a sizable army ready to meet invasions." Prodding the wall of the dungeon with one claw, Tannyr laughed. "If you ever want to feel like a small fry, Trav, consider what would happen if several hundred soldiers marched into you. It doesn't happen often, but the military has been called on to sanction some dungeons."

Travis shuddered, his heart literally shaking a little. "Okay, no more horror stories for this dungeon. So, the city's smarter now? More active?"

Nodding, Tannyr added, "It's helping them protect your entrance and it seemed to accept me without any antagonism. I think it might have learned that at least one dungeon isn't worth making an enemy out of."

"That's a relief. I wish I could, uh, talk to it. I mean, it would be nice to have someone else to complain to when all my kobolds are bullying me." Then it struck him that there was more to this. "So if the city isn't an enemy, and it's smarter, can it understand people? Could you talk to it?"

"A much older city, definitely. Northridge shouldn't even be conscious, though. It's too young even if it is. We'll have to give it time and be its friend until then."

"So we keep trading, help Northridge—the people—protect the city, and deal with threats like the undead dungeon for them. Thanks for explaining it, Tannyr."

"You're welcome, Travis." Stepping back out into the morning air, Tannyr gazed around. The workers were back at their tasks, marking stones that needed to be lifted to the wall and placed. A wall, she well knew, was a delicate act of using as little mortar as possible, since it weakened the wall overall, so stones were chosen such that they'd fit together as perfectly as possible with as little work required to the stone as possible. As a master mason, she could keep the shapes of hundreds of stones in her head and mentally rotate them to fit together better.

"What's it like?"

The question, from one of the guards, caught Tannyr by surprise. "Being a kobold?" At the woman's nod, Tannyr shrugged her shoulders. "I see better in the dark than I did as a dwarf, I can dig through the ground like a hot knife through butter, and the sky still terrifies me a little. You get used to it, though." She recognized the weapon they were carrying. "I see you have one of the new rifles. How does it fire?"

The confusion over if Tannyr had asked how it worked or if it was operating well resolved in the guard's mind to the latter. "Straight and true. Whoever makes them, they're doing a great job."

Tannyr couldn't help but smirk at that. "You're looking at her."

It was weird news to bring, but Penelope was used to everything lately being sort of weird. "Brolly!" she called as she approached the palisade. "Are you awa—?"

"Yeah. Come on up. What word from Northridge?" Relaxing from his vigil, Brolly waited on the wall for Penelope to jump up.

"You can head back whenever you want. The strangest thing though, is my orders. It appears that the reason this damn hole kept attacking us is that dungeons gain resources for delving each floor of an enemy dungeon. Now Trav's happy about what our work here has gotten, and he's willing to give this damned hole a reprieve—just so we can do this again. Also, we got approval to sanction it if we need to." It still surprised her that they had got that permission, but hearing Travis rant about how much resources they had helped confirm in her mind that they probably shouldn't.

"So you will?"

"No, but we are going to make delving into this place a regular thing. Also, now we know how they got all the resources to keep building up, we're going to have to make the forest entrance a lot more deadly. Sorry about that." Looking over the top of the palisade, Penelope eyed the entrance of the dungeon.

"Are the resources really that good? Also, don't sweat making that entrance a deathtrap, put up a warning sign, though." Standing up, Brolly stretched and looked around to ensure his guards were in their right locations. "Gather up! We'll be moving out in ten minutes!"

"It's an almost-free resource. We'd be fighting this place's minions anyway, so this way we get a lot of pay for the work. Besides, I think Fife would get bored." Vaulting over the wall, Penelope landed in the no-man's-land in the middle. "Good luck on the march home!"

"And same to you on reaching the bottom." With a good salute given, Brolly turned to his guards and set about getting them moving. "Oh, I just about forgot about you two." He looked at Brayden and Kelvin. "You're welcome to come back to Northridge with us, then use the second entrance there to get home."

Looking back at the entrance of the dungeon, and then to the city guards, Brayden nodded. "It would be safer. I have a bad feeling about something. Like the wind just changed and a storm is coming."

"You feel that too?" Kelvin was a little surprised to find the young (to him) priest matching his own thoughts to words. "My hand won't stop reaching for my spear."

Brayden felt a sobering shock at the old former elf's words. "Should we go with them? We'd be a bigger target."

"Let's run. Two kobolds can be harder to find and stop than a squad of soldiers."

