Broken Core

by Overline

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Alternate Universe
Length: 13416

What is dead can die again. Dawn faces challenges from without and within in his new form as a magical construct.

What is dead can die again. Dawn faces challenges from without and within in his new form as a magical construct.

Published 2018-01-22 06:00:06 UTC
Last updated 2018-01-23 21:28:52 UTC

Chapter 1

Jian’s work station was filled with murders. The smooth white orb covered with inscriptions, shattered in a corner. Copper coils sparking with electricity, twisted and bent out of shape on the floor. Dense clouds enchanted with pure pegasus magic. All murders…

Except one. The old red pegasus lifted her newest contraption off the table with a smile. It was a small transparent gem, with thin, almost microscopic flakes of metal in the exact middle of every part of the invisible crystalline lattice. And around each bit of aluminum were tiny runes, so small it was the work of days to make the tiniest section visible, much less change them. She’d spent over twenty years on her current project to make one simple modification.

No murder had come from her use of it. Not yet.

Final Dawn hadn’t expected the end to come so fast. The near-certain possibility of death had been on his mind from the start, but he hadn’t considered that he’d die before even reaching the dungeon.

He tried to move, to make one last attempt to run or fight, but he only managed a slight twitch in one of his legs. His killer took the short knife and stabbed him again. The weapon seemed to drink his blood, leaving the ceramic surface the same brilliant white it had been when he’d first seen it.

“Stop moving. You might die too fast.” The pegasus said, taking something out of her saddlebags and examining it. Her rust-red feathers flicked against each other in a gesture of complete unconcern, as if she wasn’t even going to acknowledge the pony she’d just murdered.

He choked out a curse, choking on the blood in his throat. She’d stabbed him there first. He didn’t know why. There was nopony to call to for help. He tried to do something. Anything. There were earth ponies who could give themselves the properties of a stone, ones who could reform their bodies to instantly heal any wound that didn’t kill. He’d never been successful before, but maybe…

He writhed against the rough surface of the road in frustration. Nothing worked.

Then the pegasus stood up. “Alright, this should do it. Hold still.”

No. He was not going to hold still. He was going to make this as difficult as possible, to fight against every—

She slid the knife into a spot behind his neck, and everything below that point went numb. He couldn’t delude himself any longer. There would be no escape, no sudden saviour, no change of heart. He was dead, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“W-Why?” he gasped. If he was going to die, then he wanted an answer for it. Pegasi could rarely stand the monotony of daily city life; almost every one of them went adventuring. Their rarity, along with this one’s striking coloration, made him sure he hadn’t seen this one before in his life.

She kept her silence as she pressed a crystal-clear stone against his forehead. The word shredded itself to painful pieces before his eyes. Every sense he had was painfully ripped apart and destroyed. Sight went first, non-shapes and anti-colors spiraling across his vision in sanity-destroying waves. Then his hearing left in scraps of shrieking sound. On and on it went until he was left in complete darkness.

He couldn’t even scream.

Eventually, he saw the spark. It was tiny, a point of light in an otherwise absolute darkness that he at first thought was a hallucination. But unlike the others, it never went away. After a long period of study, he determined that it was mostly blue, but sometimes shifted colors. It was close. He felt like he could touch it, if he wanted, but for a while stayed his hoof for fear of it going away.

Then he reached out to it. He didn’t use his mouth or hooves, because they didn’t exist, but he felt it all the same. As soon as he did, it rushed into him.

Final Dawn kept the spark inside of himself until it grew into a roiling ball of energy. Feeling experimental, he pinched off a tiny part and threw it at the darkness. It receded, and everything was outlined with a coating of blue.

He was in a hollow in the side of a mountain, in a small space that was barely a proper cave. Packed dirt and rocks made up an uneven floor. Stone crawled up the walls and made up the ceiling, surrounding all sides except one. From that direction came the sense of an empty void through which nothing existed. Dawn’s awareness recoiled back to the center of the hollow, where something small and round sat that he knew was him. It was as familiar as his old pony-self had been, a gem with delicate symbols of meaning inside.

But the energy that now coated the place felt wrong, like somepony else could just come in and take it. He quickly gathered up the tiny bits of energy, and the world returned to darkness. Maybe he just needed to keep his connection with them. After a moment of consideration, he put them back out again, but tried to keep his grip on them. They highlighted his surroundings the same way, but immediately felt better.

Then his mind caught up to what he was doing. He was dead, right? That crazy pegasus had stabbed him a lot with that knife. Then she’d put something to his forehead.

Something, now that he thought about it, that had looked a lot like the gem that was him.

So he was a piece of magic crystal now? Why? There was nopony around him. Just stone and dirt and an exit that felt like an empty, devouring void. What was he supposed to do?

Well...he could try to get his body back. If he made enough magic, he could spread it everywhere and find the pegasus. Maybe she’d stored his body, kept it safe with charms and shields, and he could go back the moment he found it. It was probably a futile hope, but what else was he supposed to do?

So Final Dawn threw magic out into the void. It settled onto dewy grass, and he felt cold hard moonlight. He quickly withdrew the magic, leaving the outside unable to shake the feeling that he needed walls and tunnels and rooms and caves to protect himself from the nothingness.

It must be the stone he was in. Something about it didn’t like the outside, and the fear only intensified when he tried to fight it. Still, didn’t mean he was going to just give up.

It had turned from night to day to night again before he gave up. Each time he flung his magic out into the open, even while maintaining his connection to it, the utter emptiness he sensed caused him to withdraw and flee back inside the cave.

Then a pony found him.

Disembodied hooves trotted through his hollow. Final Dawn tried to make sense of it. Was somepony standing outside throwing in horseshoes? No. He knew with certainty that he could tell with difference, though he didn’t know how. These were the real thing. Was the mysterious pony using a spell that hid everything but their hooves? Maybe, but that didn’t make much sense. Without any reasonable explanation, he decided to try throwing some magic out into the...void. It would be quick. Just a few seconds, to make sure nopony was out there.

He took hold of some of the magic with his connection. It flowed toward the exit, toward the endless nothing. Along the way, it flew through the area above the phantom hooves.

The rest of the pony was revealed. She had a thin plating of green armor covering her, made of a material Dawn instinctively knew was orichalzine. Leather saddlebags sat between two outstretched wings, lightning arcing between the feathers and ionizing the air around the pegasus, and an amulet bursting with energy hung from her neck.

He was an idiot. He could only feel things inside the magic. Just coating every surface with it left anything above or below invisible to him. The magic needed to be everywhere for him to see anything.

Dawn drew all the magic back into himself, then flung it out again. This time, instead of letting it fall where it may, he pushed it again and again, making it all fly around the small cave like a miniature snowstorm. The pegasus flinched back, seemingly able to sense the magic as it moved, and looked around warily. He ignored her for now, trying to concentrate on keeping the magic from clumping up. Eventually, it all resolved into a single massive tornado-like pattern, spinning around and catching everything that went on.

Then the pegasus took another step toward the middle of the room. Suddenly, he had an instinctive urge to make her go away. She was too close, and he didn’t have the resources or ability to challenge her. She didn’t belong. He piled magic into a dense structure within his crystal, building with the same instinct that told him she needed to leave. Once he finished, it wavered and resolved into something different, something that he took without consciously knowing how and activated. A superheated beam of energy flashed out of his crystal and zoomed toward her, a jagged arrow made of lightning.

She must have been ready for it. She stretched a wing toward the lightning with unreal speed. The bolt curled inward and joined the electricity already sparking around her.

