The Dungeon Fairy: Two Choices: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 2) Jonathan Brooks (online e reader TXT) 📖

“Sir!” came a voice from behind him, cutting Lily off in midsentence.  Malachite turned around to see one of the Fairies monitoring the giant map covering most of the room – Chrysanthemum or Chrys for short, if he recounted her name correctly – trying to get his attention.  “Look!” she said, pointing to the map’s upper quadrant, where the northeastern part of the Abenlure continent was located.  Oh, no….

The Council Leader quickly homed in on what was obviously the issue being pointed out to him.  The light indicating a Dungeon Core was blinking rapidly – which he knew wasn’t a good sign.  In fact, it usually only happened…

Sure enough, the blinking stopped, and the light started to fade away, leaving yet another dungeon bereft of a Core because it was destroyed.  Malachite could only hope that the Dungeon Assistant had a chance to have their Bond broken before the Core’s destruction.  “Which one was that?” he asked.  He hadn’t gotten a chance to check out that information himself before the tragedy happened.

Lily came up behind him and said tiredly, “That was Marigold’s Core; I think they were just coming up on their millennium mark together.  I hope she got out before…”  Her choked-off words echoed Malachite’s own thoughts regarding the Dungeon Assistant’s well-being.

“Perhaps that was a fluke; these things do happen, after all.”  He hated to say that out loud, but if he hadn’t said it – no one would.  Malachite didn’t like to trivialize the destruction of yet another solid, reliable Dungeon Core, but he was also trying to be optimistic.

“I hope so,” Lily said sadly, staring at the Balance Bar as it tilted back to where it had been a month ago.  “For all of our sakes.”

The next day, another Core was destroyed, on the complete opposite side of the continent of Abenlure.  Again, there didn’t seem to be any correlation between the types of Cores that were destroyed; they both used wildly different creatures and traps in their construction, one had been nearly 1,000 years old and the other just under 400, and they were in completely different regions.  They were also far enough away from each other that it was highly unlikely that the destruction was done by the same source, though that was still a possibility that they had to consider.  The only thing they had in common, in fact, was that both of them had been operating within the Rules and Regulations set out by the Council.

There was no putting it off any longer: Malachite was going to have to visit with the Conclave of Sages to see if he could find out what was going on.

He looked at the others inside the Council chambers, which included those that helped with the everyday workings of the Council and the other Council members, and he could see that knowledge on their faces as well.  There was nothing else that they could do, because for all that they could tell, most – if not all – of the Cores that had been destroyed had been following the Rules agreed upon by the Council and the Conclave years and years ago – far before Malachite had even been born.

“Alright, I’ll be going.  If you don’t hear from me within 24 hours, and things start to get worse, you’ll have to spread the word to all our Assistants to enact Defense Protocol 1,” he told the Council members as he fluttered to the middle of the room.  There was no reason to go anywhere special, as he could Translocate from just about anywhere.

“But that—” Lily started to protest, but immediately corrected herself.  “It shall be done.”

Malachite nodded and closed his eyes, picturing the Conclave location that he hadn’t visited in nearly 1,000 years.  There was a good reason for that, though, because it was dangerous every time he had to visit; while he had quite a few powerful Abilities as a Dungeon Assistant Fairy at his disposal, it paled in comparison to what the Sages could do – or had been able to do in the past.  That was mainly because the members of the Conclave were originally Raiders – and extremely powerful ones at that.

They originally came about during a time of chaos and instability in the world, when Dungeon Cores and Raiders both were unregulated.  Cores and their dungeons varied wildly in unpredictability, verging on the outright impossible at times, but the Raiders at the time were equally brutal and wild.  Eventually, a small, central group of Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Orcs came together and conquered every dungeon in the world, destroying those that weren’t “playing fair” – at least by their rules.  They became so powerful that there wasn’t a challenge left to them anywhere to be found, so these Raiders created what they called the Conclave of Sages, which was filled with those that had achieved the ultimate in strength and wisdom.

Really, though, it consisted of Raiders whose lives had been extended through the grueling process they went through to get stronger.  Most of them were violent and just liked to kill things, but some few of them were actually quite wise and developed a series of “Rules” they wished the dungeons to abide by, so that their children and children’s children (and so on) could reliably delve through dungeons and get stronger themselves.

Malachite wasn’t there, so he didn’t know the exact details, but a collection of Dungeon Fairies that had been assisting the Dungeon Cores all that time got word of these proposed “Rules” and jumped at the chance to help implement them.  The Balance of primordial force in the world was dangerously out of proportion, so anything that would prevent the wholesale slaughter of their charges (who, for the most part, were trying to be fair) was something that they were all for – if only to save the entire planet from destroying itself.