The soldiers, Brayden knew, all had their own talismans. They could fight to the last man and still wake up in time for dinner. "Yeah." Raising his voice, Brayden said, "I think it would be faster if we ran back to the forest entrance. Keep an eye out for trouble, Brolly."

"You too. Okay, let's move!"

The more the pair ran, the more they felt urgency to get back to their dungeon. Brayden counted his strides, lengthening them as much as he dared without risking tripping in the undergrowth.

It didn't take Penelope long to run to the bottom of the dungeon—13 floors down. Her gait combined with a complete disdain for the few weakling undead that were back-spawning let her breeze through each floor until she found her friends at the bottom—with their backs to a giant crystal. "You found it, then?"

"Yup. How'd you find us?" Fife asked, reaching a claw out and tapping the anemic heart.

Laughing, Penelope stepped over the body of the undead lord and approached the glowing green crystal. "You left a trail of corpses, Fife. Oh, Felna, did you try linking to the core?"

"Not if we're going to be destroying it," Felna replied. "I don't want to know what that feels like."

"So!" Katelyn tapped her staff on the floor a few times to get attention. "Are we breaking this thing?"

"Nope." Penelope explained the situation with resources and farming dungeons, and tried to leave out the implication that it was exactly what the undead dungeon had done to Travis. "But," she said, moving on to keep her compatriots off balance, "we have permission to, if we want to. Word came back that Travis may destroy this thing if he wants."

Fife couldn't help herself—she was grinning from one side of her face to the other and showing off all her teeth. "You hear that, big guy?" Tapping her shield gently on the heart, she leaned a little closer. "You and me are going to spend a loooooot of quality time together. I bet your boss is going to invent a way to talk just so he can swear at me. You know, maybe I should get a second bedroom dug out in here?"

"Alright, alright. Let the poor thing be, Fife. Brayden and Kelvin were heading back home, now it's our turn. I expect the dungeon won't bother trying to stop us, but let's keep our eyes peeled in case it tries some kind of crap. I'll take point, Fife at the rear. Form up when you're ready." Drawing her swords, Penelope felt excitement boil up inside her. Even if most of the dungeon's attackers would be behind them, she hoped to run into something that she'd be able to slice up.

Moving up behind Penelope, Ogmera appreciated the sickly green glow of the swords that somehow outshone even her own alchemical light. Extending her will, she wove her magic around Penelope in a way that would make doing battle with her a comedy of errors. A dozen little bad luck charms woven together, tumbling over each other to find purchase on anything that would seek to slow the half dragon down. "Don't slow down for anything. They'll have trouble hitting you—just kill and move. Let Nathaniel heal you after the encounters."

"He can heal while moving?" The magic covering her felt a little odd to Penelope, but she trusted Ogmera to know what she was about.

"He can. Clever lad. Felna! You have Fife. Nath, up here behind this behemoth." Winking at Penelope, Ogmera stepped back to the middle of their group.

Regretting only that she hadn't killed more than a few in her dash down through the dungeon, Penelope aimed herself to the tunnel that led back to the stairs to the next floor up. "Are we ready?" She waited for a series of affirmatives before she started her march.

In the first ten floors up from the heart, there was the odd skeleton, but nothing that so much as got in the way of her swords. Several she pushed down and simply stomped on to kill. A mere three floors before the surface she paused and called out, "Anything behind us, Fife?"

"Nope! If I didn't know any better, I'd say the dungeon wants us out of here as fast as we can go."

"Rejected so soon, Fife?" Katelyn asked. "Will your heart recover?"

"Don't worry, Kate, I'll be back in a week to say hello again."

The tunnels, Penelope had noticed, were fairly basic, despite the atmosphere being a little creepy. She spotted a skeleton turn the corner at the end of the current tunnel and look her in the eyes before turning back around.

Setting off again, she took the stairs two at a time to get to the fourth floor—where she stopped. In the darkness her eyes could pierce was a group of heavily armored soldiers with large shields and spears. "Kate, get your ass up here. I'm no expert, but are they—?"

Cutting Penelope off with the answer, Katelyn stared at the big men in armor advancing on them. "Balavian knights. What are they doing in here? Uh, they're going to attack us. They'll think we're monsters."

"Hey! You lot! This is our dungeon!" Ogmera stepped up beside Penelope, using a hand to push the mountain of a boss not a single bit. "We're sanctioned to delve it by the local—" A stabbing pain in her shoulder shocked Ogmera. She hadn't seen the crossbowman before they'd fired, but now she could see two more lining up on her. "Fffff—"

Spotting the blood on Ogmera's face, Nathaniel pulled her behind Penelope and focused on her with his healing magic, begging his god for aid while he pulled the bolt from her right side.