Final Dawn’s panic grew. He formed another portion of his magic into a shape that turned out to be ice, which cracked against her armor, shot a fireball which splashed onto the wall behind where she had been standing, and flung a bolt of pure darkness at her. She batted it aside with a wing, which immediately began to darken. She frowned and took a leather pouch full of a liquid that was almost as full of magic as her armor and took a sip. Her wing returned to normal.

There wasn’t enough magic left inside his crystal to form into another attack, unless he took the bits that were whirling around him, and he would rather die than go back to the darkness. It was too much like the void outside.

The pegasus put the pouch away and started speaking. Dawn couldn’t hear, but he could see the movements her mouth was making through the magic in the air. Unfortunately, he couldn’t read lips. She reached back into her bags and threw something to the ground. It was a seed, full to bursting with magic. She nodded toward it, then left.

And Dawn was once again alone, with most of his magic spent, able to see only the inside of his prison. He examined the seed. Something about the pony hadn’t let him draw on any of the magic inside of her, or the things she carried. Now that she was gone, though, he felt he could easily reach inside the seed and take the magic for himself. He extended his mental grasp toward it, then hesitated. The pegasus could have done anything. She could have smashed his crystal without a thought, and after his attacks she might have even been justified. But she hadn’t. She’d given him the seed. The magic could be tainted or something, but that just seemed like a more roundabout way of smashing his crystal. The more likely explanation was that she wanted him to have it. He mulled it over, then withdrew. It would grow, and he would watch it. If it did anything suspicious, he would drain it.

As it turned out, watching plants grow was boring. Oh, at first he spent a lot of time looking at the magic swirling around inside, but the magic-sight was becoming more normal to him every day. He could even tell different colors apart with it. Without being able to understand what the magic was actually doing in the plant, he quickly lost interest. Dawn spent his time trying to figure out a way to spread magic outside in a way that wouldn’t trigger the instinctive fear of the void. Eventually, he found one.

It was slow and expensive, but it worked. Forcing magic through anything non-living or that didn’t already have some magic inside of it was a difficult endeavor, but eventually he was able to stuff a bunch of the blue energy into the floor beneath his gemstone. It filled a circle of dirt and stone about a meter wide that was deepest at the center, and became shallower near the edges. The effort took a few days, measured by the times the light he could now sense streaming into his tiny cavern rotated between the soft silver of the moon and a bright glare from the sun. When he was done, he was almost out of magic and felt a curious state of semi-exhaustion where only his mind felt weary. Since he didn’t have a body.

He really needed to get that back, if he could. And if he couldn’t, maybe he would make a one. You could just stuff something full of magic and make it live, right?

But that was a last resort. He could put magic into solid matter. It would be a lot slower than just flinging magic all over the world, but he had time.

Dawn extended his reach downward and got to work.

He hadn’t kept track of the time. All he knew was it took a lot of it, but eventually he had the entirety of the small mountain he was in suffused with his magic, and a good portion of the land surrounding it as well. The problem was that it was way too slow, and just like he hadn’t been able to sense the pegasus walking around inside his cave when his magic had been coating the walls and floor, he couldn’t sense anything above the soil.

For a while he was stymied, until he really considered what he was. He hadn’t thought too hard about it until now (he tried attributing all his moments of stupidity to shock, but couldn’t get past the fact that he couldn’t really feel emotions too strongly in his current state), but he was a dungeon. Everypony knew what dungeons were. They allowed the large portion of the population that wasn’t born into a family or guild to get a measure of power. Dawn himself had been on his way to one to pay off an artifact he’d bought, an artifact that was probably being seized along with the tiny room he’d been renting after he hadn’t returned to pay his debts. But he was getting off track. He was a dungeon. Somehow, the pegasus who’d killed him had put him in a gemheart. And if she’d done that, she must have had a reason. He just needed to give her whatever reason she needed to come back. Did she want a dungeon she alone controlled? The visit of the pegasus from earlier made that possibility a lot more distinct. Everyone knew what those kinds of ponies did, of course; they were Surveyors, adventurers powerful enough to exist without anypony else backing them up, and daring enough to investigate reports of new dungeons even with the likely chance that the report had the location of an ambush meant to kill ponies and take their artifacts. All she needed to do was give an adventuring guild his location and a small percentage of everything taken from his dungeon would go to her.

And to get her to come back, he’d have to start making stuff that would give adventurers a profit.

The only problem with that was that he had no idea how. Everypony took for granted that you would find coins, powerful artifacts, herbs, and higher metals in dungeons if you could defeat the challenges they set up, but nopony said how. Could Dawn just spin the magic he had into physical objects like he had with those spells?

It was worth a shot.

As it turned out, trying to build spells or objects out of magic without that instinct he’d had guiding him before was a fruitless undertaking. He could recreate the bolts of flame, ice, lightning, and darkness from before, but they always went in the exact same direction with the exact same effects and used the exact same amounts of magic. He tried picking apart the magic that made them, but the compact swirls of magic that built them up were too entangled and shifted even while he was looking at it. There needed to be another way.

Dawn eventually turned his attention to the rocks and dirt he had infused with his magic. He had an intimate understanding of everything his magic touched, from the tiny bits of metals within the stone to the nutrients and tiny creatures living within the earth. It wasn’t possible to just study the structure of the stone and recreate it by putting his magic in the same pattern like he had with the spells, since magic was made entirely different from anything physical. He found out how to shift the soil around, making towers of dirt outside in the void, but it wasn’t until he broke apart a section of dirt in frustration that he stumbled upon the answer.

When he split the ground into a soupy mess, he noticed something. The soup was full of tiny particles, smaller even than that first spark of magic. These particles weren’t like magic. Where all of magic was built from the same exact essence, the pieces that made up the ground were not. They were made from dozens and dozens of different pieces. And when he tried to put them back together, they made something new, huge particles that flew apart when he mashed them into each other. When he tried to keep them together, they exploded. He barely kept it contained with a field of magic around it, and everything within the area was charred. By carefully picking apart the tiny pieces of matter that made up the rock in his cave, he was finally able to slide the pieces together in the exact same arrangement and recreate anything within his magic. He was even able to recreate what he somehow knew was pure aluminum, traces of which he found inside the rock. Gold, silver, copper, iron, and other ores were just as easy, though the higher metals eluded him. He even recreated an earthworm after a few dozen attempts that ended rather...messily.

By that time, the mysterious plant had grown. The magic inside of it looked to have been a way to control its growth, because all of it was gone. Its roots stretched through the soil, and a thick green stem poked above the ground. On top of it a cluster of three small tentacles thrashed, tipped with thirsty thorns. Dawn felt at it for a while, confused. Why would the adventurer have given this to him? If every dungeon could turn dirt into gold, why not just give him a bunch of coins? It was a mystery he didn’t have enough information to puzzle out, so he reached out with a mental shrug and picked the plant apart in his mind. Then he dissolved another part of his cave, hollowing out more of the mountain, and formed the pieces into a duplicate of the plant, this one at the entrance, as if to guard him from the light that streamed in from the void. Its tentacles writhed and it stretched toward the entrance. Dawn fed it some magic, then retreated back to his thoughts.

The pegasus and adventurers both seemed content to wait for him to do something, but he didn’t know what that something was supposed to be. Make gold and let them take it? As soon as he had that thought, another part of him spoke up, the part of him that had the fear of the void outside and the part of him that had taken control when he’d made those spells that he’d shot off at the adventurer.

