This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

The Church of Xuphin sent clerics over to confirm, and it was formally announced that Verity was joining the exclusive ranks of the Chosen. This position, if you could call it that, came with no formal training or duties. It held no powers. Instead, it came with status and the weight of expectation. The Chosen sometimes had divine revelations, or at least unique insights, and sometimes they contributed to the world a Great Work. If you were Chosen, it was because one of the gods had a plan for you, of a specific nature, or perhaps they knew something about you, something they liked. Given that Verity was a promising young bard, it was supposed by the clerics that she would contribute a song at some point, either a song of infinity or something of that nature. But sometimes, Chosen became nothing special. Whatever purpose their Choosing had been for passed by, unseen and unknown. The gods never offered clarification.

Verity had read up on the other Chosen of Xuphin, trying to understand what it meant. One of the most important Chosen of Xuphin was an ectad engineer who was responsible for discovering a stabilizing agent that could be used to nearly triple the lifetime of ectads. Another had worked on advancements in land reclamation, expanding territory out into the seas. A third had been the architect on the largest building in Dondrian. That was Xuphin: big, splashy, expansive, always more, driving toward the impossibility of infinity. Yet some of his Chosen seemed to be nothing more than tradesmen or teachers, simple, unchallenging roles. Still, there was an expectation that came with being Chosen—and a prestige.

Whatever doors had been closed to Verity before, they were now opened. She had offers to play with all sorts of people, and for all sorts of people, enough that at sixteen she had her own wealth separate from her parents. She was given special attention at the conservatory from all kinds of people who wanted to have the distinction of having helped her, or at least being able to say that they had. A few times, she played enormous concert halls.

And through it all, Verity felt that she wasn’t making her best music. She would play and people would preen, but her magic was weaker than most adult bards, and the praise of the bardic masters toward her musical ability seemed tainted by the fact that she was Chosen, destined for greatness in some capacity, if she didn’t end up becoming nothing instead.

She had done some work to set her affairs in order before leaving. She’d talked to the Church of Xuphin, which had tried to convince her to stay, and she’d talked to her parents, who had demanded that she stay, but she was seventeen, the age of majority, and no one had the authority to stop her. She left in the dead of the night, leaving a note behind but not saying where she was going.

Alfric surely knew all of this. Her status as a prodigy and god-favored was surely why he had sought her out. It wasn’t clear what Alfric thought she would do for Xuphin or Infinity, but presumably he thought she would do something. There were infinidungeons, she knew, not places with four or five rooms like the one in Pucklechurch, but the kind that were so deep you would never get to the bottom of them, if they had a bottom at all. There were dungeons in the heart of Dondrian that had fortifications built around them and which you couldn’t attempt without all manner of mages standing guard outside and a chrononaut to undo it in case something somehow got out. Perhaps that was Alfric’s ultimate goal. Well, if it was, Verity would simply refuse. She had been doing perfectly well pretending that she wasn’t Chosen, and it wasn’t like Xuphin or his church had any particular mandate or expectation for her.

“Strawberry hair / strawberry fair,” Verity tried, strumming her lute. “Strawberry wares, and strawberry prayers.” The lyrics were getting worse as her thoughts drifted away from the music. Sometimes the songs came easily and freely, as it had when leaving that first dungeon, and other times it was like she was stuck in the mud.

“I live in a garden, abandoned so long, I sit on the ground, and I sing my sad song, but with time, the garden, shall rise up anew, and at least, in my sadness, I’ll have a nice view.” Verity sighed and set the lute back into its case.

“All right, garden,” she said to the plants. “It’s time to start getting you into shape.”

With some time to take it all in, the garden wasn’t quite as bad as Verity had thought. There were almost certain to have been casualties of neglect, but they had likely died early on, and what was left were cultivated plants hardy enough to survive and a number of weeds that had put deep roots into the rich, loamy soil.