"Fife! Up here!" Penelope glared at the soldiers, flinching when two more crossbow strings sang their death song. One was off key, though, and broke before sending its bolt tumbling in a rough arc against the left wall, the other slipped off its bolt and never did more than signal the bowman's intent.

Gritting her teeth as she passed Ogmera, leaving the woman's care to their clerics, Fife walked past Penelope and brought her shield up. "Seems to me like you bastards should buy a lady dinner before—" Two crossbow bolts hit her shield and the third her cheek. Fife could feel a bruise there but her flesh held against the barbed bolt-head. "Well, now you've pissed me off. Light 'em up while I go make a pain of myself."

The next line of crossbowmen had swapped up to stand behind the armored troops and were trying to sight around Fife, but her aggression drew their fire. At such close range, one of the bolts actually grazed her weapon arm, but her own effect on their front line was far more effective. Against her old self, the soldiers might have grunted and been forced to shove back against her shield, but with the power of a boss monster and with her own dungeon's boss right behind her, Fife crashed into the first soldier, knocked him down, and stomped on his face with her talons as she worked her momentum into the second.

Pillars of fire almost ruined Penelope's vision as she reached the line of soldiers beside Fife. Her friend was savage with her shield and claws, but her sword was mostly spending its time parrying spears away. Penelope hit the first spear poked her way so hard the haft was pulled from the soldier's grip and she managed to get close to him. He checked her first swipe with his shield, but when she bit down on the top edge of it to hold it steady he had nothing to stop her other blade with. "Talk to me, Fife!"

"I'm a bit busy, Pen. How are our mages doing?" Snapping her own teeth at a soldier to make him bring his shield up, she drove one talon down onto his booted foot and tightened her grip down into his flesh. "Did someone tell these guys who we are? Why did they attack?"

Penelope saw the danger first. She opened her mouth and shouted, but the line of soldiers opened up before them and the light ballista, with a bolt as thick around as Penelope's arm, fired. Fife, who always seemed so solid and unmovable, flew back as the weapon caught her in the chest. It pierced clear through her shield, through her armor, and the head dented the rear plates.

Snarling in shock, and noticing the incendiary show had paused, Penelope took a deep breath and exhaled her most potent magic. Finally, the enemy soldiers started doing more than snarling and grunting at her attacks—they screamed. The acid burned through flesh faster than armor, but when it got caught between the former and the latter she knew it would be doing its worst work.

The ballista's crew ran screaming, as did several rows of the heavy troops and crossbowmen. Penelope had a moment of relief to feel like they'd managed something when she saw two more of the siege weapons armed and aimed toward her down the tunnel. "Sh—"

One of the weapons fouled by the grace of Ogmera's spell. The other didn't.

The pain of the hit drove all thought from Penelope's head for a few moments. She was a wounded monster and flew into a rage. The only thing that remained in her red-drenched brain was that her allies were behind her.

Fife was staring at the ceiling of the tunnel. She tried to complain about the pain in her chest, but when she exhaled she only felt bubbles coming from the back of her throat. She wanted to swear. She wanted to tell her friends to burn the enemy until ash remained. She wanted to get up and keep fighting, but instead she died.

Travis was surprised when Fife appeared. After listening to her swearing for far too long, he saw Katelyn appear. The only problem was they both appeared with timers, and both were merely floating presences. "Uh, what's going on?"

Her mind processing her death, Katelyn tried to single out the important things. "Are Brayden and Kelvin back yet?"

"No. What's going on?!" Travis was frantic now, particularly when Penelope appeared next.

"There were soldiers attacking the dungeon—not from our kingdom. They were from the Balavian Empire." Katelyn's mind raced as she tried to make sense of it. "They shouldn't be here. This is—"

"It's the start of a fucking invasion!" Fife was finally done with her tirade. "Those weren't mercenaries. The Empire doesn't do mercenaries. The only legal profession there for fighting is in the military. Whatever they're doing here, it's with the backing of the whole Empire. You have to warn Northridge!"

Travis didn't want to. He fully liked the idea of getting all his kobolds back home, filling all the entrances with sludge traps, and then hiding until whatever was going on outside ended. But he couldn't. "Tannyr?"

Stretching and straightening from her bed, Tannyr had never been woken by Travis before and it immediately had her alert. "What's wrong?"