That wouldn’t be fair, it insisted. Letting them just stroll in and take whatever they want without being challenged is wrong.

Final Dawn hit a wall. Just like his attempts to spread magic outside into the void, the feeling that just creating valuable metals and leaving them out wouldn’t be fair wouldn’t leave him. He could fight it for a time and leave out a few blocks of gold and aluminum in his cave, but then the feeling that it just wasn’t right would overwhelm him and he’d dissolve them back into their discrete parts.

So something about being a dungeon wouldn’t let him do that. Then it hit him: He was trying to figure out ways to get ponies to come to him without actually being a dungeon. All he needed to do was be more dungeon-like. Unfortunately, he had no firsthoof experience as to what dungeons were like. He was a city pony through and through. Still, he could use stories as his base. Dungeons were said to be big, with multiple separate rooms and levels, each with distinct themes. They were supposed to reward adventurers for defeating difficult obstacles, and punish those who tried to cheat. It all made a lot of sense. There were no stories of dungeons that were aboveground, unless they’d taken the shape of a castle of inhabited a flying island, and even then they didn’t show themselves at the parts that were in direct sun or moonlight. They gave out valuables after their challenges were defeated, and didn’t just give out stuff for free, an aversion he’d directly experienced.

Maybe he could put a bit of coin next to those tentacle plants?

A few seconds of concentration and three round copper pieces popped out of the ground next to each plant, fully formed. He’d have difficulty with them if he were still a pony, but not so much that it would make three whole coppers just laying there an unattractive prospect. It felt...fair, and he didn’t have the need to reabsorb them. He’d need something more threatening for anything more.

He had his first traps. What to do next? Making the place roomier seemed like a good option. He already had the entire mountain infused with magic, so it was the work of a few days to make a winding path through the entire thing, eventually ending at a small room at the bottom. Dawn had a ton of leftover matter, so he took over some more land below the mountain and hollowed it out as well, then compacted the spare material and left it there for later use.

Now that was done...could he move his gemheart? Dawn sunk the ground under his heart, pulling it under until it was out of sight and reach of anypony who might come in. It didn’t last long. It needed to be accessible for anypony who got past all of his defenses. If it wasn’t, then he wasn’t being fair.

And then his crystal was once again on the floor of the cave, right next to the entrance, where the void was. Okay. He couldn’t simply hide his gemheart, but maybe he could move it to the end of the tunnels. He took hold of the ground underneath it and shifted the crystal to the very last room he’d made.

It was ugly and minimalistic, but there wasn’t much else he could do aside from shifting the walls and creating more of those tentacle plant things, and he was planning to change it up as soon as he found more things to flesh everything out with. In time meantime, he was settled on fiddling with the spells. It was difficult work and required intense concentration. He had to expand the structure the magic made to see what each individual part did, and the lapse of a single moment of concentration would cause the entire thing to implode.

He’d figured out how to change the direction they would fly in when another group of ponies came.

Chapter 2

It was a sad fact that nine out of every ten new dungeons were in some way broken. A dungeon’s flaw usually manifested as an unwillingness to interact with the world around it. Other times they would just absorb everything they could like massive black holes. Kidore had once seen a pony ripped apart before her eyes before the dungeon imploded and killed everypony but her.

This one had already been scouted out in its infancy. The report stated that the mana had just started flowing regularly, so the chances of the whole place exploding dropped drastically.

Real Null stopped a few meters before the small mountain started, and turned back toward Kidore and Subtle Point, his dark feathers rustling in the cool morning breeze. “I’ll go in first. Kidore, shield me. I’ll call if it’s safe.” He always went first.

He turned around and marched toward the cave, light glinting of his enchanted copper breastplate. Kidore concentrated on her spell, the Soul Spring on her flank giving her an instinctive ability to bring her wavering, transparent red bubble into existence. It shimmered as it closed over Real Null and hummed at a constant pitch. After a minute, he called out. “I’m not dead!”

Kidore looked to her left unable to keep from feeling relieved. With some of the stuff he did, sometimes she couldn’t help but think maybe he wanted to be. Subtle Point looked the same as she felt, permanently hardened expression temporarily softened. Then her blue eyes turned hard again and her amber wings tightened. Kidore sighed and walked inside the cave, dispelling Real Null’s shield. She didn’t have the mana or magical strength to do cast anything else while holding one. She lit up her horn with a soft pinkish glow, holding a levitation spell but not directing it at anything.

A plant twitched on the floor, green ichor leaking out of its tentacles. Real Null bent down and came up with three unmarked copper coins. He tossed them into his pack, his form almost invisible in the cave’s darkness, then noticed Kidore’s attention and pointed a wing to the other side of the cave.

A tunnel stretched endlessly through the black. She nodded. “It’s a good one.”

Final Dawn was frustrated. These new adventurers had been able to kill his plants and take the coins with almost no effort. He couldn’t present a proper challenge to ponies this powerful. It was hard to see past that fact and keep himself from trying something stupid, like trying to make something that could move and attack them with nothing to model it after. He knew intellectually that it was in his best interests to let them do whatever they had come here for, but letting them just roam around uncontested felt wrong, like an intense, burning itch he couldn’t scratch.

After watching them just standing there and talking as if they weren’t in a dungeon, he had the bright idea to yank all his mana out of the room. He caught a last image of them all looking around, startled, and felt a moment of happiness at the fact that he’d at least managed to surprise them. He’d caught a snatch of conversation before doing so, and now he had a name for the magical energy he manipulated.

Mana.

After a while, he tentatively probed the chamber with a bit of magic to make sure they were gone, then flooded it back up with swirling mana. They’d left things behind.

The first thing that caught his attention was the orb. It glowed with magic, and used some of its huge supply every second on some purpose he couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t until he traced it directly that Dawn realized it was emanating light. It was a magelight. That would be incredibly useful. He’d almost forgotten ponies couldn’t see well without light, and now he could use the magic sphere’s design to make areas have specific environments. He absorbed it.

The next thing he directed his attention to was an entire dead dog. It looked to have been dead for a few days at least, and Dawn couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Still, they must have left it for a reason. It was huge for a dog, almost three-fourths the size of an earth pony, and a bit bigger than the average pegasus. Well, he couldn’t figure out how to do anything with it for now, so he just absorbed it, the memory of how to remake it piece by piece ingrained into his crystalline mind.

After that were a few metals: copper, tin, nickel, iron, lead, and even some gold and iron flakes. The real prize in that department was the mithril. Dungeons were its primary manufacturers, though some skilled pegasi were known to be able to make it too before most of their Talents were lost. Dawn studied the piece he now had access to intently, tracing the swirling pieces of mana that circulated through the metal, following certain paths over and over again…

Runes. Tiny runes were etched onto the metal, imperfections in the metal he’d at first attributed to being simple wear and tear. But mithril didn’t dent so easily. He recreated the crystal magelight and made his mana dance through it, looking for the runes. His search was at first fruitless, until he reabsorbed it in frustration. In the split-second it had all been entirely infused in his mana, he’d been able to feel the way it moved, as it mistook his magic for its fuel source. He remade. If he’d still been a pony, he’d have been holding his breath. Dawn peered at the tiniest fragment of crystal he could, and fed it a piece of mana, which it instantly converted to light.

