Krungus awoke with a gasp, cheek pressed against soft, pulsing ground. It gave slightly beneath his weight, squelching with every twitch. The air smelled rich and wrong—like spoiled wine in a locked cellar. For a long moment, he lay still, letting his ancient mind run diagnostics. Limbs: intact. Magic: null. Hat: missing. Eugene: nowhere.

  He sat up slowly. The landscape around him undulated with fungal ridges, spore-pocked vines, and tower-sized mushrooms that pulsed faintly with internal light. Strange spires rose from the ground like inverted roots, dripping with iridescent dew. The sky—if it could be called that—was a dome of moist darkness, alive with drifting specks of bioluminescent dust.

  "Nope," Krungus muttered. "Nope, nope, nope. I know a nightmare when I'm marinating in one."

  He turned in a circle, scanning for any clue. No horizon. No wind. No stars. Just the slow, rhythmic breathing of the place, as if the world itself were asleep and dreaming.

  He touched the ground again and flinched. It pulsed in time with his heartbeat.

  A laugh. Wet, sloshing, familiar in the way a fever dream remembers an old friend.

  "Hahahahaha oh Krungus! What a delight! Come, come! Wait til you see what I've been working on for the last 9,000 years! You're gonna hate it!"

  Krungus froze. That voice. That voice didn't echo, didn't bounce off cavern walls or fungal growths. It came from everywhere. From the spores in his lungs, the mycelium brushing his legs, the taste on his tongue.

  Rhyzomund. The name dropped into Krungus's mind like it had been there before. The so-called Lord of Decay. The one he'd banished millennia ago in a desperate gambit to claim a realm of his own—the very realm that would become Syzzyzzy. He'd stolen it right out from under Rhyzomund's rotting feet, sealed him away, and moved on.

  And now, apparently, 9,000 years later, he was back.

  "Rhyzomund," he said flatly.

  No reply.

  "Of course it’s Rhyzomund. Because where else would Coincidence toss me but into the mushroom-scented loins of my old nemesis."

  He stood, brushing phosphorescent fuzz from his robes. "Well. Time to go see what fresh hell fungus-boy has cooked up."

  He muttered as he walked, "It was a simple banishment spell. Should’ve dropped us into a safe pocket—an abandoned demi-plane, or a memory palace, or literally anywhere quiet. But no. Something rerouted it. Twisted it. Like it sniffed out where I least wanted to go and hurled me there. Which means... either the spell was tampered with, or some bigger force is at play. Coincidence, maybe. Or something worse."

  He sighed and recited an old rhyme he’d made up over 9,000 years ago while testing unstable portals:

  "Step through a shimmer, trust your stride— You might find peace, or warts inside. No plane is promised, no realm exact, The universe never has your back."

  "I thought it was clever back then," he muttered. "Turns out it was prophecy."

  He crouched beside one of the nearest mushrooms, brushing his hand lightly against its stem. A psychic vibration ran up his arm, not invasive, but curious. Investigative. And familiar.

  His eyes narrowed. "Wait a moment... I've felt this before. Back in the City. During the fungal outbreak. B'doom's mushrooms. The ones that went wild."

  The realization hit like a falling star. If these mushrooms carried the same psychic signature, then Rhyzomund’s influence hadn’t been entirely sealed. Maybe it had seeped out—infected spores smuggled through dimensions, or whispers carried along forgotten ley-lines. Or maybe B’doom hadn’t been acting entirely alone.

  Krungus straightened, heart pounding. "Oh, you clever, rotting bastard. You’ve been leaking into my world this whole time."

  And now he was here. In Rhyzomund's domain. Krungus didn't like anyone calling themselves 'lord' of anything, much less decay itself, and especially not when they had a personal vendetta. The idea of a sovereign entity with a nine millennia-long grudge was enough to sour his stomach.

  He took a step back from the mushroom and drew a slow breath through his nose. Time to test the waters.

  Krungus raised his hand and whispered a minor incantation—something harmless, a spark-light. The air resisted at first, but then shimmered faintly as a golden spark danced at his fingertip. He nodded. A second test followed: a cantrip of analysis, probing the rules of this plane. It worked, but not cleanly—the response was slower, more textured, as though the magic here ran through a thick filter of rotting thought.