"Everything. Fife, Pen, and Kate—Now Wild too. They all just died and said the Balavian Empire soldiers attacked them in the undead dungeon. Fife thinks it's an invasion. I hate to ask you, but can you go to N—?"

"You don't have to ask that, Trav, because the answer is yes. Give me a second to grab my guns and I'll take the message to Northridge." Climbing swiftly from her bed, she grabbed the belt and holsters from her nightstand and the two pistols from the rack beside it. A powder horn and a bag of shot was next, along with one of her rifles.

Ludmiller had vanished when the last of her fellow kobolds had died. At her feet, Stratus, Tom, Felna, and Jack all lay with her own dagger marks in their chests. In a moment their bodies faded as the talismans triggered—and they were sent back to Northridge.

She didn't understand the language the soldiers used when they rushed forward and looked around for corpses, but she recognized what swearing was no matter the tongue. Between Fife and Penelope's blocking, their party's mages had done a real number on the attackers. There were charred corpses and wounded being tended to by the enemy far in excess of what a single delving team should have managed.

The Balvarian's didn't have any real magic to speak of, nor were they as forward thinking with machines and firearms as the kingdom was, but they certainly had a way with armor and training. Their tactics had been effective in the end, after all. She watched as two of the enemy looked around for any trace of their group, but either they couldn't sense her or they didn't know to look for a kobold that could be invisible in the dark.

A large woman stomped through the ranks of downed soldiers, past all the dead, and right up to the searchers. Her authority was plain to Ludmiller in her bearing and her willingness to bark orders. More soldiers started scurrying around and a new line of front-liners formed up and started heading deeper into the dungeon.

Ludmiller saw an opening. The soldiers were mostly facing the other way and their leader was two steps away. She could have gone for the kill and dealt with the woman—but right now it wouldn't matter. She kept pace with them as they walked deeper, floor by floor, only catching a few skeletons here or there. A pair of zombies slowed them for a moment, and soon they were in the heart room of the undead dungeon.

More orders were given by the woman, and huge men came forward with the biggest sledgehammers Ludmiller had ever seen. These weren't weapons for fighting people and they weren't tools for construction.

The first time one of the hammers came down on the glowing green heart, Ludmiller felt the dungeon scream around her.

Swing after swing, shriek after shriek. She'd never experienced a dungeon's anguished cries before, but Ludmiller found herself in tears as she moved carefully around the heart so she was beside it. So close, she could feel the air and magic compress with each blow of the black-headed hammers on the heart. Ludmiller, probably due to some aspect of her own bond with Travis, could feel when the dungeon heart was one strike from death.

Apparently, so could one of the soldiers—or he had enough experience at this task to know when to stop. The shout from the commander stopped one of the men mid-swing. He held his hammer back and ready while the commander came up and stood right beside Ludmiller.

There was fury boiling around the undead dungeon heart as it sensed its death was imminent. It hated these creatures, it hated them worse and more than it hated the others. The dragons were another dungeon, and practically kin, but these things were horrid and they wanted to kill it. They hurt it and hurt it, they killed the dragons. Now, as it watched their leader remove something from its neck, it felt a new horror.

Ludmiller didn't recognize what the thin chain the woman was unspooling was, but the tiny thing pulsed with some kind of magic of its own. She looked up at the dungeon heart and realized in that moment what the chain was for. Binding magic, sealing magic, controlling magic. The heart before her felt it too and begged for mercy—begged for death.

Field Captain Donna of the Balavian Empire was relieved something was going right. She'd lost more to that one odd fight than she'd expected the whole dungeon to have done. Recon had told her that this was undead, so they'd prepared with prayers and counters to death magic—what they'd gotten was dragons that seemed almost impossible to hurt and a group of heretic-mages that defied belief.

Now, though, her task would be complete. She measured up the sickly dungeon heart for its new adornment and was about to lay it down into the fissures the dead-iron hammers had made when a pair of scaled arms appeared beside her, two daggers extended and already sunk into the green dungeon heart.

Donna wasn't magic sensitive, but she didn't need to be to know the dungeon died. The heart crumbled to dust as the grinning kobold face flickered and then faded from view again. Screaming with her anger, she drew her sword and swung for where the body of the kobold should be, given its only possible escape route—and her weapon drank well.

Before Ludmiller could process the speed of the commander's attack, two crossbow bolts slammed into her and delivered her from the dungeon and back to Travis' care.

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This story is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. If you are paying money to see this or the original creator, Damaged, is not credited, you are viewing a plagiarized copy of the story.

And then everything changed—when the Balavian Empire attacked.