The entire thing was grown. Somehow, ponies had figured out how to create a single piece of crystal in the same of a simple series of runes that caught mana and converted it to light, then replicated it over and over. How did they do it? If he could just maintain a constant presence of mana outside, in the void, he could find where it had come from and study it…

But if he could do that, he would be able to find his body, which was the entire reason he was even trying to act like a dungeon. He wasn’t trying to just study stuff so he knew how it worked, and he didn’t need to. He could remake the magelight himself out of raw materials without caring about how ponies would do it. It was hard not to feel a bit curious, though.

He absorbed the metals and the magelight. Next was a bunch of seeds. Dawn absorbed them one by one. He would need a bigger area than the regular twisting tunnels he had to grow these if any of them were the size of trees, although he felt that if he studied the blueprints of the seeds he had in his mind, he might be able to figure out how they grew…

But no. That would take way too long. He’d already felt time slipping away during his experimentations with the runes on the mithril and the magelight. Something like that would take way too long, and he needed to get a passable dungeon up and running before anypony else decided to check on him. But if his lure didn’t work, if he was stuck here forever—Dawn didn’t flinch away from the thought like he would have just a few days ago. He was slowly changing. The realization hit him like a blow to the gut, though less intensely than it would have when he was a pony. Emotions were muted, and his motivations were changing so slowly he hadn’t even been able to detect the change until now.

He needed to stop it. Maybe he could find the parts of his crystal that stored him and change them, turning them back to normal as the gemheart warped him. A swirl of magic around his crystal brought his attention to the way it was fragmented, the tiny piece of metal each bit held that repelled his attempts to even read the runes in the crystal. And as he tried, he realized he really didn’t want to. Changing himself would be bad, far worse than cheating or being in the void.

If he did nothing, it would change him, but there wasn’t really anything he could do. Unless…

Final Dawn created a magelight in his deepest chamber, next to his gemheart. Then he created another, this one with slightly different runes. It went dark. Inoperable.

He had another moment of haranguing himself for his own stupidity as he realized that if he’d by chance tweaked the runes in the exact wrong place, it might have exploded. Then he went back to work, hollowing out another chamber next to his matter storage, and made the walls out of mithril.

Dawn couldn’t directly read his gemheart, but he knew himself, and could feel by instinct the parts of him that were him, and not the crystal. Slowly, carefully, he recreated those parts in his mithril test chamber, resulting it—

It exploded, cracking the mithril. The fractures it created almost reached his matter storage. He hadn’t tested the mithril. He’d just assumed that it would work like any other normal material, and recreated a bunch of it without realizing it was different. It had runes, runes that were the entire basis of how it worked. Without them, it was just a brighter iron.

He worked quickly. He could make his entire testing chamber out of mithril, but he’d need to change the runes. Any blacksmith who tried to work with mithril without knowing what they were doing would ruin it. The runes were directly tied to the amount and shape of the mithril they were carved into. It took several tries and a lot of energy to continually reform an amount of matter that large, and he couldn’t experiment with smaller sample because the runes were tied to the metal’s size. Mithril was the most annoying thing he’d ever tried to replicate. He had to abandon his efforts more than once after running completely out of mana to use and wait for it to regenerate.

Eventually, he did it. He had a mithril testing chamber. He spent a few days tweaking a magelight’s runes until he figured out how to make it explode, then set it off in the middle of the chamber and watched the engraved shapes light up with a bright blue light and start drawing in magic to reinforce themselves. Seeing with magic was almost better than with regular sight. He could see every rune at once, and track the path of every shard of superheated crystal as it ricocheted through the chamber. Then Dawn surveyed the mithril with a mental frown. The explosion had created a few tiny imperfections that would grow with repeated abuse, and after a long, long time—hundreds, maybe even a few thousand more repeated blasts—would crack again. But before he could repair them manually, he realized they hadn’t lost their glow and were still drawing in the ambient mana he had swirling freely through the mountain so he could see. As he watched, the tiny fractures sealed themselves, and missing bits of mithril regrew, forming directly out of magic.

Then he realized he’d spent a long time experimenting. He’d remembered to track the time, at least, thought he almost wished he hadn’t. It had been almost a month. The time spent just figuring out how to make the magelight explode added up to four days.

Well, nothing for it. He’d taken too long and spent too much time to stop now. He reformed the crystal part of himself in the mithril chamber, which again promptly exploded. Once more, this time tracing which parts triggered the—too slow. This time—he was out of mana. That was an unpleasant surprise. It took a huge amount of magic to recreate the gemheart that made him. It seemed the more complex an object, the more it took. He wasn’t going to give up now, though.

On his next attempt, he detected the fragmented runes that caused the instability.

The try after that, he added on what his best guesses to match the halves together. It still exploded.

Another guess left the entire structure inert, but at least it didn’t blow up.

Then more adventurers came.

Thankfully, he’d been about to try his next attempt in just a few days, so he had enough mana to panic properly.

Kidore cautiously slid into the cave, Real Null and Subtle Point already ahead of her. The newborn dungeon probably couldn’t come up with anything that could threaten them, but dungeons could be creative, and she’d been surprised more than once at what one could do with just a little time.

It was still dark in the first cave, and the plants were gone. Kidore lit her horn, then realized she wasn’t the only light source. There was a bright glow coming from the tunnel that led further into the dungeon that hadn’t been there a few seconds ago.

“It’s adapted,” Kidore observed.

Real Null nodded, not turning around to face her, and shifted his wings. They were too experienced to be caught off guard by facing each other instead of their surroundings. They’d been Surveyors too long. “I’ll go first,” he said.

“You sure?” Kidore couldn’t keep herself from asking.

The glow meant the dungeon could adapt materials it found to its own purposes, which was all they really needed to know, and all a lot of Surveyors checked for. Real Null always went above and beyond the norm, making sure everypony knew his team took their job with a serious above just the base motivation for money.

That, or he has a death wish.

The second option seemed more likely the more she traveled with him.

“Yes. What if it simply moved the original magelight?” Real Null asked, walking toward the tunnel.

Kidore hesitated, but reluctantly followed. It was possible, if unlikely. She followed her team, unable to keep a single, persistent word from echoing in her mind.

Priming.

Would would they think he had? Whole floors planted with the seeds they’d given him? Lights everywhere? Did they expect him to have fixed the dog and have tons of them roaming around?

Dawn moved quickly. He plopped a magelight in the tunnel adjacent to the adventurers, and fastened it onto the ceiling. Then he carved out a huge area at the end of the tunnel, leaving a circular area about fifty meters tall and two hundred across, taking up most of the middle of his small mountain. Magelights all over the ceiling, seeds all over the floors, pump them full of mana, grow grow grow…

The adventurers were getting closer. Too close. He needed to slow them down.

He turned his attention to the dead dog. Maybe he couldn’t fix it, but he might be able to make it seem like he had.

They’d already found the magelight in the ceiling, but Real Null had insisted on continuing. Kidore felt intangible needles beneath her fur as they padded through the tunnel. The silence was eerie.

The dark pegasus stopped, holding out a wing. “I hear something,” he whispered. Subtle Point slid through the tunnel and stood next to him, a thin layer of frost already coating her wings. Kidore threw a shield up, sealing them off from anything that might be up ahead.

Just in time. Something impacted on her shield, causing a sound that always reminded her of somepony landing on a sheet of linen stretched across a pit of spikes.

“Did anyone see—” she began, then stopped.

It was the dog they’d left, the magelight from behind casting it into sharp relief. Instead of saving the body to use as a model for when it acquired more organisms, it had turned it into a zombie. It thunked against the shield again and again, not even a whimper rising from its undead throat.

“It’s been Primed,” Real Null said. “We need to get out of here. How long can you hold that shield?”