  "Hmm. Interesting," he murmured. "The Weave's collapse in the City didn't touch this place. Of course it didn't. Different planes, different laws. Syzzyzzy has its own infrastructure, cobbled together from what's left of stolen space and time. And this place..."

  He knelt and pressed his palm to the soft mycelium floor, muttering a third spell—a diagnostic pulse meant to ping the magical lattice beneath any plane.

  The answer that returned was not a lattice, but a nervous system.

  "Oh gods," Krungus whispered, more disturbed than surprised. "It's alive. The whole damn plane is alive."

  Magic here didn’t ride the Weave—it trickled through mycelial logic, thoughts and instincts coded into roots and rot. No wonder his spells felt different. He wasn’t casting on the plane; he was casting through it.

  "Well. That's inconvenient."

  Which meant Rhyzomund likely knew he was here. Knew every step Krungus had taken since waking up. If the whole plane was alive, and Rhyzomund was its god, then every spore was an eye, every root a vein of awareness. Krungus grimaced.

  "This whole place is watching me like I'm bacteria in a petri dish."

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  He cast another diagnostic—an echo-check for lingering scrying spells. Nothing obvious, but that didn’t mean much. Whatever magic existed here didn’t broadcast itself in familiar ways. He tried a shielding ward. It flickered, then unraveled—subtly rejected by the plane, like a transplant organ denied by its host.

  His fingers twitched with growing dread.

  This place had been designed.

  Not grown randomly, not evolved over eons, but built. Shaped. Like someone had studied Krungus—his habits, his reflexes, his fallback strategies—and constructed an environment where none of them would work.

  "He planned for this," Krungus muttered. "He’s been preparing for me. He made a Krungus-proof prison. Gods damn him, that’s exactly what this is. Few things rattled a wizard like the knowledge that someone else had planned better. Wizards were supposed to be the ones who prepared for everything, who held the trump card in every pocket dimension, who had scrolls for every scenario. To be outmaneuvered before even arriving—that was a different kind of terror."

  A low ripple of spores trembled through the air, and then came the voice again, slithering through the fungal nerves like a mocking heartbeat.

  "Not exactly a prison, o forgotten one," Rhyzomund cooed, "more like a maze you'll never get out of."

  Krungus snorted. "Ya, that sounds like a prison still, Rhyzomund."

  He cast one more diagnostic spell, this time focusing on spatial positioning and temporal anchoring—an advanced spell he’d refined during his years in Syzzyzzy. The results unsettled him.

  They were moving. Not just across a plane, but through it. Their position in space-time wasn’t stable—more like drifting, or being dragged. And fast. Faster than any natural system should allow.

  "That’s not good," he muttered. "Either this whole realm is in motion... or it’s moving me."

  He sat still for a moment, letting the results settle in his mind. A few possibilities presented themselves. Maybe this was a planar anomaly, shifting naturally like a mobile island in the vastness of space between planes. Or perhaps Rhyzomund was transporting pieces of the realm using some fungal equivalent of dimensional conduits. Maybe even time itself had come unhooked down here, creating the illusion of movement.

  But the most plausible answer—and the one that chilled him the most—was also the simplest: they were in a pocket dimension being hurtled through space like a ship.

  "Oh no," he whispered, eyes narrowing. "You built a sporecraft, didn’t you?"

  Even scarier than the motion was the question that followed:

  Where was this ship headed?

  Eugene landed like a dropped coin.

  A crunch. A yelp. Darkness.

  He lay in pitch black, the world around him humming low, like a powerline buried too deep. His back ached. His head throbbed. His hand tightened around his staff, the lantern at its head flickering weakly. He lifted it and tried to light it.

  A warm shimmer. Enough to see.

  Stone walls stretched out in every direction, covered in mosses that shifted color when looked at directly. The floor beneath him was smooth obsidian, interrupted only by a body.

  Half a body.

  A woman Eugene didn’t recognize.

  Her torso was twisted, her lower half missing. She looked too skinny, her limbs gaunt and skin blotchy with discoloration. There was something wrong with her complexion—clammy, like she’d been stewing in fever dreams. Her body looked long dead, yet the wound at her waist was disturbingly fresh, raw with trauma. She lay crumpled in a heap against the wall, her hands still clutching a scroll half-burned from the inside. Her eyes were wide open, glassy with disbelief. Eugene scrambled backward, chest heaving.

