The stone gate closed behind Kael with a gross wet sound, like skin sealing up a cut.
He turned around just in time to see the last bit of sunlight disappear. His torch flickered, making shadows dance all over the entrance room.
"Just another job."
He said it to himself, but the words felt wrong. This was supposed to be his last run before he quit. One more map of this messed up place, and he was done. The air got thick with the smell of rot and something else... something that smelled like metal and hungry.
Kael pulled out his paper and charcoal, his fingers already covered in sweat and dirt.
Time to earn his way out, or die trying. He'd mapped tons of dungeons in his six years making maps, but this one felt different.
The job promised enough gold to pay for memorials for everyone he lost at Barrow Falls. Five names carved in stone, five ghosts that still showed up in his dreams. This map would finally let him sleep at night. If he lived long enough to get paid, anyway.
The entrance room pulsed with a weird rhythm, like the whole place was breathing around him.
Kael shook his head and tried to focus. Just lines on paper, just another job. But the beat matched his own racing heart, and he couldn't shake the feeling something was watching him.
The first hallway stretched ahead, his torch barely lighting up the far end.
Kael unrolled his paper and started drawing the entrance layout, his hands moving fast and smooth. After all these years, making maps was easy for him. His hands knew the angles, the measurements, how to write down every detail.
But as he drew the first hallway, something weird happened. The charcoal lines on his paper started moving, crawling like bugs across the page. They rearranged themselves into patterns he didn't draw, making new angles and passages that weren't there seconds ago.
Kael blinked, rubbing his eyes with his gloved hand.
The lines settled, but now they showed a hallway that was kinda different from what he was looking at.
"Just tired, playing tricks on me."
He whispered it, but even he didn't believe it. His hands shook as he tried to draw the right layout again.
The walls pulsed with a slow beat, like a heart. Kael pressed his hand against the stone and felt warmth coming from inside. This wasn't normal. Dungeons didn't have heartbeats. He'd been in tombs older than kingdoms, ruins that saw empires rise and fall, but never anything like this.
His torch caught something shiny overhead.
He looked up and his blood went cold.
Rows of super sharp teeth lined the ceiling, slowly grinding together with a sound like crushing bones. They weren't stone or metal... they looked alive, like the mouth of some giant monster.
Kael swallowed hard and kept walking forward.
No turning back now. Every step he took, the hallway seemed to change behind him. The shape felt wrong, angles that shouldn't exist in real life. He stopped to update his map, writing down the strange way the dungeon was acting.
As his charcoal touched the paper, the lines moved again, more aggressive this time.
It was like the dungeon was watching him draw, reacting to what he was doing. He'd never seen anything like this in all his years. The old teachers never talked about living dungeons in their books.
They wrote about traps, monsters, treasure... but never about the dungeon itself being alive.
The truth hit him hard.
"I'm mapping a creature, not a place."
His job prepared him for lots of dangers, but not this. Not for the building itself being his enemy.
Panic started creeping in, cold and sharp. Kael decided to go back, to return to the entrance and figure things out. But when he turned around, the hallway had already changed. The entrance was gone, replaced by a hallway that bent in impossible ways, breaking all the rules of the layout he mapped just moments ago.
His torch showed walls that weren't there before, passages that went nowhere.
The dungeon was actively changing around him, reacting to him being here. Kael checked his map again, hoping for some hint, some way out. The paper showed a completely different layout now, one that matched the impossible hallway he was standing in.
Kael pressed his back against the warm, pulsing wall, trying to breathe steady.
His torch flickered, making the moving lines on his map look creepy. The paper shook in his hands as he watched the charcoal marks rearrange themselves, making new passages that weren't there before.
The metal smell was getting stronger, like fresh blood, and he realized it was coming from the teeth grinding above him.
The dungeon wasn't just changing around him... it was actively rewriting everything.
Every time he tried to write down its layout, it responded with a new setup, like it was playing a game with him. A game he never agreed to play. The air got thicker, the metal smell stronger, like blood in the wind.
Kael could hear something moving far away, something that sounded like footsteps but wasn't human.
His torch started to dim, the flame getting smaller like the dungeon was stealing all the air. He dug in his pack for another torch, his fingers shaking. The walls pulsed faster now, the heartbeat speeding up.
The teeth in the ceiling ground together harder, sending dust and small pieces raining down.
He needed to keep moving, to find a way out before the torch died completely.
"But how can I get through a place that won't stay mapped? How can I escape a dungeon that fights against everything I try to do?"
Kael looked down at the paper in his hands, at the lines that seemed alive.
And then he saw it happen right in front of him. The charcoal lifted from the page, moving around without him touching it. The dungeon was drawing its own map, and he was just holding the paper.
"The map redraws itself while I'm staring at it, and now it's drawing a path straight to me."
Every mapmaker knew the first rule. Never let the map know you're watching.
He just broke that rule, and it was watching back.
The path led deeper into darkness, where something waited. Something that had been expecting him.