Dungeon Runner
The Tiger Writes
sciencefiction
sciencefiction
31K5
Tibs survived by picking pockets; until he's caught.
Instead of losing a hand, he's sent away and told he must now survive a dungeon.
How is a kid who knew nothing more than his ...Bottom Rung, Chapter 64
The darkness was filled with sounds.
"Why isn't he waking up?" a woman demanded, and the answer dissolved into mist.
The sounds weren't alone. Shadows flitted around the darkness, sometimes in unison with the sounds, others not.
"No. I am not leaving," a man said. "You clerics had your chance. Tibs is going to pull out of this without your help."
He was Tibs.
He was in the darkness. But he didn't remember why. Why he'd come here. Why he'd wanted to cut himself from... why he'd done this.
With the darkness came sensations. Discomfort. Something he didn't want to feel anymore.
"Why didn't you call for me!" a man yelled.
"What would you have done, Alistair?" another man answered. "You think I don't have enough to deal with already? The nobles are demanding to be let into the dungeon because they paid for it."
"Let them," Alistair snapped. "Let the dungeon eat them instead of these children."
"I would if I could, but it's closed off again. We barely got the boy, his team, and Bardik out before another slab of dungeon stone came down. Any later and we would have been trapped in there, eaten ourselves."
The man was wrong.
Tibs didn't know how he knew, but the dungeon wouldn't have kept them in, he'd waited until they were all out before sealing himself shut. Why had he sealed himself?
In the darkness came memories of pain.
A woman lying on rags, a boy curled up against her, clutching to her corpse, unable to understand that he was alone now.
Cold, cutting through him, the rags on his back not enough to keep him warm. The pain of not sleeping because he was afraid that his small fire would go out and with it so would his life.
A beating when he wasn't fast enough from snatching the cooling bread on the windowsill, but the satisfaction of having taken a few bites out of it before he was caught. Of finally having something to quiet his stomach.
The pain of landing on hard dirt, the fear of what was coming. Looking for a way out of the cell, but the guard had taken all that was his, and they were watching them in the cell, laughing. This was the end for him, he knew. A thief with only one hand didn't live long.
The pain of making friends. A girl with a bow, a woman with a sword, a man with an amulet, others; there and then dead.
He'd be joining them.
Dungeon food, that was all he was good for. That was why he'd been sent here. To feed the dungeon.
"How did you know?" a man asked. He knew the voice, had heard it in the darkness, talking to Alistair. "It's my job to protect this place, and he managed to sneak all that corruption under my nose. How did you know what he was doing?"
Tibs knew, he realized, because he'd played a part in it.
"This thing lets anyone follow where I've been," Bardik had told him, indicating the brand on his left wrist. "And I'd rather no one knows I'm involved in this."
So he'd gotten Tibs to drop the message stones. Signals the time was right for... Something.
He knew what Bardik was up to because the dungeon had called for him. Yelled in pain, and Tibs had heard. It was something Tibs could do that no one else did. Something about him was different.
"Clever boy," an old man had said, "but not clever enough."
Pain.
Pain so deep it would erase him completely. Pain he took on so the dungeon wouldn't have to. He'd already suffered enough.