“Maybe half an hour. I’m not in danger of running out of mana any time soon. Its muscles must have atrophied,” Kidore said, not letting any of the chill she felt in her bones seep into her voice.

Primed.

That one word was the reason newborn dungeons was so much more dangerous than the older ones. When only adventurers strong enough to qualify as Surveyors showed up at a dungeon, the dungeon could gain a skewed view of the average pony’s strength. When that happened, it was Primed. It would throw out challenges that would make the most seasoned adventurers pause, killing dozens of ponies before it realized its mistake.

They were retreating. The unicorn dragged the shield behind her while the dog threw itself against it over and over. Could they tell Dawn hadn’t fixed it? Were they going to leave and not come back? Maybe he needed to make it stronger. It took a lot of mana to animate it, and more to increase its strength, but they it was worth it if it meant they would return, because then he could challenge—no. He wanted to escape. To find his body. That was his only goal.

Dawn split the rest of his mana between the plants in his artificial jungle. They were growing, but slowly, and they needed a lot more mana than he had. They were missing something.

Heat.

The magelights above provided brightness comparable to the sun, but their light was cold. The atmosphere was cool and damp, and the place still felt like a cave. If he could tweak the runes… No, that would take too long. The adventurers would be gone by then. He just needed a decent tangle that looked like a jungle. He’d flesh it out later.

The adventurers were almost at the end of the tunnel. Dawn frantically observed the dog for flaws. It moved like one, its eyes were blinking, he’d even brought it back with water so its mouth would have the same consistency as a live one. Then he saw one of the adventurers open her mouth and talk to another.

Sound. His dog was completely silent, and he didn’t have a live dog to copy the bark from. If only he’d had more time…

An idea was born. Dawn acted on it as soon as it came to him.

Kidore left the tunnel with a sigh of relief. The dungeon hadn’t tossed anything too terrible at them, all things, considered. The undead dog would easily overpower somepony new to the deadly game of adventuring, but to experienced ponies like them, it was only a threat if it caught them unawares.

She stopped. Null and Point weren’t moving. She finally looked away from the shimmering red film stretched across the tunnel. Something was wrong. It was darker than it should be. She looked around the small circular chamber for the exit, rotating her vision across the entire room three times before it hit her.

The exit was gone. That was new.

“Carve a way out?” she suggested. Her voice was steady, but her heartbeat was quickening.

Real Null dug into his pack and pulled out four razor-sharp pieces of mithril with beaten leather straps attached. Warsaws. Originally named after the industrious earth pony who invented the first set after a pegasus asked for a certain kind of weapon, the modern form had since evolved from light copper good only for a single blow into the durable mithril triangles Kidore saw before her.

Subtle Point took two and fastened them onto her wings in quick darting movements. Null was more graceful, moving at a constant, deceptively slow-looking speed. They weren’t powerful enough to entirely shrug off the effect putting pieces of metal, no matter how small, had on their wings, but it wouldn’t really matter in caves this cramped. They were as ready as they could be. Kidore positioned herself between them, bringing the magic welling up through her body and into her horn so she could bring a shield into existence at a moment’s notice.

They couldn’t leave. If they just disappeared, whatever organization they reported to might be suspicious, but that would be better than confirmation that Dawn was flawed. He just needed to show them. They’d follow the tunnel back to his still-forming jungle, and...well, he would also need to figure out how to read lips to make sure they weren’t going to return with an unfavorable report. If they declared him off-limits, or sent a bunch of ponies like the first Surveyor to destroy his gemheart, he would have no chance of fulfilling his goal. Which was to get back in his pony body. Yeah.

Just after he finished a few things as a dungeon, of course. It wouldn’t take long after he found his body, and he could probably learn how to store it indefinitely.

A change in the dirt his magic was inhabiting jarred him out of his thoughts. He tried to shake his head, only to be reminded once more than he no longer had a body. It was surprisingly easy to lose track of time without one.

He turned his focus on the adventurers. A physical gasp was impossible, so he had to settle for a mental one. They were carving a way out with devices on their wings. Mithril. Dawn knew how to twist the runes to make the metal explode, but the ponies eluded his mental grip. He couldn’t touch them, or even anything too close to them. Quickly, he investigated the cause of the interference, and discovered with a faint jolt of surprise that they leaked their own mana similar to his own. The unicorn’s horn was glowing with extremely pure magic, and released slightly larger, dimmer particles in a way that reminded Dawn of the time he’d put too much matter in too small a space, and they’d flown apart.

The magic she let out was still useable, and she and the pegasi also leaked magic in a state of much greater decay. All of it contained traces of their signature. All of it interfered with his own, blocking him completely until the magical signature faded. Why? It made no sense. He had more of it. If pony magic was so antithetical to dungeon magic, why couldn’t he just obliterate it?

The questions would have to wait. They were getting closer and closer to the outside every minute he deliberated, using mithril tools to aid in their digging while he watched, helpless, knowing the dog wouldn’t stand a chance.

Unless…

The runes in the mithril were his clue. He’d spent long minutes trying to figure out a way to change or destroy them, when he finally noticed what they were doing. He’d realized they moved mana, of course, but it hadn’t occurred to him now that he could simply replicate the flow the runes directed the mana in manually. Dawn focused on the intricate flow of magic in his testing chamber and copied the arrangement in the dirt he’d collapsed on the entrance. Already, he was feeling the urge to reopen a clear path from the outside to his gemheart, but he was able to suppress it for now.

Then mithril struck magically reinforced dirt, and both went flying. The amber pegasus had half her head vaporized. The darker-colored one hadn’t been lucky enough to die immediately, and dragged himself to the red unicorn on broken, bloody legs.

Dawn moved his mana helplessly, unable to bring the ceiling down again for a second collapse. Their deaths had been completely fair. They’d broken his walls. If they wanted out, they needed to at least see the jungle. Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about the unicorn. She was too red, too much like the pegasus who’d killed him and stuffed him into a rock. She needed to die.

Then he consciously thought about what had just gone through his mind.

He needed that replica of himself as soon as possible.

Well, it didn’t really matter anyway. There was nothing he could do to stop the unicorn from leaving. He’d failed. He’d been stupid. He should have prepared something before testing, should have realized they’d be coming back, should have just let them go instead of trying to trap them, should have let them tunnel out instead of accidentally killing two ponies, should have…

She left, leaping through the hole and drifting through the air, burning large amounts of magic as she did so.

Dawn turned his attention back to the bodies. They were just...laying there, and he felt nothing. He should feel disgusted, or at least some pity, but he couldn’t. Eventually, their signature disappeared from the ambient mana and he could—woah. There was a huge amount of mana in them, many times what he currently had. They both had a plethora of interesting items in their bags, but Dawn was really interested in the bodies themselves.

There was a lot he could do with pegasus talents.

But first he would have to survive the inevitable retribution.

Chapter 3

They were going to kill him. The glowing gemheart at the end of his cave system would be smashed. He could almost feel the pieces of crystal flying through the air, his magic unraveling and mind dissolving…

Dawn reigned in his panic. He could still feel that, at least. Slight comfort.

Calmer, now. They were going to try to kill him. He’d heard enough about dungeons to know that none of them had ever blocked off an exit. With enough preparation, he could stop them from destroying him. There would be no time for delicate research, for tinkering with the inner workings of magic. He needed something rough, sloppy, and fast, yet still powerful enough to beat back a ton of experienced adventurers.

