Dungeoneering

Dungeoneering:

 

Shelyn had several years of experience looting ruined dungeons—or at least snatching whatever scraps she could salvage from them—so when that stone slab closed behind her, she didn’t lose her cool.

True, she didn’t like having overlooked a trap; but she couldn’t locate the slab or the mechanism that had triggered it. Logically, it should be somewhere in the chamber she now stood in.

Although the room itself made her think of some twisted kind of magic, because when she tried to light it with her torch, what she saw there was highly suspicious.

For starters, the chamber was perfectly cubic—which was strange enough in itself.

In the center there was a pedestal with a key resting on it; a couple of steps to the left of the pedestal stood a mirror, and on the far wall, a door bore an inscription that read: “Exit.”
A strange bluish, luminescent liquid coating the walls revealed more to her eyes than the torch alone could have.

Shelyn thought you didn’t need to be a professional… dungeon-delver? She wasn’t sure of the word. Dungeonist? Dungeonette? Well, whatever. The important thing was that this room was a trap.

But why such an obvious trap? The whole point of a trap was to go unnoticed until the adventurer triggered it—and then harm them.

Was this some sort of architectural sadism? If that were the case, maybe whatever had triggered the slab at her back had been in the threshold itself, meant to crush her rather than trap her. But Shelyn hadn’t done anything special to dodge it—she had simply walked inside.

She used an extendable staff to knock the key from the pedestal without touching it, but nothing happened.

Then she checked with the staff that the floor tiles and the walls didn’t hide any pressure mechanisms.

She tossed a few objects around, in case there were movement sensors of some sort, then picked them back up.

A little recklessly, she touched the key with her finger. Nothing happened. So she picked it up and tried it in the lock. It fit, but didn’t turn. She couldn’t exactly say she hadn’t seen that coming.

She took out her lockpicks—because you couldn’t go around dungeon-delving without a good set of picks—but, predictably, the lock wouldn’t budge.

After a moment’s thought, she tried opening the door without inserting a key at all, but—for whatever reason—that didn’t work either.

That left the mirror. And Shelyn knew that the combination of mirrors and forgotten, dark ruins usually led to trapped creatures from the other side of terror, dangerous journeys between strange planes of existence with no clear way home, sickly interdimensional cults—or a pretty redhead staring at you from the other side. But usually Shelyn wasn’t lucky enough to just see her own reflection.

She could swear her reflection had looked normal before, but now, of course, it was a strange version of herself: more leather, paler skin, definitely more scars, clothes dangling with too many chains, something like needles piercing her arms and forming a kind of carapace, and a threatening attitude.

Shelyn examined it with curiosity.

The creature began ramming against the mirror, fracturing it, while Shelyn watched with interest. Then the other broke through and stepped into the chamber.

“Hi. You’re not some kind of metaphor, are you?” Shelyn ventured. “I don’t like metaphors,” she tried to explain clumsily.

“That’s a strange question,” the other Shelyn replied. “Not that I know of. Are you? Can a metaphor ask another metaphor if it’s a metaphor?”

“No, and I have no idea,” the adventurer answered, confused.

“Didn’t it occur to you about the mirror?” asked the other, pointing at the gap left between two rooms that shouldn’t connect the way they did.

“No, I’m a bit slow. I thought I was the correct me, until now, that is,” Shelyn apologized.

The other Shelyn circled the mirror, glancing into it as she passed: those two rooms posed a serious geometrical problem.

“Cool, huh?” she said, grinning.

“I have an idea.” Shelyn went to what remained of the mirror, crossed through, and took the key from the other side. She tried it in the lock, and this time the door opened.
The other Shelyn was going to the same but on the other side the door was already open, of course.

Each crossed their respective door. The next room was rectangular, but now the mirror covered the entire ceiling, and each saw the other walking upside down.
The mirror wasn’t really a mirror, at least it was not reflecting them, though it mirrored the rest of the room perfectly. And fortunately, they could hear each other through it.

“Do you think this makes sense?” asked Shelyn.

“I quit drugs years ago,” the other replied, “so probably not.”

On the far wall was a small plaque in cursive script.

“This one says…” Shelyn began. “will exist? There’s even an interrogation mark.”

