Back in those days, I spent most of my time at the outskirts of town fucking about. I had a group I tended to stick around, most a bit younger than me, and we’d do everything we could think of that didn’t involve making ourselves pleasant or useful for other people. Most days we indulged in a bit of stolen beer—which was one of the major products of Shepleberry—and all days we’d indulge further in a lot of complete uselessness.

  Agry was what you might call the lead of the group, behind myself. Not as tall, not as broad, but mean and confident in a way that those who effortlessly attract deference from others tend to be. He wasn’t present today though, sick. Lucky bastard.

  Vara was, not to put too fine a point on it, the tits. That’s not to reduce her in any way, you understand. It was simply the role she played in the group. A big pair of tits that the boys all ogled and fought over. Back then I didn’t think much of her at all—except of her tits—but looking back on it I suspect there was a great deal more to her than met an unscrutinous eye. She had a way of getting what she wanted usually without even asking, and the kinds of competition that emerged as all the drooling idiots in the group vied for her attention felt a bit too intense to have emerged organically.

  Laryck was the last, another boy. So I hate him. I didn’t back then, of course, but these days, in retrospect, I’m baffled that I could ever tolerate the stupid fuck for more than a sentence at a time. He was the only one in the town bigger than me—and, going by my occasional trip beyond on one of my father’s caravans, bigger than everyone in the surrounding towns too. Well over six and a half feet, and with a natural bulk that told me he was born to sit on a farm and lift heavy things when instructed. Good thing, too, because he was about as stupid as a draft horse.

  Those were the main three, not counting myself. Everyone else in the group tended to be more of a hanger-on. At that point the only other one with us was Wobbly Will. William Bertwot was his full name, but we called him Wobbly Will on account of the fact that he weighed about a hundred pounds more than he should have. Short-ish, but broad at the shoulder, he carried much of his weight around in a belly the size of a cauldron. It wobbled when he moved at any speed. We were, as you can tell, not a particularly creative group.

  There’s only really one day I could start this story from, because most of my time back then was, frankly, unimportant. I did not do anything of substance, and only lounged around eating and drinking and fucking as I did all I could to avoid actually working at my father’s behest. A single day can rarely be pointed to for the beginning of any great change in the world, but in my case the choice is obvious. And it was one of the more harrowing days of my life to boot.

  It started out ordinarily enough, with the three of us—or four, rather, counting Will—seated on an old stony wall at the town’s outskirts. It was Rebic built, some said, which would’ve made it well over a thousand years old. It certainly looked its age, almost seeming on the verge of crumbling with every moment.

  While the wall would probably have interested a historian, who actually thought about things in his day-to-day life, it did not have any great intrigue for us. And so, inevitably, the conversation drifted away from it.

  “Did you all hear about the collapse at the city’s outskirts?” Laryck began, in that hesitant, almost worried way the ever-so-stupid tend to have of asking anything at all. Anticipating the mockery before it can come.

  This time, there was none. None in any appreciable amount at least. I was lounging before the wall a few feet from the rest, eyes closed and belly buzzing wonderfully with the heat of my stolen beer. It left me in quite a good mood.

  “What collapse?” Vara asked, being one of only two among us who didn’t feel the simple, sheepish urge to feign knowledge where she had none at all times. The other, of course, was Will. Yours truly was the sheepiest sheep of all.

  “Well,” Laryck began, “there was a collapse.”

  All of us waited for him to continue. He didn’t. Had trouble finishing a thought, sometimes, did Laryck. Most times really. He needed some coaxing.

  “Collapse where?” Vara pressed, hiding her annoyance. “What collapsed?”

  “Oh!” Laryck’s face lit up in the corner of my vision as he understood what she was getting at, nodding earnestly .”Right! Apparently it was the Dungeon.”

  My eyes snapped open at that, and my whole body went stiff as a week-old corpse. I just barely resisted the urge to sit bolt upright for fear of shattering the all-too-deliberate easy mastery of which I’d spent so long convincing the rest of the group.

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  The Dungeon. You won’t know it, of course. Or, if you know the name, you won’t know the place referred to here. It was, in truth, not so grand a thing in the wider scope of Uros. Underground, and ancient. It was a structure of stone and thick cobbles, though I’d never done more than glimpse it before.

  I was not exactly a typical peasant, you understand. Born with wealth and education into the class of merchants, my upbringing hadn’t instilled in me quite the same level of instantaneous fear that most common folk came to direct at anything unknown or mysterious. But it wasn’t superstition that made the Dungeon feared—it was just common sense. That and instinct, of the sort a rabbit feels when it sees the shadow of a hawk.

