I continued to stare at the mural for a solid minute, a frown on my face.
“What is it?” Carmine asked. “Some army? The demons attacking the skeletons? This is known.”
I shook my head. “This is the demons surrounding this fort. This mural depicts the demons attacking this fort with the expressed intent of reclaiming you… well, the princess.”
“So, the last mural had the Demon Prince come in and rescue you from that noble and then spirit you off to the capital. That didn’t happen. In other words, the lore that was revealed in the previous fort didn’t happen. This mural wouldn’t have come true unless I had already prevented that mural from coming true.”
‘What are you saying?’
“Either, the story somehow already anticipated my actions, or the murals are being created upon discovering the safe rooms. Perhaps, the lore of this dungeon has already degraded too much that the story is no longer cohesive. Maybe… the story is being written as we act it out.”
“What about this last part?” She asked, pointing to the end of the mural.
“If I’m right, then the story will continue to twist and change as we participate in it. It won’t just be me and you, but the others who had entered this dungeon as well, such as Bernard. Every one of our actions could cause the lore to change. When we look at a mural, we’re seeing what will happen next, presuming there is no interference.
“In this case, the fort will fall tonight, and you will be taken.” I pointed to the flaming fort, and the princess seemingly being carried away by a crowd of demons.
“I see…” She spoke quietly. “Is it that way for all dungeons? I mean, that the mural doesn’t generate until the safe room is seen for the first time.”
“In my old world, there is a game called ‘telephone’,” I answered instead. “One person whispers a word into the next person’s ear who whispers into the next person’s ear. Eventually, someone misunderstands the message or gets something wrong, and then it becomes diluted. By the time the last person delivers the message, it no longer was what the original message meant.”
“Your children play strange games. We just liked to battle with sticks or throw balls.”
I ignored her and continued. “Lore, or the dungeon curse, or however you want to see it, might work on a similar principle. Like souls, when it’s not solidly bound in place like when a soul sits in a body or a story is written on a page, it is prone to alteration, degradation, and destruction. New lore gets incorporated into the old, and things become half-remembered, exaggerated, or glorified. If this dungeon is as old as they say, it’s possible that the lore degraded to the point that it doesn’t even remember it’s own story.
“In other dungeons, people visit them, and they visit the safe room, and once the story is written in a mural, it’s recorded, and those recordings don’t change.”
“I’m not sure I get it.”
“They have a saying if a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? I’m just saying if no one is there to learn the story, does it exist? Perhaps, that is why unfinished stories become a blight on the world, so they become known. Those that aren’t known are forgotten. As for this one… it’s so old that it has to fill in the pieces with our actions, hence the karmic curse.”
“I see… I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah… in the end, it’s just words. Dungeons are a force of nature in this world. You might know basically why a tornado works, or how the rain falls, but being able to predict every weather anomaly with accuracy is a fool’s game.”
“Someone once told me that rain fell because of water sprites and tornados from angry wind gnomes. That’s correct. Right, master?”