"Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires." ― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

I'd taken a few minutes after my "conversation" with the dracolisk to let my temper subside. I didn't recall having a particularly fiery temperament in my old world, so I was reasonably confident that my dungeon instincts had been triggered by the direct threats offered by a being who wouldn't be able to readily follow through on them.

Distracting myself with books had always been a successful strategy, and since it seemed like rubbing salt in the wound to start pushing my domain coreward before the dracolisk had even left the area, I returned my attention to my library/core room. The spectral librarian was hovering above the oaken table above my core; I wasn't sure if there was a reason for that, or if it was simply keeping itself in the densest mana flows in the area. In any event, I gave it a standing order to take up a position on the chair nearest to the reader, rather than hovering above the table itself. It wasn't really substantial enough to SIT on the chair, exactly, but it didn't need to be a marker for my core, either.

Having waved off the librarian a bit peevishly still. I decided to settle my core by transcribing another book or two. I started by finishing the transcription of The Hobbit, which gave me vague feelings of nostalgia for a father I could no longer remember, then moved on to The Silmarillion, which I got the sense I'd read rather later and with less immediate enjoyment. By the time I'd worked my way through the Fall of Númenor and the fates of the Rings of Power my anger had largely abated, leaving me to wonder how much of my reaction had been my aversion to being ordered around and how much was attributable to a generalized dungeon bloodlust.

Still, having settled down, I left the librarian to upload and shelve the new books, and I returned my attention to the wizard's cat, still loitering near the food and water I'd left it by the puzzle door the void dwarves had left behind. It was awake and immediately aware of my attention, but still reluctant to enter the hall where I'd confronted the dracolisk. That was fine, I decided, as I meant to continue expanding my domain along the service passageway following the conduit.

I'd made some progress in my coreward march already, but I estimated that I still had at least twice as far yet to go to make it to the center line of the island. I was essentially claiming the entire tunnel, with the exception of the conduit itself, but that wasn't terribly large – just enough for a large dwarf to move down while carrying some tools – a little more than a meter and a half in a square cross-section. The conduit took up space along the left wall (as I headed inward), or it would have been more like 2 meters wide, really.

I'd claimed and traversed perhaps another 125 meters along the path before I encountered another trapdoor built into the ceiling and marked by the remnants of some corroded metal ladder in the wall. The tunnel continued straight, but not having found anything of note, I determined to claim up through the trapdoor just to see where it led.

That turned out to be one of the better decisions I'd made recently, or at least one of the luckier ones, as the trapdoor opened out onto a larger open hall that appeared to connect to another cavern. I couldn't tell how large it was until I'd claimed into it without some creature to act as my eyes. I could spawn something in, but this seemed like a situation suitable for the wizard's cat to resume its duties.

I returned my attention to the cat, nudging it with the promise of treats (in the form of kippered herring) to dart across the hallway and into the trapdoor leading to the tunnel. I'd been able to convey that the dracolisk was definitely not present, and that went a good way towards convincing the now somewhat nervous cat.

Sealing both doors shut behind it, I had the cat sauntering down the tunnel to the leading edge of my domain within a few minutes. The cat emerged from the tunnel into the larger hall and paused to clean itself rather delicately, having not been a fan of climbing the corroded metal ladder, but not quite able to make the leap without doing so and unable to take flight in the narrow tunnel. It did, at least, have the sense to engage its stealth powers before doing so, though I had yet to note anything moving through my domain, as far as it extended.

I was beginning to get the sense that I needed to go back and continue filling in my main dungeon area; this expansion was beginning to feel a bit tenuous and the demand on my mana pool to continue extending this pseudopod of my domain was beginning to feel distinctly noticeable. Still, I was determined to at least see what was in the cavern ahead through the cat's glowing green eyes.

It took its time grooming, but it really only felt like a long time because I was impatient, and soon enough it was creeping carefully along the pathway to the cavern ahead. Behind it, the hall extended another 50 meters or so, before stopping at an apparent dead end. I suspected there was a door of some sort over there too, but it would have to go on my list of things to worry about later.

That seemed to be getting longer on a daily basis, and pretty soon I got the sense I'd need to turn it into an actual list, and not just a metaphorical one. I halted my musings along those lines as the cat finally crept up to the entrance of the cavern, right where I'd halted the advance of my domain. Having learned a lesson in caution from our last exploratory adventure, the cat slunk through the entrance, but immediately paused, just left of the entrance to take stock of the situation.

A few things struck us immediately, the cat and I both. It was dark – really dark. We'd been traversing tunnels lit only by the cat's eyes and whatever glow was given off in the visible spectrum by the mana conduit, which wasn't much. This room was darker yet, as though something was actively absorbing the low light shed by the cat's spectral green eyes. There were some specks of silvery light spread across the floor, but that too seemed to be absorbed, and once you raised your eyes more than a foot or two off the floor, the darkness was nearly absolute. The dark itself didn't bother me, or even the cat, but the active absorption of light – THAT was concerning...

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Sharing our mana sight, our eyes were immediately drawn to a mass of void energy swirling in a mass near the center of the chamber, appearing almost as a photo negative version of a sun as it hovered within a finely wrought cage of some shimmering magical metal, dangling like a lantern from the upraised hand of a statue. In the cat's more basic darkvision, the cage seemed to hold a rather simple looking sphere of some dark stone – I'd call it jet, or possibly onyx, but all I could really say was that it didn't seem glassy enough to be obsidian, rather it had a dull, matte luster to it.