“This one says Does free” the other pointed out. “What do you think?”

“Is this a logical problem or an emotional one?”

“Philosophical, I think.”

“Yeah, yeah, but from which angle do we solve it?”

“Put it this way,” the other proposed. “Is our mental activity determined or not? If it is, then we don’t own it. If it isn’t, then it’s random.”

“I don’t like that idea…” Shelyn admitted.

“If our mental activity is determined,” continued the other adventurer, “then it’s determined by something in our mind or by something external. If external, then no free will. If internal, then we’re just postponing the problem. Because we can ask again: is that thing in our mind determined or random? Either way, we don’t control the situation.”

“But what the hell-ohhh…” Shelyn had always believed free will was essential, of course. Without it, you had to answer a whole host of questions about ethics, responsibility, and punishment that very smart people—though perhaps not smart enough to answer them—would have to face. And yet, free will suddenly seemed like nothing more than an illusion, shattering like that first mirror in the first chamber.

At the same time, her fear that some idiot who thought free will didn’t exist might justify any atrocity vanished, because that was the stance of someone who didn’t really grasp the matter, since the agent is always accountable and society always protects itself.

“I’m not making a point,” Shelyn said, surprised at her own words.

“What?” asked the other, intrigued.

“I mean if someone asked me what I mean, if there’s no free will…”

“Oh, yeah. I’m too old to go around making points, too,” her interlocutor agreed. “Free will doesn’t exist,” she declared theatrically.

The far wall stirred and produced a door.

Both opened it and stepped into the next room. This one was white and bright.

They were both in the same room, at the same time, in the same place—being one.

There was absolutely nothing in the room, not even the door they’d entered through.

Shelyn ran her routine tests: checking for pressure, motion, or sound sensors; for cavities, reliefs, protrusions, or any hint of seams in the smooth wall.

There was nothing.

So Shelyn—or both halves of her—sat down on the floor and began to think.

On the bright side, she wasn’t hungry, nor did her bodily functions seem active. In other words: she had all the time in the world.

At first, she thought about her situation with urgency. Then she relaxed. Then she reflected, grew bored, began questioning the meaning of her existence, who she was, what the world was, she tought silly thoughts, and cycled through those stages again and again.

After what felt like eternity, she stopped thinking, because it wasn’t taking her anywhere.

Then she relaxed into the silence.

It stretched out in every direction; who she was blurred into the walls of that chamber, and her mind became a mirror reflecting everything.

And yet, within the silence, she began to think again: her brain told her life would be very boring if there were nothing in her mind, that she couldn’t give herself up completely with all that story on her back. And that story—who she was—settled heavily on her shoulders once more.

Her fears pounced on her in a merciless struggle; doubts appeared, wounding her; terror dragged images from the past, full of darkness and of all the wrongs she had suffered or, more often, had inflicted.

But it was too late: Shelyn had already realised that her idea of herself was a strange lie no one tells anyone.

Her mistakes were her wisdom, and her pain and worries pointed to the problems she needed to resolve.

And she saw how all that darkness filling her body disappeared, leaving empty spaces that, instead of sealing, let the light shine through.

Shelyn didn’t like metaphors: you could never trust them, because they never meant exactly what they claimed to mean. To her, they had a dishonest streak, and that’s why she hated becoming one.

She valued sincerity—tempered with empathy, of course—above all else.

So she relaxed and returned to silence.

She realized words could never transmit that stillness—at best they could name it, destroying it in the process.

And she wasn’t sure, but maybe—just maybe—metaphors were a way, incomprehensible if anybody asked her, of escaping the limits of language.

Silence, in any case, struck her as the better solution: it was honest, and meant exactly what it was.

Silence felt like remembering something important, like coming home, like the calm of knowing you were where you belonged.

And so, with her body pierced by beams of light, she felt herself returning to herself.

The walls of that chamber opened, like petals in spring, and Shelyn found herself before a wooden cabin in the forest, beside a flowing brook: her home.

“Fuck me,” she muttered.

She still didn’t like metaphors: you couldn’t trust them.

 

    Dungeoneering  © 2025 by Marta Roussel Perla is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/