The corridor beyond narrows almost immediately, forcing us into a slower pace than I’d like.
Nyx had been right. The deeper we go, the more obvious it becomes that this place wasn’t simply built to house a few hundred undead and some strange murals. It was made to hold against something.
Ancient barricades line nearly every bend, most little more than collapsed stone and rusted metal now, though a few still stand tall enough that we have to step around them carefully.
Thick iron spikes jut from the walls at odd intervals, some folded forward like old traps that never reset. But Nyx never stops us from moving forward, so either all of them have already been tripped, or there are simply none in our path.
In other places, narrow slits are carved into the stone at shoulder height, perfectly placed for archers or spellcasters to fire through.
And everywhere, branching passages.
Some lead only a short distance before opening into empty chambers. Others twist away into darkness so deep even my enhanced sight struggles to make sense of it until Bella quietly conjures small flares of ice-blue light to drift ahead of us.
They paint everything in a cold color that mingles with the torchlight of the main corridor, making the old stone seem even older somehow.
The first chamber we check looks almost like a barracks. Rows of stone-framed bunks line both walls, stacked three high, each little more than a narrow slab with shallow depressions worn into the surface where bodies must have rested countless times.
Or tried to.
There are no hints of decaying blankets, pillows, or softness of any kind.
Just… straps.
Leather long since dried and cracked hangs from many of the bedframes, some snapped, others still looped neatly where wrists and ankles might have been bound.
Seraphine stops beside one and frowns.
“That’s unsettling.”
“You don’t say?” I mutter, crouching beside one lower bunk.
At the head of each bed sits a shallow groove cut into the stone, with old silver threading worked into the edges. While rough and mostly unfamiliar to any I’ve seen today, it’s clear that these etchings are meant to be enchantments of some kind.
Channels where mana would travel for some purpose I could only guess at.
I push a trickle of mana into Relic Whisperer and get nothing. I push more and more into the Skill, rapidly increasing to dump whatever mana regen I have available into it, flooding the Skill with mana that does absolutely nothing.
I let out a disappointed sigh. “I got nothing. I can tell they’re enchantments, but they’ve long since died.”
Bella leans closer, scarlet eyes narrowing. “But why the deliberate restraint? This is no prison cell or torture chamber.”
My mind wanders to how Bella would know what a torture chamber looks like, then chalk it up to noble stuff that I have no desire to know.
“For sleeping?” Nyx asks, skeptical of the question even as he asks it.
“Heh, you mean for not sleeping,” I say before I can stop myself.
As they all give me curious looks, and my face flushes a deep crimson. Realization at my crass joke hits them at the same time, and Nyx snorts.
Seraphine and Bella shake their heads with disappointment, but I catch the twitch in Bella’s lips as she struggles to hold back her amusement.
In another passage we dip into, a few shelves still stand along the far wall, bowed beneath books that somehow survived the ages.
At least, until Nyx touches one.
The moment his fingers brush the cover, the thing collapses into grey dust so fine it almost floats before settling.
Bella huffs with irritation before pushing him aside. She reaching for another far more carefully than Nyx, managing to get her fingers around the spine.
Then it folds inward with the softness of ash. An indignant noise escapes her throat, and another few books disintegrate from the puff of her breath.
I can’t help it.
I giggle.
She whirls to glare at me, but her cheeks are dark with embarrassment.
Despite the moments of humor, we remain on high alert, checking each and every side passage we can get into as we descend further into the Dungeon.
One room that holds our attention for a bit contains long stone benches facing a wall. On it are faded inscriptions too worn to decipher, as though lessons had once been taught here.
The further we go, the more of the same we come across.
Barracks. Storage. Old defensive alcoves.
And absolutely no goodies that hadn’t already decayed beyond salvaging.
My mood worsens slightly at that, the sound of our footsteps and explorations echoing pinging around my brain in a way that quickly begins to agitate me.
The deeper we descend, the more the corridor seems to fold in on itself, each passage becoming shorter and shorter as it gradually guides us to a single point, much like it did when traveling to the Dungeon entrance itself.
All the while, I keep my eyes peeled for more goodies to sell on the surface—but find nothing that hasn’t already decayed beyond salvaging.
As we near another corner, Nyx appears from the shadows, a few paces ahead, one hand held out to stop us.
We all freeze, and for half a breath I expect an ambush. Another battalion. A trap.
Instead, Nyx speaks quietly.
“Someone’s there.” His hand shifts to point around the turn.
We ease forward until I can see past him. Around the next sharp turn, lit only faintly by Bella’s drifting flare, a single figure sits against the wall.
It’s completely still. Motionless enough that I immediately know it’s another corpse.
Ancient armor hangs from it in dark, rusted strips. A spear rests across its lap, the metal tip planted against the stone floor as if it had been forgotten.