That can’t be fair, right? he thought to himself. A bunch of adventurers, able to sweep away anything he set in their path with ease, who would have no problem smashing a newborn dungeon. No feeling of outrage rose. He knew why. It would be payback. A bunch of extremely powerful ponies trying to kill him would have been enough to allow him to hide his gemheart in the normal course of things, he knew. But the pegasi that were still cooling on the floor of his cave hadn’t even had a chance. They’d been trying to escape, and had died through no fault of their own.

The idiotic instinct that things had to be fair, that they had to be balanced, wouldn’t leave him. If he’d instead been lenient on the adventurers, the balance would’ve swung back to him and he could’ve just hidden himself. And that was why most dungeons had a top floor that was super easy to defeat. Why hadn’t he realized…

He was going in circles.It was time to stop wallowing and start doing.

First order of business: the bodies. They would have items that he could absorb, and hopefully some that were simple enough that Dawn could incorporate them into his defenses without having to study them for weeks to understand.

He concentrated on the magic he had swirling around, and focused on the pegasus that was so dark he was almost black. Dawn enveloped the corpse’s mana, which still hadn’t dissolved and had surprisingly still been preserving its host even after death. It would take too long to tease out the strings of mana within the pegasus that allowed him to control his magic, but Dawn was still able to compare a small section to the feeling of the elemental bolts of magic he’d once thrown and still couldn’t properly deconstruct. It took some time, but he eventually teased meaning from the magic.

Fire.

It was a more complete base than the single bolt he’d launched. Where that was like a cannon on a ship, the magic he sensed in the pegasus was more like the ship itself, complete with captain and sailors to do all the minute adjustments. If Dawn had enough time to deconstruct this, he could branch off to more flame-magic that this pegasus hadn’t learned on something almost like instinct.

Unfortunately, he might not have that kind of time. He needed to get defenses up as fast as possible. Dawn absorbed the dark pegasus’s magic and felt his store of mana triple. His gemheart physically enlarged from the gain as it ate into the magic, something he hadn’t known they could do. He turned to the amber pegasus and did the same thing. This one had built up ice magic. It looked like they’d had complementary talents.

He ignored the broken mithril triangles. It was a shame that the damage they’d done had shredded their wings. It would take probably a day to trace delicate nerve, tissue, and bone, then reconstruct them. But he set that aside, for now. Their saddlebags were of more immediate importance.

Again, he started with the darker one first. He had a small bottle of enchanted liquid that Dawn’s magic detected was red in color. Most likely a healing potion. They could be incredibly useful. If only he had more time, then an army wouldn’t be a problem. He could make his own army with—with mithril scales, maybe, making them virtually unstoppable. Along with the ability to use even simple fire or ice magic, and—Dawn had to wrench his attention away from the potions before they drew him into an intense cycle of experimentation, and it was all he could do to absorb them without spewing them back out to see how their healing worked in intricate detail.

Next was a collection of crystal orbs small enough that a pegasus could comfortably scoop them out of a pouch with a wing and toss them without paying too much attention. They were completely dark, even when Dawn pushed a bit of magic into one. They weren’t meant for lighting, and the runes that were built into their crystalline structures were too simple for that to be the case. A few of the runes were the same: probably the ones that drew in mana, but other than that the orbs had only a single simple repeating rune.

Dawn absorbed them and created one at the top of his mithril testing chamber to test his suspicions. He studied it closely as it accelerated toward the ground, until it smash—

A roiling cloud of mana erupted from the broken orb, and if Dawn had still had them, its blue color would’ve been visible even to his naked eyes. The crystal was promptly blown into smithereens, which were in turn blown into fragments of sand, which themselves dissolved into tiny particles of dust, and the entire testing chamber went up in flames.

Maybe he’d pumped a bit too much mana into it. He’d wanted to see every stage of the explosion, so he’d overloaded the thing by roughly a hundred times the amount it would otherwise have stopped pulling in mana at.

Well. That was neat, and he wouldn’t have to reconstruct all the other runes he’d included in the modified magelight if he wanted to make more, but the real prize of this gem was that he didn’t have to detonate it manually. While he had to cause the explosion himself by actively channeling the magic in his modified magelight, all he had to do with these was fill them up and have something else throw them. Granted, that second part might take a bit of time to figure out. Maybe more than he had. Something he could do immediately was embed them in the walls to stop any attempts at digging a way out. Then again, he didn’t need to. He could just make the mana flow similar to mithril again for the same effect. Out of ideas for immediate usefulness, Dawn tossed them to the back of his mind.

Next was food. The dark pegasus had a lot of the packed and dried grasses and traveling herbs, enough to feed an earth pony for a week. Dawn missed food. He dissolved its matter and put it into his storage cave under the mountain, committing its structure to memory even though it would be pretty much useless to recreate. He could feed anything he made directly with mana. But it seemed he could still feel nostalgia, and he had a pretty much unlimited mem—

He pulled the emergency brakes on his train of thought, carefully studied the section of tracks it’d been moving over, and restarted it at a snail’s pace.

If he had an unlimited memory…

Another inch.

And he could absorb, change, and recreate anything…

The train followed a bend in the tracks and accelerated.

Why hadn’t another, larger dungeon taken over the world by now? Were ponies stopping it? He didn’t think so. He couldn’t do anything with the mana that was touching a pony’s own aura except move it and maybe pick up some information, but that wouldn’t stop a sufficiently powerful dungeon. It could just create a bunch of its own creatures and overwhelm the ponies that way. Even after only a quick overview of pony magic, Dawn knew it worked extremely inefficiently. They had so much mana gathered over their lives, and so much of it wasn’t even necessary. Whole sections were just...junk. Any dungeon would win, with enough time. The only things stopping it were the instincts. The unnatural fear of going outside, of hiding the heartstone. The unstoppable desire for balance. Maybe even the inability to use mana to directly interact with ponies…

No natural creature felt that way.

The train dipped under a bridge, followed a tangent.

Pegasi were adventurers. Almost none of them were content to settle down in a town. They wanted action. A few who felt comfortable breaking the stereotype confided that they wished they could have a break from such an active lifestyle, but that they felt nothing they did would matter. Earth ponies with the right training could feed entire villages single-hoofedly, create gemstones that would store massive amounts of magic, make a thin layer of shale sturdy enough to use as a shield. Unicorn apprentices with their own dedicated training could use the shale to build that castle, could manipulate the atmosphere and change the weather for miles, enchant one of the earth pony’s gemstones to work as a shield against said weather. Against that, a pegasus would likely feel pretty useless. They had their own weather-manipulation talents that worked on a much finer level, but there’d have to be an entire team with dedicated training to match a single unicorn.

Dawn had had a pegasus device, an ancient wonder from the old days said to have been created when pegasi had their own unique discipline similar to earth ponies or unicorns. The glass globe with its swirling blue energy had been able to convert minute amounts of lead into pure gold. Then it had broken, and the one pony who was able to fix such things had refused, not believing he’d be able to pay her back. He hadn’t dared to tell her what it did for fear that she’d simply take it, so he’d taken the path to the nearest dungeon in search of something he could take to buy her services.

He was getting off track. The point was that the pegasi of old were supposed to be able to imbue objects with intelligence. Everything he knew pointed toward dungeons being constructs, not because he had evidence for it, but because nothing made sense otherwise.

A red pegasus, pressing something small and hard against his forehead.

The memory seemed flat without the extra senses magic provided to go along with it, but Dawn could still remember every moment in cold, precise detail. She’d bound him to a dungeon, taking his soul before it could go Beyond and sticking it to the gemheart. Why?

