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Nothing was more dangerous than a quiet road ahead. It was one of the first axioms drilled into the naive young fools that joined the Half-Foot Guild: a trap is a monster you don’t see or hear.
Chilchuck’s current excuse for a party was more than happy to send him into the unknown ahead alone. He’d usually be more pissed off, but he was looking forward to something to focus on outside of intra-party rivalries and sexual tension. With his bare feet pressed against the familiar grit of dungeon tile, he almost felt whole again. If he was nothing else–not a father, or a husband, or a man–Chilchuck was a professional, who did his job right–
Or maybe not even that. An unexpected click sounded from beneath him. Lost in thought, he hadn’t noticed the cobweb-fine tripwire until too late. It was impossible to miss the grinding of gears that followed, not to mention the slam of the door. Blinding light streamed in from overhead.
Illuminated in the center was the only other object visible in the room: a towering silver mirror. It was nearly three times his height, its edges studded with jewels. It took some willpower to keep his jaw from dropping to the floor; the craftsmanship was damn exquisite. In his years as an adventurer, Chilchuck had probably seen much larger, more valuable and ultimately gaudier gems, but this would be plenty enough to sate the treasure-seeking goals of the expedition. When they eventually got impatient enough to break down the door behind him, the team could chip it apart and head home for the month, maybe even the year. It would almost hurt to dissasemble such a pretty thing.
If they could survive coming in at all, that is. He wasn’t going to be stupid enough to move forward without careful inspection. There were no hollow spots in the wall, no other threads waiting to be snapped, or pressure points under the floor. The entire room seemed to be built around locking an inhabitant in, and letting time and frustration finish them off.
Or maybe , Chilchuck thought, giving a glance to his reflection, maybe they’d lose their minds with vanity. The mirror’s height made his tall-for-a-Half-Foot frame seem impossibly small. Bags and shadows hung under his eyes next to an outcropping of frown lines; evidence of six months of shit sleep in a lonely bed. It wasn’t hard to believe that his guild had suddenly grown apprehensive of this face, with his dry sense of humor growing cruel and sharp by his drinking and his age. The local altvarg shikker . Standing here, it wasn’t hard to believe that his wife found this Half-Foot in the mirror worth leaving.
The image shifted, erasing the lines from his eyes, rounding out his face, and darkening his hair, until he wasn’t looking at himself at all, but rather his daughter. Flertom, who had inherited most of her mother’s gentleness and beauty, carried a platter laden with dried fruit and cheese through her apartment. He remembered helping her move in, slightly after her fourteenth birthday. She’d brought him a similar snack back then, as he installed a new set of locks for her apartment door. His stomach clenched with hunger, and then churned with something worse, as Fler set the tray down in front of her guests: a handsome, unfamiliar dwarf on her sofa, and… a face he thought he might never see again. With the sultry eyes that kept him up at night, his wife beamed through the silvered glass. He watched her laugh shyly into her cup of wine. Not for him, but for the mysterious stranger in his daughter’s home.
Chilchuck tore his gaze from the image even as his imagination filled the rest in, racing like a spark through a fuse. Somewhere distant, in his more rational mind, his experience warned of mirror monsters that devoured one’s heart. What did it matter, if he didn’t have a heart left anyway? She’d taken it with her when she left, and now he was meant to focus on his work as an adventurer, as a union man overwriting the prejudice his kind faced. Glaring a hole into the stone of the floor, Chilchuck willed himself towards reality. He was here for a job, after all.
“Do you know how many generations of ‘your kind’ a dwarf can go through?” A voice vibrated the mirror, startling him out of his thoughts. He scrambled back, tripping on an uneven part of the pavement. Its shining surface showed his daughter, larger than life, leaning in to feed grapes to the dwarven stranger.
Fuck that. He had already done the math, back when Fler came home with her first crush and then opened another bottle just to stop thinking about it. Dwarves lived four times as long as his kind, which meant that any young suitor could pass over his wife for his daughter, and then his granddaughter, and even great-granddaughter without so much as a blink of the eye. Chilchuck had heard the stories. He’ll see her as a passing fling, around for a few years and then gone. His fingers dug into a stone jutting out from the floor. It would be one thing if only Chilchuck was replaced, but…
“Cheap labor, or cheap whores. You think the world won’t see her as expendable?”