  "What the hell…?"

  He took a deep breath, tried to center himself. This wasn't a battlefield. Not anymore. Wherever he was, it wasn’t the city. It wasn’t the Veil. And it sure wasn’t Earth.

  He lifted the lantern higher.

  The ceiling was about fifteen feet high, but the shadows made it seem infinite. Like a tower with no top. No sign of Krungus.

  "Krungus?"

  Silence.

  The lantern hummed. The shadows pulsed.

  The room around him was solid obsidian, smooth and polished to a mirror-like shine. There were eight doors total: three on his left, three on his right, one directly ahead, and one behind him. The six on either side looked plain—standard wooden doors, featureless and utilitarian. The one ahead was a large obsidian double door, its surface matte and unyielding, but one side stood slightly ajar, open about a foot. About ten feet in front of those double doors stood a suit of armor—old, humanoid, and motionless. It looked ceremonial more than functional, but something about its presence made Eugene uneasy. The door behind him was the most ornate of them all, covered in intricate carvings and delicate inlay, but it had no visible handle. Just patterns that hinted at meanings Eugene didn’t yet understand.

  He clutched his staff a little tighter. "Cozimia? Hazel? Anyone?" he whispered into the dim.

  Cozimia's voice emerged, calm but concerned. "We’re here, sweetheart. Wherever here is."

  Hazel Fortuna followed, her tone flickering with unease. "This place doesn’t feel Weave-touched. Could be a pocket realm. Or some conceptual trap."

  Another Jennie chimed in, one Eugene barely knew. "Could be between. Not one place or another. Those kinds of realms chew people up."

  "Do any of you know where we are?" Eugene asked.

  Silence. Then Cozimia again. "No, sugar. But the doors are a clue. They always are. Just don’t assume the fanciest one’s the way out."

  Hazel added, "If you can, try listening. This place might tell you more than it shows."

  Eugene nodded slowly, lantern trembling slightly in his grasp. He was still alone in the room—but no longer entirely alone in his mind.

  "Cozimia," he said, glancing around. "Can you, uh... maybe make this place a little less nightmare dungeon?"

  "Of course, sweetheart. Give me a moment," she replied.

  The room softened. The harsh reflections in the obsidian walls mellowed, taking on a warmer hue. A faint golden light seeped from the corners, and the temperature shifted just slightly toward comfort. Even the shadows retreated a little, replaced by an ambient glow like late afternoon sun filtering through gauze.

  But as the room brightened, the suit of armor in front of the double doors twitched.

  Eugene froze. A slow, grinding sound emerged as the armor attempted to move—but it was sluggish, halting, like something waking up after centuries of disuse. Its arms flexed once, then hung limp again.

  "Was that supposed to happen?" Eugene asked aloud.

  Cozimia’s voice returned, hesitant now. "That... might not have been me."

  Eugene crept forward, staff raised like a makeshift spear, the lantern swinging at its tip. Each step echoed with the soft scrape of boot on stone. When he reached within about four feet of the armor, it jolted to life with a sharp metallic clank.

  Eugene yelped and stumbled back, heart racing.

  The armor didn’t pursue—it simply stood straighter, gears inside whirring faintly. Then, from deep within its chestplate, a voice began to play, not spoken aloud but projected like a phonograph caught in a dream.

  The voice was unmistakable.

  “Welcome to the bottom level of my life’s work, also known as my prison. If you have made it here, I am either dead or imprisoned somewhere new. I spent the first one thousand years of my imprisonment here, becoming, as far as I know, the only wizard to ever master Constructive Sorcery. Eventually this floor became my storage so I could continue building the upper floors. There are 7 floors in total, the theme of this one being ‘darkness.’ You may find some impressive treasure here if you are so daring, unless someone has come before you and pilfered it. Beware of traps, however, and maybe try to avoid the plumbing…"

  (The recording paused briefly.)

  "Also, and I am not proud of this, there may be some… employees of mine still living down here. Well, by the time you get here it might be their descendants. There are a few groups of somewhat intelligent creatures and not-so-intelligent creatures living in the dungeon. If anything has survived by the time people listen to this, I have no way of knowing. Welcome to Syzzyzzy.”