  But minor details like grown men quivering in their boots over it didn’t mean I would be admitting my fear back then, of course. I had that most common and intoxicating of drugs in my system—youth. And so my face remained as stony as the underground chambers we discussed.

  “And what exactly did this collapse do?” I asked, bolstering my voice with a fair bit more volume than was strictly necessary. I said it all sneering and contemptuous-like, as if I somehow felt superior to the Dungeon itself. This is because, as you have no doubt noticed already, I was a moron.

  “I heard it exposed a chamber.” Laryck explained, growing excited now, losing himself in the telling. “An entire one, I heard you can actually access the Dungeon now!”

  Again, I froze. Now as young and stupid as I was back then, I did have a sense for where things were heading. I knew there was only one inevitable end to this trail of conversation.

  The Dungeon, though something of a cultural touchstone around Shepleberry, had never actually been explored. The whole thing was walled off for the most part, separated from the outside world by slabs of stone thicker than a castle wall. A few men had, over my life, tried to gain entrance—to widen some of the periodic cracks through which the interior could just barely be glimpsed. All of them had failed. There was just too much work to be done, too much stone to be hacked away at. A lot of pickaxes had been blunted in the effort of removing a measly foot or two from a single point of entrance. They hadn’t even given us a better view inside.

  A collapse was one thing, the Dungeon doing anything at all was always one thing, but to have it exposed to the outside…

  “I doubt it means anything.” I sniffed, thinking fast and talking faster. “The damned floors are…What, a dozen paces deep? More? And it’s so dark in there, with so hard a stone bottom, that simply dropping into the place is no more feasible now than it was when solid walls warded us off.” If I was asked to venture in, I would have said yes. Because I was a big, brave man. Idiot that I was, that was all I really cared about, that illusion. So I feigned disinterest instead, scepticism, indifference. Avoiding a dangerous thing because it was dangerous would have been embarrassing, actually doing it would have gotten me killed. So I tried to pass it off as beneath my notice entirely. A manly, respectable sort of attitude which had the benefit of keeping me just as far from danger as pure cowardice.

  Vara, of course, saw through it instantly. She always did. I realise only now, in retrospect, how much of our interactions came down to her subtly tormenting me. Seeing my facade for what it was, recognising my desperation to uphold it, and using that to box me into one thing or another. I’d thought myself smart, that I was keeping her around just so long as I had to root her. She, on the other hand, had recognised all the power she had as the prettiest girl in town, knew how quickly it would vanish once she gave me what I wanted, and kept me chasing after her like a slobbering dog.

  “Surely you can get your hands on some rope—your father must own a lot for tying down cargo. Or are you worried to cross him by stealing it?”

  If you learn anything from this era of my life, let it be that a young man is no match at all for a young woman.

  “I’m not, of course.” I snapped. “But there’s still the darkness.” The flimsiest excuse so far, this time it was Will who perforated it.

  “We can just bring a few torches and drop one down.” He pointed out. God, I wanted to strangle him then. I made a silent promise to myself that I’d inflict some great cruelty on the boy later, and forced a smile.

  “Right, of course.” I grinned. “It wouldn’t be hard to get in at all.”

  Inside, I was rather less happy of course. The easier it was to get in, the harder it would be for the town tough to not get in, and the more likely I would find myself to be horribly killed. Vara, the evil woman that she was, pressed the issue.

  “I’ve always wondered what the inside really looked like.” She murmured, as if just idly thinking aloud. “Would someone here take me? I’d be so grateful.”

  She licked her lips as she said it. Among adults, or people well into adulthood that was, it might have been a bit much. It was just the perfect touch for young, dumb males.

  “I’ll take you!” Laryck declared, speaking at the exact same time as Will.

  “I wouldn’t mind going!”

  Not a single one of them remained quiet, and the pressure to actually go along with their idiocy was mounting by the second. Leader of the group as I was, I still balanced on a precipitous place, socially speaking. If I was less courageous than the pack at large, I’d be disgraced. Such is the idiocy of adolescence.

  “I don’t see why you’d need company to look around some old ruin,” I sighed, “but fine, I’ll escort you.” I stood up as I said it, stretching and unveiling my full height. I expected Vara to be nice and impressed by my great manly stature. She probably thought I looked like a fool. Which was correct.

  Vara’s eyes lit up and her lips seemed to inflate, I only heard half of what she said next because I was busy staring at those lips and imagining what I might ask her to do with them later.

  “Right.” I nodded, once she’d finished making noise. “Of course.” We all parted ways at that, heading home to prepare for our little adventure.

  Which was the worst mistake of my life.