Dungeons had restrictions. They were built for a purpose, probably something to do with the feeling Dawn had that things must be balanced. Combining a dungeon’s purpose with a pony’s instincts meant… What? Did she want to change how dungeons worked? Why not make changes to the gemheart directly instead of putting a pony’s unpredictable soul inside of it?

He didn’t know, and after a few more minutes thinking in circles, he decided to save the entire issue for later. His first order of business was still to survive.

That was all the dark pegasus had. Dawn dissolved his body and saddlebags, then went over to the amber one. She had another bottle with mana-infused liquid as well. Dawn dissolved the slightly-different feeling health potion and went on to the next thing. There was also some food similar to what the other pegasus was carrying, Two rusted iron bracers with mana coiled up inside of them, a phoenix egg with runes carved onto its shell Dawn couldn’t yet understand, and an eyepiece with its own store of mana. Like everything else he didn’t have time to pick apart and study, they would probably all be extremely useful if he had more time.

So what could he do? Dawn could still use the pegasi’s magic systems without taking the time to understand them. He used a huge portion of his magic to recreate the dark pegasus’s mana network in the air. The huge amount of mana made it look like a ghost, and even an earth pony would be able to see it hanging in the air. It reminded Dawn of a windigo, the ice-spirits that haunted areas of conflict and buried entire countries under snowstorms. He fed the thing some mana and gave it instructions to shoot a fireball. It did so, then silently whinnied. Dawn froze in his inspection, startled, then carefully peeled away his contact with the construct. It didn’t freeze or collapse into pure mana, but instead pawed at invisible ground and flew through the ceiling, then stopped there and curled up and held still as if sleeping.

That was...interesting. It looked like more than just a pony’s magic was connected to their magic system; so were their instincts. It didn’t looked to have any trace of the mind that had once controlled it.

Dawn tentatively brought it under his direct control again. It looked like it’d be effective against any invading adventurers, but he’d need to see exactly how effective before spending such a huge chunk of mana on it. It flew down to his mithril testing chamber under his command, then stopped right at the edge of the mithril and refused his command to go further. Dawn hadn’t known his constructs could do that, but he supposed he’d kept enough of its former instincts intact that it retained some semblance of its former autonomy. Anyway, he could take even more direct control of it and simply force it to enter the chamber. It wouldn’t be able to resist that. But first he wanted to see why it refused.

It looped around the chamber with no problem, but wouldn’t go inside. Dawn directed it to go back into one of his tunnels, and it did so with no problem, so it wasn’t that it liked to be inside rocks and didn’t want to touch air anymore. It was like the mithril…

Sometimes Dawn wished he still had a head so he could bang it against something. Here was yet another example of stupidity. It didn’t want to touch the mithril. Dawn made it touch a hoof to the surface of it, and mana immediately started streaming out of the ghostly creature. It threw back its head and opened its mouth as if screaming in pain, and Dawn hurriedly made it withdraw. It was...fainter. The mana it held was still evenly distributed, but almost an entire fifth of it had been leached away in less than a second of contact with the enchanted metal.

The mithril glowed a slightly brighter blue with the extra mana, slowly converting the excess energy to light. Dawn extracted it and thoughtfully returned it all to the ghostly pony, restoring it to its previous state of brightness, then directed it to return to the entrance cave and throw another fireball somewhere. It left a scorch mark on the floor.

So it could affect physical objects, and most likely ponies, but only with magic. Dawn idly directed it to set itself on fire, and its mana started to drain at a steady rate. That meant it could attack anypony he wanted it to, and unless they had mithril it would be untouchable. He sent it a command to dip through the floor and come back up, and observed as the stone was scorched and blackened while the dirt in direct contact with the ghostly manifestation turned to ash, then made it stop using its magic. He refilled its mana and disentangled himself from it, leaving it to its own devices. It promptly flew back to the previous spot it had been at before he’d taken control and curled up once again. It looked like it was absorbing ambient mana not under Dawn’s control from the area. It didn’t seem to have a limit on how much it could contain at once.

He was definitely going to use the windigo-like creatures in his defenses. First, though, he recreated a few of the magic-infused objects he’d absorbed. He needed to know what its weaknesses were.

Pretty much anything with runes, it turned out. The magelight grew bright enough to rival the sun with all the magic it took in, the orbs with the unstable runes leached mana until they exploded, the iron bands sucked in mana without any outward effects, the phoenix egg glowed and was probably about to hatch until Dawn absorbed it (he didn’t want to hatch the enchanted bird unless he knew what the enchantments were), and shadows sprang up and spiraled around the edges of the monocle. Dawn also tested the healing potion, just as a control, and surprisingly it leached magic as well. Did ponies figure out how to carve runes into liquid? It needed further study, but he was under the curse of a time crunch, and so couldn’t investigate and had to ignore the burning desire of curiosity, which he was sure was stronger than when he’d been a pony and was probably part of being a dungeon.

Satisfied with the effectiveness of his inadvertent creation, Dawn brought up his memory of the other pegasus, resulting in another ghostly blue phantom floating in a cave. It swooped around a bit, then flew through the ceiling and curled up next to the older mana construct which, interestingly enough, had already gathered a significant amount of mana seemingly from nowhere. Did it somehow take it from the rock? Was there mana Dawn just couldn’t see? More questions that would have to wait.

Dawn wanted to test its abilities with ice, but refrained. They’d probably be similar to the fire ones. Still, he’d created a windigo, or at least a decent approximation of one. A ghostly creature of frost that could only be fought with runic weapons.

He’d created two highly effective defenders, but he still needed more. He couldn’t ignore the uncomfortably small amount of mana he had left. All the magic he’d absorbed from the two pegasi’s deaths was now stored in their...mana ghosts? It was about ninety percent of all the mana he had access to.

If only the unicorn had been caught in the blast. The ability to make shields anywhere would be extremely useful, and a mana-thing with levitation might be able to snatch things from adventurers without even touching them.

He needed a name for their species, if he could call it that. Windigos wouldn’t work, as they obviously weren’t vengeful spirits of the north. Mana constructs was too general. Shades implied they still had their souls with them. After a few moments of consideration, Dawn settled on just calling them phantoms.

He let them stay curled up in solid rock and began the preparations for the rest of his defenses. The dog he kept in the first chamber. He could use it to gauge the relative strength of any adventurers by how quickly they destroyed it. He’d leave it without sound, as that was something else that would take study to figure out. He could probably detect it by the way it passed through his magic and learn to replicate it through trial and error… Anyway. The dog. It took more mana than he liked to maintain its other realistic aspects, so he dropped those too. It no longer moved anything like a natural animal, instead using its limbs in the manner that would most quickly get it to its destination. Its eyes didn’t move, always staring straight ahead with a glazed look. The water eventually evaporated from its system. If Dawn was still a pony, he’d probably be terrified of it. As it was, he looked it over with clinical disinterest. It would do.

The makeshift jungle was still growing.

He’d converted the floor to a soft, peaty dirt that would sink underhoof and grew firmer the deeper it went as a base for his jungle. If enough ponies walked on it, the ground would eventually compress and lose the sucking feeling he wanted it to have, but that was a long-term problem that he’d have to ignore for now. The adventurers hadn’t given him any grass seeds, so the trees and vines and bushes grew on bare soil. Dawn could extend a bit of mana he had infused in the mountain and surrounding area and grab a sample to reconstruct for his jungle, but aesthetics were unnecessary, and besides, it would take more mana to keep grass alive without a heat source. He still needed to figure out a way to get the magelights to output more heat, or convert mana to heat directly. Right now, despite the bright lights on the ceiling, the atmosphere made it abundantly clear that everything was underground.