The things skull tilts downward slightly, chin nearly touching its chest, as though it sat down one day and lost the will to stand again.
Then one hollow eye socket flickers, and I realize the thing is still alive.
Unalive? Gods, undead are needlessly confusing.
The faint green glow of its empty eye taints the blue of Bella’s light as it slowly lifts its head to look directly at us. One good eye remains, albeit clouded with blindness and surrounded by the rot of its own flesh.
It doesn’t move to stand, though. It just… stares.
And its jaw moves. Slowly. Repeatedly.
At first I think it’s some reflex as it imagines chewing on us. Then I realize it’s speaking. Or trying to.
The sound is so faint that I don’t catch it until we’re only a few paces away, and I cringe internally at the sound of it.
Dry. Cracked. Ancient. It’s barely more than a breath dragged through broken flesh.
“No sleep,” it rasps.
The jaw works again.
“No sleep.”
And again.
“No sleep.”
Over and over, each repetition sounding thinner than the last, like the words alone are all that holds the creature together.
Seraphine lowers her spear slightly but doesn’t relax. “What in the…”
Its gaze shifts between us slowly, listless and empty.
“No sleep. No sleep. No sleep.”
There’s no madness in it. No warning, either. Just a phrase worn smooth through endless repetition. Like it forgot everything else, and only those words remain.
Bella studies it quietly, her expression unreadable.
Nyx circles the area, careful to remain mostly out of the things line of sight.
A shiver crawls down my back when its dead gaze drifts back to me. Something in the way it looks at me catches oddly in my chest, and I can feel Dungeoneer’s Insight trying to help me piece things together once more but grasping nothing concrete.
It opens its jaw again.
“No slee—”
Seraphine moves. In one clean thrust, the spear punches through brittle bone and whatever remains behind it, straight through the center of its skull and into the wall behind it.
The green light flickers once, then vanishes.
She frees her spear in one clean motion, leaving the body almost exactly as it had been mere moments ago.
Seraphine exhales slowly through her nose.
“I really, really do not like this place.”
“Well, at least the name—Temple of Sleepless Vigil—is beginning to make sense,” I whisper. “Even if it’s creepy.”
After a round of nods, and a quick scan with Relic Whisperer, we leave the body behind.
Nobody speaks much after that. There just doesn’t seem to be much to say, not with those dry words still lingering unpleasantly in the back of my thoughts.
Our footsteps echo differently after the next turn, the sound stretching farther than it should as the passage widens once more.
Bella’s flare drifts ahead first, then she stops and speaks the first words we’ve heard from one another in what feels like hours.
“The murals changed.”
Instantly, our attention shifts to the walls.
She’s right.
The repeating cycle of Morena and Fylem steadily growing more and more disappointed is gone. In its place stands a single figure.
An old man.
Not old in the sense that they’re just worn, or lined with age the way Darla is.
He is old. Truly old.
His back bends beneath elaborate robes layered so heavily they almost swallow his frame, with a beard that falls nearly to his waist in thin strands. One hand grips a long staff so twisted and knotted it looks like he simply grabbed it from the side of the street, if it weren’t for the grooves meticulously etched across its surface.
Even the way his face is carved makes me pause for a moment. Age like that… shouldn’t really be possible.
Even average people with modest level growth keep their youth far longer than they should. They still grow old, but there is always a grace to it. Those with real power can look young enough to irritate everyone around them for centuries, but this…
This depiction shows a person that has lived far, far beyond any of that.
“What level would someone even need to look that old?” I murmur.
Nyx snorts softly. “High enough that they probably stopped caring what they look like.”
Even as he answers, he sounds distracted, his eyes tracing the depictions.
The old man isn’t simply standing there. Before him hangs a wide stone basin suspended in the mural by nothing at all, carved so delicately it almost looks like polished glass.
Inside it, the world repeats.
Tiny scenes spiral across the liquid surface in a mirror image of the scenes was witness coming this far. Morena, Fylem, people, faeries, nations, destruction… again and again, each smaller than the last, nested within themselves until my eyes struggle to follow it.
The old man stares into it with hollow intensity.
But unlike the the gods, he looks horrified.
Further along the wall, the story continues. The same old man walks.
Across forests. Mountains. Deserts. Every scene we saw in the previous murals, he finds his way there.
Always with that crooked staff. Always leaning forward as though every step costs him dearly.
And behind him, people gather. At first only a few. Then dozens. Then hundreds. Men, women, children, armored figures, robed ones, workers, scholars—whole lines of them following wherever he leads.
More and more trail in his wake, until they become uncountable specks in his shadow.
“He gathered them,” Seraphine says quietly.
“For what?” Nyx asks, transfixed.
