In a world where dungeons weren’t just perilous challenges but thriving ecosystems governed by arcane rules, adventurers flocked to seek fortune and glory. The dungeons themselves, semi-sentient and bound by ancient magic, lured challengers to balance their internal worlds. If a dungeon grew too quiet, it risked collapsing into entropy; too crowded, and it might explode into uncontrolled chaos. It was a careful equilibrium managed by dungeon cores—crystalline entities imbued with raw intelligence.

  A young woman named Lira had no interest in the intricacies of dungeon politics. She was a proxy—a hired representative who entered dungeons on behalf of wealthy patrons too cowardly or unskilled to face their challenges themselves. For a fee, Lira would take their contracts, fight their battles, and retrieve their spoils. It wasn’t glamorous, but it paid enough to keep her tiny apartment above the alchemist's shop and put food on the table.

  The morning began like any other: Lira nursing a lukewarm mug of tea while flipping through the latest postings in the adventurers’ guild. She skimmed past the smaller jobs—delivering rare herbs or escorting caravans—until her eyes landed on something unusual.

  “URGENT: Proxy Needed for Exclusive Dungeon Access. High Pay. Immediate Departure.”

  It wasn’t the promise of gold that intrigued her. It was the location. The job was in the Marrowdepths, a dungeon that had been closed off for decades. Rumors said its core had gone dormant after a cataclysmic collapse. Dungeons weren’t supposed to recover from such events.

  She signed the contract before anyone else could claim it.

  When Lira arrived at the Marrowdepths, she found her employer waiting: a pale, gaunt man dressed in extravagant robes that shimmered like oil on water. He introduced himself as Harvin, an arcane scholar. His request was simple: retrieve a specific artifact from the dungeon’s heart—a shard of its core.

  “I’m not here to plunder,” he assured her, his voice smooth but hollow. “This is a study of dungeon mechanics. I need to understand how it revived itself after collapse. That shard holds the answers.”

  Lira didn’t care about his motivations. She cared that he was paying her triple her usual fee.

  The entrance to the Marrowdepths loomed ahead, a jagged maw carved into the stone. As Lira stepped inside, the air grew heavy with magic. The walls pulsed faintly, alive with veins of glowing minerals. She felt the dungeon’s awareness prickling at the edges of her mind.

  “Unusual,” Harvin muttered behind her. “It’s... watching us already.”

  “Dungeons usually do,” Lira said, her tone dismissive. She had dealt with enough to know they were always waiting for intruders.

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  But this one was different.

  The first few chambers were deceptively straightforward: skeletal sentries wielding rusted blades, traps that clicked with predictable timing, puzzles whose solutions came almost too easily. Lira’s instincts screamed at her. Dungeons didn’t become legendary by being this easy.

  In one chamber, she faced a hulking golem of stone and bone. Harvin, who had been trailing nervously, whispered incantations to ward off stray attacks while Lira dodged and struck with precision. When the golem crumbled into rubble, she noticed something strange: the fragments began to reassemble, but not into their original form.

  Instead, they shaped themselves into words etched on the floor: “WHY ARE YOU HERE?”

  Lira stepped back, her pulse quickening. “Dungeons don’t talk.”

  Harvin looked fascinated. “They don’t. Not like this.”

  The dungeon repeated its message, the words glowing with an eerie light. Lira hesitated before replying, “I’m here for an artifact. A shard of your core.”

  The response was immediate: “LEAVE.”

  Harvin stepped forward. “We can’t. We need—”

  The ground beneath them shifted, and the walls began to close in. Lira grabbed Harvin by the arm and ran, barely making it through a narrowing corridor before it sealed shut. The dungeon was no longer playing fair.

  As they ventured deeper, the traps grew crueler. Rooms filled with illusions designed to confuse and isolate them, enemies regenerated faster than Lira could cut them down, and the dungeon’s magic seemed to whisper directly into her thoughts.

  Harvin started to falter, his initial excitement replaced by fear. “This isn’t natural,” he said. “Dungeons aren’t supposed to resist like this. They’re constructs, not sentient beings!”

  “Tell that to this one,” Lira snapped as she pried open a hidden door to escape a collapsing room.

  When they finally reached the dungeon’s heart, they found it pulsating with a deep, ominous glow. The core was larger than any Lira had seen before, suspended in midair by tendrils of energy. Beneath it lay the artifact Harvin sought: a shard, jagged and radiant, like a splinter of starlight.

  As Lira approached, the core’s voice filled the chamber.

  “DO NOT TAKE IT.”

  She froze. “Why not?”

  The dungeon’s response was laced with sorrow. “THE SHARD IS ME. I SPLIT MYSELF TO SURVIVE. REMOVE IT, AND I WILL DIE AGAIN.”

  Harvin stepped forward, his face twisted with greed. “It’s just a dungeon. It’s a construct! Take it, Lira!”

  But Lira hesitated. She had seen enough to know this wasn’t just a typical dungeon. It had evolved, become something more. She looked at the shard, then back at the core.

  “What happens if I leave it?” she asked.

  “I WILL ENDURE. I WILL LEARN. I WILL GROW.”

  “Lira!” Harvin shouted. “You signed a contract. Take the shard!”

  Lira made her decision. She turned her blade toward Harvin. “I don’t break contracts,” she said, “but I also don’t work for people who don’t deserve to live.”

  Harvin’s protests turned to screams as Lira fought him off, forcing him to flee back through the dungeon. The core, in turn, rewarded her with a clear path to the surface, unharmed.

  When Lira returned to the guild, she found Harvin had already spread lies about her abandoning the mission. But Lira didn’t care. The Marrowdepths had chosen her to protect its secret, and she wouldn’t betray it.

  As the years passed, the dungeon’s reputation grew, attracting new adventurers drawn by rumors of its living nature. And in her dreams, Lira sometimes heard its voice, whispering gratitude from deep within the misty abyss.

  The Covenant was changing, and Lira would ensure it thrived.