Peek: Isolated (Patreon)

Hmm? Well, would you look at that: an axe head! It's not often someone loses an axe, let alone one clearly enchanted like this one! I'll need to hang onto this and try to get a new handle for it. My old wood chopper has seen better days.

Speaking of chopping wood, help me get the fire started, and I'll tell you the tale of the only Cloistered dungeon I've ever been in!

Ah, that's good. While they get dinner ready, I'll tell the story. You see, just like that axe, sometimes even dungeons get lost. They're a lot harder to misplace, of course, but sometimes disaster befalls a place and people just forget about a dungeon. Sometimes it gets subsumed, sometimes it manages to hang on until people find it again.

And sometimes, dungeons get misplaced before anyone ever finds them. It doesn't happen often. Even a young dungeon will make waves in the local mana, and then the dungeoneers swoop in to investigate. But sometimes nobody notices. We actually have quite a few cloistered dungeons here in our Wanderlands, formed when a tribe spends just a little too long in a place before moving on.

Most of the time, we never discover there was ever a dungeon there. But sometimes one manages to stabilize itself, right under our noses. The sewer dungeon of Rest technically counts, but that one was only on its own for maybe a year or two. Properly cloistered dungeons usually need at least a decade to get established and strange.

The one I visited was in the Principalities, situated in an unknown cave system underneath a battlefield between two rival factions. The people of the Principalities are always jockeying for a better position, and the two settlements of Glenhill and Gladehill were no different. Two rival wolfkin factions, though I never bothered to learn why they hated each other. I was only there to delve the dungeon, which they also were constantly fighting over.

In fact, when I was there, the Dungeoneers had actually set up a bit of a neutral ground not far from the dungeon entrance, where they could realistically duck the taxes of both sides, pitting their jurisdictions against each other.

But this story isn't about Principality bureaucracy, it's about a dungeon. I had expected death affinity and maybe a rough belligerent dungeon, but it was a pretty relaxing toybox dungeon with air affinity, of all things. Now, the thing with cloistered dungeons is that they don't quite see the world like we do, or like other dungeons do, either.

We might think living below a battlefield would make it enjoy slaughter or something, but it never actually was able to see what was happening. It just knew there was regular noise coming from above. And this is where that cloistered mentality really shows. It didn't have anyone explaining the world to it, so it didn't know anything. All it knew was that invaders were bad, but not so bad it couldn't handle them.

It also knew that air could make sound when it would blow through a tunnel. So without knowing any better, it thought the battles above was just another noise made by the wind. And with having experienced little else, it tried to recreate the sounds it was hearing.

Of course, it didn't have a bard like myself to help guide it, so I wouldn't call its early attempts anything resembling music. It actually kept all its different attempts, all in sprawling tunnels, wind rushing through. The best of it was like wind chimes, while the worst was like throwing a chest of random junk down a hill.

But it kept at it, and that's what actually got it discovered. After one battle, eerie music wafted over the field, and those who could still walk made a hasty retreat. People started to suspect dungeon activity when the music became a regular feature of the area, and the two settlements now had something else to encourage them to compete and fight over.

The Dungeoneers eventually heard of it, and sent their own Investigators who found the source of the music to be a cave choked by a thicket of brambles, and an odd little dungeon that liked to make music.

It was one of my favorite delves, but I might be a bit biased. The music was so strange, so free. I'm still not sure if it was actually good, or simply so novel. Either way, I should try to head back some day, and see if it's gotten any better.

~Onthar, orc Bard Historian