The statue itself was rather disturbing. I hadn't given much thought to what a void-aspected dwarf might look like, but I had the sense that I had just found out. It was a rather rough-hewn thing, shaped from a dark basaltic stone. If it DID represent one of the original dwarves, either they weren't dwarven in stature or it was about twice life size. I leaned towards the latter interpretation, given the dimensions of the tunnels we'd been following. It was, roughly speaking, dwarven in proportions – stocky and broad shouldered. From there, it rather diverged from what I'd seen of other dwarves in Relnis. There was no beard, as near as I could tell, or any hair at all for that matter – there were also no eyes, though long, rounded ears and a broad, flat nose were traced out loosely in the carved stone. The head rose above the prominent, broad nose in a smooth, dome-like fashion, while below it a thin-lipped mouth with teeth bared in a rictus grin snarled towards the entrance. The torso, mercifully enough, was covered by the flowing robe carved onto it, though the fingers clutching the lantern had an alarmingly tentacular flexibility to them.

As we tore our eyes away from the dramatic figure, structures defining the five corners of the chamber came back into focus. The angles seemed a bit off, though hardly the sort of eldritch, non-Euclidean geometry favored by Lovecraft in his Cthulhu mythos. I suppose I was more accustomed to four sided structures, and these had five; two walls of each structure abutted the corners of the pentagonal chamber, and three additional walls slanted out, with a central door in the outermost face. There were no windows, and not much effort put into the aesthetics of these buildings. They had a vaguely brutalist feel to me, offset by runic inscriptions crawling up the door jambs and across the lintels before slanting upwards to meet the roofline at the corners. They gave the impression that the buildings had been chained into place with runic inscriptions, or perhaps served as anchors for some larger enchantment. The runes were not familiar to me from my reading, though I did note some similarities to what I had assumed were decorative elements on the glowing axe in the gnomish museum. As the cat edged forward, we noted that those runes extended from each doorway to flank a path towards the central statue where they shaped out a pentagonal dais to the statue proper.

In the spaces between the structures and their paths, a low carpet of dark fungus blanketed the shallow earthen substrate. They were somewhat slimy looking and delicate, akin to a rehydrated wood-ear fungus, but blacker and with silvery motes of light glinting from within their depths. I extended my domain into the room just far enough to absorb one.

Blueprint acquired: Light-of-distant-stars fungus

The name was rather romantic sounding, but as the cat gazed around nervously, I understood where the name was coming from – those silvery motes in the fungus were bioluminescent light sources, but so very faint that darkvision was still required. In mana sight, the fungus was eerier, clearly absorbing void mana from the lantern stone, and emitting a faint celestial aura from those silver specks.

The cat began slowly edging towards the nearest structure, but as soon as it placed a paw on one of the paths outlined by runes, they began to light up -- if you could call it that. Really, they began emitting void mana, and there was no visible light. If anything, the exceedingly dim starlight radiating from the fungal beds was drawn in, and canceled, giving the runes the impression of a devouring darkness. Even more concerning, a fluttering, sibilant noise came from above, and the horrified cat glanced upward briefly, noting a mass of mobile darkness detaching from the ceiling, and breaking into component units.

At first, I assumed they were bats of some kind, but as they separated, it became clear that wasn't the case. They were, vaguely, bat-sized and bat-shaped, but that was all that could be said. They were rather undifferentiated creatures, more like the shadow of a bat than of a bat themselves. As we watched in rising concern, I saw the swirling creatures appear to pass through each other, suggesting a not-entirely tangible nature. Eerily, they made no sound themselves, the noise coming simply from the movement of air as their pitch-dark wings beat against it. That suggested at least some material aspect, I thought. They began to form up into a vortex of movement, wheeling down like a tornado from a funnel cloud, tracing their way across the chamber toward where the wizard's cat was realizing exactly what had happened, and what was likely about to happen.

It required no prompting to race back the way it had come, diving for the trapdoor I'd left open – if not for this precise eventuality, then at least in preparation for an emergency of some sort. I slammed the door shut moments before the void creatures, whatever they had been, could reach the cat. The cat and I froze for an instant, waiting to see whether the creatures were solid enough for a stone door to stop them.

I wasn't entirely sure that they were, but they were in my domain now, which gave me some additional options. I was tempted to experiment with a variety of forms of violence, if only to discover just how tangible they might be; I suspected that physical violence was likely to be ineffectual, but more magical forms had potential.

As it happened, that was not necessary. As the creatures swirled above the trapdoor, in preparation for what I was not sure, I flexed my aura, attempting to convey a fraction of the presence that May showed, when she cared to, dialed into an ominous threat of death and devouring. That seemed to startle and concern them, though I wouldn't claim to be able to read their emotions, if they had them. Regardless, they swirled briefly above the trapdoor, but rapidly the component members began to defect, falling away from the main vortex and heading back to their chamber.

I was unclear if they were part of the room's formal defenses or simply had been startled into action when the runes activated. They could be feral pets for void dwarves, for all I knew, or some kind of household pest, or even a kind of resource to be raised and exploited. I suspected we might never know for sure. So much about that room remained open to interpretation that I knew I'd be back – though I didn't hold out much hope for the active participation of my cat.

He was still hunched in on himself in the access tunnel, eyes rolling a bit wildly, and the fur on his back raised. A nearly inaudible hiss emerged from deep in his chest. Then, sensing my return and my assurances of his safety, he let out a ripping yowl and fled back in the direction from which he had come.

I sighed internally, and decided this was as good a time as any to go back to the main dungeon and begin work on a third floor. I didn't have any really concrete ideas, as yet, but I could at least start claiming the space I'd need and improve my mana flow.

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