The stone came loose under his nails, and–Chilchuck’s lack of strength be damned, he wasn’t half bad with a projectile. He hurled it at the mirror with all his might, blooming a spiderweb shape with a satisfying crack.
Glass and metal rained down. Behind the jagged edges of the remaining mirror, a black void gaped into nothing. No light or sound came from inside the impossible space. Impossible, he knew, because he’d stood behind the mirror himself, and it was barely two centimeters thick, hardly endlessly vast inside.
Sweat beaded at the nape of his neck. “… Ah, shit.”
A large section of remaining mirror fell at once, shattering onto the floor with a thousand false diamonds. From behind it, a kitten stepped out from nothing at all. Its footfalls made no sound, even on the broken glass. It was small, closer to the size of a toy than a real cat, but its eyes seemed to hold that endless emptiness from the mirror behind it. Its fur looked like real gold.
Something inside Chilchuck was screaming for him to run, but in that moment he couldn’t move. It was worse than any succubus he’d ever encountered.
“Don’t you wish for your beloved?” the kitten spoke with the mirror’s deep voice, sprouting wings from its back in order to float to his side. Chilchuck numbly reached for another stone, but his shaking hands scrabbled uselessly at nothing. In the black space that used to be the mirror, a misty image of his wife appeared, and then another, and another. Other, similar-looking women with features slightly changed appeared: her smile but with fuller lips, her face but with fairer hair. “I can do even better.”
The women were dancing and laughing. Holding his children. His daughters. Meijack was still counting on him to come home, to retire to their locksmith business. No, he thought, but couldn’t bring himself to speak. His mouth just hung open, unmoving with fear.
“Don’t you wish to help your people?” The voice pushed on, “Your guild could thrive here. You could bring your people prosperity and respect.” He could picture it, too: the dungeon halls retrofitted into shops and housing, rebuilt to suit half-foot size. Elves and tallmen stooping to enter his office, forced to bow to his authority. He could build as many walls as it took to keep himself, to keep his family protected.
“Ah. You wish you had been better.” The kitten crawled into his lap, it’s pale feathers tickling his sides, now. He let it squirm against his stomach, purring.
Chilchuck has been working within dungeons for more than a third of his life. He knew their innate workings: the sounds, the passageways, and the rules of his profession better than he knew his youngest daughter. He was one of the top hires of his union, his professional reputation far preceding him. Few were better at adventuring, and still sane enough to keep at it. One of the very few from when his union started (at this point, it was him and Dandan) that was still alive. It hadn’t been enough.
Fucking years of stinking, musty, dangerous tunnels with monsters that were bad and people that were worse, and Chilchuck hadn’t even wanted to risk his life at all in the first place. Absentmindedly, he brought a trembling hand to the kitten’s head. Never before had he touched something so delicate and soft. At first, they needed the money. Then, he couldn’t stand how his people were being used, mistrusted, and mistreated.
And then, at some point, after Mei started off in the locksmithing job, he just wanted to have done something his daughters would be proud of. He could give them all they ever wanted. He could keep them safe. I wish…
The door unlocked suddenly and silently, and the random, nameless members of Chilchuck’s party came through. Tallmen, gnomes, dwarves, all with awe in their eyes. He studied the shock on their faces as they took in the room.
Stacked store crates of armor and fine cloth lined the walls, propped up against chests laden with coins and aging barrels of spiced wine. Golden fountains poured fresh water in from elsewhere and light streamed in from a crystal in the ceiling. And in the center, a pristine mirror with jewels laid all around its frame. Chilchuck casually leaned against its cool surface. His wife and daughters stood behind his reflection, cooing and giggling over a golden pet with deep black eyes. Screw the cat, though, he only had eyes for his wife. He took in her image greedily, the way her hair curled against the silver he’d fastened around her neck, the worn skin of her hands bracketed with bands of jewelry. She’d never be wanting again.
With the flex of his hand, the door closed again, gears turning in the walls to reveal a series of blades in the ceiling. Corridors shifted beneath their feet. Above them, monsters sunk behind bars, making room for springs, triggers, and bolts. Coins from the floor beneath him sprouted wings, landing delicate and shiny in his palm.
All this was just Chilchuck’s job. He built his career on the smallest detail in locks and traps, on the furthest tunnels of the labyrinthine layout. It was simply an extension of him, the way his lockpicks were an extension of his fingers. Experimentally, he pressed a tile with his toe, and a blade dropped down from the sky.
The Dungeon was his livelihood, and he had work to do.