In the next depiction, he stops. Beneath him, dozens of figures carve into the earth. Massive trenches and foundations, walls descending down in perfect angles…
It takes the shape of this place. The earliest iteration of it, at least, drawn layer by layer beneath the feet of those who built it.
Another mural—nearly as large as the depictions showing the old man—has tables lined with bottles, powders, strange roots, crushed minerals, and steaming bowls.
Medicines, or something like them.
People drink from cups while others grind ingredients beside them, then return to carve into the earth once more.
“That answers that, then. Though I’m not sure why he’d build this place after seeing those depictions,” Nyx pipes up again, then shrugs.
As the rest of my party turns their gazes forward, eyes set on the next corridor while scanning our surroundings for any additional clues or danger, my attention remains glued to the murals.
To a tiny detail that they seem to have overlooked.
While the murals have always been incredibly detailed, they have only ever depicted what seemed important to the story its creators are trying to tell.
And whoever made this took the time to etch every single wrinkle of the dark circles under every single pair of eyes.
I look back at the image of the countless figures within the old mans shadow and find the same tiny detail.
No matter how small the eyes became, no matter how many of them there were… each and every one of them are etched with impossible precision. The rest falls into place.
Their slumped postures, which at first I figured was simply the weight of long travel bearing down on them, I see in a new light. They are totally and utterly exhausted.
No… not exhausted.
Tired.
The name of this Dungeon, the undead’s words, and now this…
“No sleep,” I murmur.
Everyone stops to look at me for a moment, curious.
“They’re trying not to fall asleep,” I clarify, pointing at the last mural, where the people drink their medicines with hollow eyes. “They’re practically dead on their feet, but staying awake with medicines.”
They’re eyes lock onto the image again, and understanding lights their gazes.
“But… why?” Seraphine asks. “There are desirable facets to sleeping less, but to go so far… that doesn’t make sense.”
“And,” Bella adds, “there is simply no way each and every one of them has the Skills necessary to survive staying awake for so long. Some? Certainly. But all?”
She shakes her head then, expression dark.
“It is as you said, Emilia. They are dead on their feet. Though I fear it may be more literal than you intended.”
Quiet returns after that, tension building around us as we try to figure out what exactly the point of this place was. We move into the next corridor.
The murals shift once more, the same cycles returning—only now, the faces of the gods have shifted.
The sadness remains, but something harsher has settled beneath it.
Morena’s eyes, once soft with grief, now look almost severe in certain panels, while Fylem’s expression carries none of the weary patience shown earlier. And they no longer dote upon their creation.
Even so, the small ball of light remains between them in every image, and somehow that only makes the shift in their expressions worse.
As if whatever they watch is no longer simply tragic, but intolerable.
Each and every one of us shifts with discomfort under the glare of the gods themselves, though I try not to linger on it.
Mostly because every time I do, I find myself wondering whether the old man from earlier had looked at the same images and come to conclusions I don’t yet understand.
Down and down we go, unbothered by anything but the endless depictions, until Nyx returns once more with yet another change.
“Someone’s keeping this place intact,” he says quietly.
We find out what he means in the next chamber, its gates yawning wide open before us.
It’s larger than every chamber before it combined, but we immediately pause upon seeing the space.
There is almost no dust. No collapsed corners or shattered debris scattered across the floor, as there had been everywhere else.
It is still unmistakably ancient, but maintained in a way the rest of the Dungeon simply… isn’t.
The walls remain smooth, the floor mostly whole. Even the carvings here retain more color than they should.
The whole chamber resembles a larger version of the barracks we’d passed earlier, only far more deliberate. Row upon row of stone tables stretch in ordered lines across the room, each wider than the bunks from before and fitted with the same silvery channels worked into the stone.
And when we enter the space, we find that the depictions shift back to the old man and his followers tireless construction. But its different again.
People lie strapped down, eyes wide open as thin beams of light—mana, I assume—emanate from the enchantments and into the person upon the table. In the next image, the circles around their eyes have slightly receded, restoring them to a semblance of wakefulness once more.
Then the same figures return to labor. Mixing powders, drinking medicines, carving stones, building, then back to the tables once more. Over and over, the endless rhythm is carved into stone.
Work. Endure. Return.
One is different. The moment we spot it, Seraphine gasps with horror.
A single figure lies on one of the tables, only their eyes are shut.
They are asleep.
In the next image, it shows that same figure straining against the bonds as three others fall upon them with blades without a hint of hesitation or ceremony.
All the while, the sleeping figures eyes never open.
Even as they struggle against their bonds.
Even as they die.
“Gods and hells, what is this place,” Seraphine whispers, an involuntary shudder rolling through her body.
I stare at the mural a moment longer.
The blades are carved with impossible precision. So are the faces that hold them.
And though none of them hesitate, each and every one is weeping.