Page 77 of The Dungeon Book

“We need your help. They’ve captured Only-Sister, and Cornelius, and—”

“So?”

“We have to rescue them!”

The ghast gurgled words older than the Dungeon Tongue. “These are the Rules,” he said. “The keeping of the Dungeon is the common task of all. I keep the lower levels. Dragon the upper, gargoyle Throte the Master’s Tower. I keep. I wait. I do not rescue. This Yrn Kyos commanded, long ago.”

“If you won’t help me—” said Bait, then stopped. She had nothing that could threaten the ghast. “If you won’t help me, then show me the quickest way out.”

“The dragon,” said the ghast thoughtfully, “is dead. Your doing, yes?”

“Not just me.”

“Oh, nothing is forgotten by the dark. And the kill was yours, not mine.” The ghast settled back on its haunches. “But you did not need to kill him.”

“We.”

A flash of rotten teeth. “You could have left the Dungeon. Fled into sunlit lands where we Denizens do not go.”

“I wanted to stay.”

The ghast chuckled. It was not a pleasant sound. Indeed, there are fewer less pleasant sounds, and I am including in this accounting “the sound of a dagger penetrating your own ribcage” and the words “oh, it’s you”, both of which I am familiar with from my own experiences. “You said, Nithscalpa must die. This is power.”

“Will you help me or not?” demanded Bait.

“Follow.”

Bait has never told me what she saw down there. I do not believe she has spoken of it to anyone. There are sketches in her book, though, from which I can draw certain inferences. The ghast, I think, led her down through the fungal caves, through chasms of fecund darkness where even shadows fester. Down through the shattered foundations of the earth, past silent sentinels whose very existence is only hinted at obscurely in the grimoires of Yrn Kyos. Down beyond knowledge or sanity.

Until at last they came to a sealed door. On the lintel of the door was a human skull, yellowed and ancient, and when it saw Bait it chattered, calling out “nay, nay, nay” until its jawbone cracked. Upon the door was graven the Rune of Yrn Kyos.

The Dungeon was not a prison, but this door had a warden.

I imagine the ghast leaned in close, and whispered in poor Bait’s ear, saying: No Denizen can open the door. The Rules forbid it. Only the Master can open this door.

He said something similar to me, once, when I became Master, but I was a coward.

No doubt he spoke to Orphir, too, when I was busy decomposing. But the power behind that door was not the power he wanted. He wanted to rule the surface world, not destroy it.

Bait probably said, “What’s behind the door?”

And the ghast replied with a word that exists only in the Dungeon Tongue, for the surface world has no conception of it. Let me translate it, inaccurately and inadequately, as them.

Imagine wild magic given form and flesh and hunger. Imagine things that cannot be imagined, or described, except with babbling about eyes and tentacles and using the word “eldritch” a lot. If magic is the loose change lost under the cushions of a couch, then the things down there are the treasure hoard buried beneath the floorboards of reality. Tarnished and befouled, sunk in such a shit-pit that even the vilest, most degenerate wretch would hesitate.

Imagine them set free. Imagine them pouring down the hillside in a cataclysmic flood. Oh, they’d rescue the imprisoned Denizens – their cousins many levels removed, both born of the same strange magic – but the flood would not stop there. On and on they’d rampage. Dunshelm, Lastease, Eskerlund – and farther still. Who can plumb that pent-up reservoir? Who knows how deep the Dungeon goes? The surface, when you think about it, is thinner and frailer than onion skin, a mere wisp of green-and-sunlight clinging to the rocky shell of the world below. There are more horrors beneath your feet than can be imagined. I think, if you glimpsed even a fraction of what lay beyond that door, you would flee back to the sunlit lands and never contemplate opening it.

But Bait was different.

Desperate.

And in that moment she was willing to burn everything above to preserve everything below.

“How do I open that door?”

The ghast smiled. “No Denizen can open it. Only the Master.”

So she climbed.