Chrysalis

Holy mother of all that is good and gracious in this world, puh-lease let me make it alive! I’m burning up! The light is fading! My soul is running before the light! Is that you mum? What is that you say? You wish I’d never been born? Get the hell out of my death vision, human mum! Bring out my real mother, the Queen!

Gawd, I’m delirious. Which is interesting since I’ve actually not quite run out of mana in my core yet. I’m down to vapour, make no mistake, but not quite out of gas just yet.

No, wait. Check that, just ran out.

Oh my word, it hurts! I feel like my soul is suffocating!

[How much further Crinis?!]

[I don’t know master, I can’t see!]

DAMMIT.

[Tiny! Do you know how much further we need to go?!]

[Hurts]

[I KNOW that! More than anything in this world I know it! Do you have any idea how much further we have to run?!]

[... No]

I swear by all that is sacred and loved in this world Tiny, if I survive this, I’m going to shrink your muscles until your arms are limp noodles and you have the brain power of two young Einstein’s. You won’t be able to fight and will have to sit around sipping tea, discussing the latest in particle physics. Only then will my wrath be sated!

It can’t be that far away. I feel as if we’ve been running for ten hours but that can be attributed to my panic and anxiety. If I were to try and guess now it would have to have been closer to two hours.

Argh! Holy smokes! That tickled me right in the pain zone. How do describe the pain of having an empty core? It’s as if my magic lungs are empty and I’m in a vacuum. No matter how hard my core tries to pull mana in it just isn’t getting anything like enough from the air above ground. My monster body consumes far more mana to operate than can be replaced outside of the Dungeon.

to get down below,

pain into the back of my awareness and focused on pushing my little legs until they were on the edge of snapping. I don’t care if they break, as long as I get below ground and away from this

this is going to be an issue for her

Ten feet tall, the stone column stood to one side of the cobbled road, words and arrows carved onto its surface. Fantastic! We’re close! I circled around the edifice and found an arrow that pointed away from the road, into the surrounding woods. That’d better be it. If I could read

all of my might. I’m not willing to dash in

my HP looking? GAH! Already down 10%?!

GOGOGOGOGOGO.

before us. A small fort in the middle of a forest. A ludicrous thing in normal times, but

stone I beheld the most glorious sight of my life. Inside the walls, cut straight through the earth is a wonderful crack, dim blue light leaking out of it. Precious mana! Without a shred of hesitation I leapt from the wall and scrambled toward the crack, Tiny not

eye on this particular crack in the ground. Not wide enough to be considered a ’Dungeon Entrance’ and

But I will!

is excruciating but I grit my mandibles and bear it. It’s time

is only a foot wide, not enough for me to slither into and certainly not enough for Tiny to back his commercial barge into. There

DIG!

zen of ant living and dig you mana-less

pace, dirt and stone was flung into the sky as

sweet touch of mana flowed more smoothly out of the Dungeon and into my parched core. It still wasn’t

Dig! Dig! DIG!

earth before he threw it over his shoulder. In a short amount of time we had managed to dig out a bowl shaped basin deep enough that both Tiny and I had our heads below ground level but it still wasn’t enough, so we concentrated on digging a narrow tunnel straight down, following the crack into the Dungeon

deeper we went the more mana seeped into our cores until finally sweet relief was

we

few hours before Morrelia found us. I awoke to the sight of her head poked

Ugh.

of torpor at the very least I’d managed to recharge my core back up to

twitched as I stretched them until the joints cracked. There is still some residual pain in my body from the damage I sustained when my core was empty. I wonder what exactly causes that damage? Does my body fall apart at the

Interesting questions.

are