Love is a Construct

Chapter 1: The Tomb

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEE!

It had been so long since I last heard the sound, it took me fifteen seconds too long to even process it. A tinny, unholy wailing, somewhat muffled beneath the discarded robes, parchments, and sheepskins that hid the totem it came from. I cleared them off, as if they could somehow be producing a glitch in the totem's enchantments. The runes carved into the wood were untouched, flawless. The screeching continued. An impossible sound.

The door behind me slammed open. A familiar-looking goblin nearly tripped over themselves trying to enter my study. "Boss! Boss!," it shouted in panic, in-between hasty breaths. It had run here, likely all the way from the sixth floor. I knew what it had to say. After all, despite inspecting it all over for damages, the proximity alarm totem continued to sound. The dungeon has been breached.

I reeled at the implications. It had been... how long? Truly, countless years. Eons. A thousand...? A hundred thousand...? I had stopped trying to keep track when I realized that I would quickly run out of paper trying to tally the days. For the first three hundred years, I had tried quite fervently to weaken that accursed barrier, to ascertain some weakness-

"Boss! You're not gonna believe this, but-"

I rose to my full height, great waves of power roiling off of me, air quivering from the dense energy. The sight stopped the minion mid-sentence, and even from here I could feel their bones shaking. Fair enough - goblins of this generation would never have seen the way my mana quakes when I'm nervous.

I turned around, my skeletal visage making the appearance of facing the door of the study, towards my little messenger. I use this language, as I had long transcended the need to use my physical body to sense the world - I hadn't any eyes, any more, after all. I read the world from the flows of power that intersected all things, and even walls did little to stifle my senses. I spoke. Or, at least, made my will known - again, my lungs had withered away long before the dungeon was even sealed. I tugged on the strings of power, and sound coalesced around us.

"Report."

It must have been me just being on edge, but the sound was a touch more cacophonous and grating than I was aiming for. The minion began to speak, but it said nothing I didn't already know, so my thoughts remained inwards. It was a great impossibility for an intruder to be in the dungeon. The barrier was impassable. The great coalition of mages that constructed it must be long dead by now. Had it been destroyed? A hole opened? No single being could be capable of this. The power required to do so... It defied rational thought. If the barrier really had been destroyed, the forces responsible must be far from benign. Either the old war was awakening once more, or...

I realized the goblin had finished speaking a while ago. It was watching me silently, legs subtly knocking, clutching the long blue scarf that adorned its neck and hung down to its hip. My sensation of the world made seeing the innermost parts of its mind as simple as seeing its countenance. Fear of me, cut with fear of the intruder. A familiar admiration. A cold sweat. Tension. Droplets of determination, beginning to build. It was waiting for an order. Rather, bracing for one. It feared what I might ask it to do.

I quelled my instinct to order it to battle stations. I had stopped teaching my minions what those were after I gave up making it through the barrier. I would be surprised if its people even still told stories of those times.

"Return to shelter. I shall face the intruder."

My voice came out calmer, deeper, clearer this time, but with no less power. The goblin barked a muted affirmation, then recoiled and scrambled back, as if to let me through the door. Inwardly, I chuckled at the gesture. I had long since bound the veins of power in this place together. Reaching out to grab one such leyline, I twisted it in my hand to establish a connection and whispered my command in the words of the ancient ones. In a moment I was whipped through space to the first floor of the dungeon.