That was fine. Mana was a powerful source of energy, so much so that even the fraction he had compared to one of the adventurers was more than enough to keep an entangled quasi-forest two hundred meters in diameter thriving. Dawn tweaked the quickly-growing plants, causing them to shift and move until he was satisfied he had a thicket that even the most agile pony would have to hack away to pass through. It wasn’t until he finished that he consciously noticed what he’d done to the lighting. The trees stretched almost to the top of the cavern’s fifty-meter tall expanse, casting everything below in a mild shadow, which deepened under smaller trees, and turned menacing when the light filtered through vines and tall shrubs. The area ponies would have to go through would necessitate an external light source.

It wasn’t enough. Dawn could and would use the fire and ice phantoms—on second thought, maybe just the ice one—to attack invisibly from within the tangle of underground forest, but he needed to have more to rely on than just them. What if they brought some sort of device with runes that drew in the phantom's mana from the distance? They would be completely useless. He couldn’t use more animated dogs—apart from the mana issue, there was also the fact that the extremely dense growth would hinder them just as much as ponies, with their almost-equivalent size and damaged systems that Dawn didn’t have the time to figure out how to fix.

The tentacle plant the first adventurer had given him might work, but any competent adventurer would easily kill it, and Dawn couldn’t grow it too large as it wouldn’t be fast enough to pose a threat, and without his magic directly supporting it the tentacle plants would die under their own weight at a certain size. But maybe he could incorporate their ability to move into the other plants.

He still remembered the twisting mana that flowed through its seed when it was growing. It would take time to figure it out, but he didn’t think it would take too long, and it would make his forest much deadlier.

Dawn plopped a vine down into his testing chamber and clumsily added the bits of structured mana he thought relevant to it. It died shortly after, and didn’t make a single twitch. He mentally sighed and formed another vine, conscious of a clock with an unknown deadline ticking down as he worked. This time he added the entirety of the magic that gone into growing the tentacle plant. It went into stasis, every biological function freezing as if time had stopped. That effect could be an interesting trap, but Dawn doubted he’d figure out a way to apply it to an unwilling adventurer before they came. He made another vine and melted the previous one into the slush of material he had in his storage chamber. The stuff was extremely dense and was slowly sinking down through the earth. He’d worry about making mithril walls for that if he beat back the adventurers. He re-added the magic to the new vine, except a strand he thought was probably unnecessary. It failed as well. He went through several more iterations before he found the specific formation of mana necessary to animate the vine. This would all be so much simpler if he could read what each twist and pulse of mana meant.

Dawn forced the combination of mana onto every vine in his jungle, and some of the other plants. They died.

After some more rounds of intense experimentation, hasty correction, and reapplication, he had it working for some of the shrubbery, allowing the bushes to flail their branches around in a vaguely intelligent manner.

He would have to find the right formation for every single plant he wanted to enchant. A fierce determination to do it no matter the amount of time it would take almost overcame him, but he stopped himself. His efforts wouldn’t be as effective as he’d thought, and had taken too much time already, but continuing would only exacerbate the problem. He had huge vines that would seek out any ponies—or animals; almost anything that moved, really—and wrap around them. The spell included hollow thorns that drank the blood of anything they pierced. If they caught anypony, they would die a horrible, drawn-out death that would take hours to end, unable to even cry out. Dawn would’ve been horrified at the prospect of causing that kind of death as a pony, but now the thought only caused a mental shrug. That was the price of being careless enough to be caught.

Still, it gave him pause. He needed to make a backup of himself before it was too late, if he could, though he knew his reasons were different than before. Before, when he’d still been mostly a pony. Now he judged himself more than half dungeon, and unafraid of whatever the end result might be. A backup to compare with would be a good idea in any case, as it would satisfy his inflamed, insatiable curiosity.

He’d do it after another one or two finishing touches to his defenses. Something so deadly even that first adventurer wouldn’t be able to easily brush it aside.

He conjured up a modified vine to his testing chamber, and caused it to form with the mana gathering symbol from the magebomb. It moved, and the fibrous material that made up its length flexed and changed, breaking the symbol. Dawn abandoned his efforts and broke it apart. This would require some thought.

Anything that could move or grow would disrupt any runes on them. If the runes were too small to for movement or growth to affect them, they wouldn’t be able to channel enough mana to do anything. Maybe he could create a sort of shell it formed and shed periodically? No, the shell would have to flex with the vine. A temporary one on the tip? One that it would form and shed after using? That idea had promise, but it would take way too long. He’d have to figure out how to manipulate its genetics to form a shell in the first place, find out how to make the shell appear with runes built into it that wouldn’t be deformed, and all that was without considering where it would get the minerals or nutrients to make it. Sure, there was iron in blood—Dawn couldn’t directly affect ponies with mana, but he could read them, and he’d figured out what made up a pony’s blood before he’d even had the luxury of two dead ponies he could do experiment with however wished. Anyway, there was iron and other minerals in blood, but that would mean a vine would only form its shell after first killing a pony. Or Dawn could give it whatever it needed directly, but…

He was overthinking this way too much. The only reason he could see for such an inability to see the obvious was that dungeons just thought that way. He upgraded the attempt to make a backup his mind free from the dungeon’s influence from ‘idle pursuit of curiosity’ to ‘necessary to not accidentally die of blindness from obvious solutions.’ All he needed to do was form the shells directly around the vines. It looked like dungeons thought in long-term solutions to problems, not short-term ones that would be the quickest to get things done.

Dawn formed the magebomb runes on a shell and put it around another vine. It worked, but it would take a direct blow to the shell to crack it and cause an explosion. Dawn took some time testing the durability of certain materials, making sure they wouldn’t crack if the vine was going to be able to simply snatch a pony and secret it away, and also so it would probably break if the vine faced heavy resistance. Then he put the new additions on every vine in the underground jungle.

He then focused on the testing chamber and redoubled his efforts to duplicate his personality. He’d gotten far enough that his attempts didn’t always result in explosions or inert chunks of crystal, but the other result was a stone that, when he connected with it, spewed meaningless gibberish.

A single scout probed his defenses, lightly scoring his dog’s snout before retreating.

Dawn ignored the intruder, though it was difficult. It wasn’t an invasion, not yet. He still had some time. In his desperate accelerated attempts to recreate his personality without the dungeon functions or restrictions, he accidentally did the opposite, forming a cold mechanical dungeon that immediately started sucking in mana and dragging mana around itself to scan the surrounding area.

Dawn instinctively pushed the full force of his mana against the other dungeon before he knew what he was doing, even the parts he’d had swirling around as his eyes and ears. He couldn’t shift the mana he had infusing the solid rock and dirt of the mountain so easily, but that didn’t stop him drawing on his phantoms. They’d almost disintegrated before Dawn stopped himself from inadvertently dismantling them. Then the other dungeon was gone, and the mithril walls bore the blacked scorch marks of their contest. Dawn hurriedly returned the phantoms their mana before trying again, this time especially mindful of which parts he was cutting and which he was preserving.

Then the swirling mana he’d replaced into the air interacted with a pony coming through the entrance. Dawn’s latest attempt gibbered at him, and he reabsorbed it before turning his attention to the adventurers. Another entered, and then another. Before long, there were fifteen standing across from his dog, which would have been growling if it was still alive.

It was time.