The Hunger for Gold

The iron door groaned shut behind you, sealing with a sound like a ribcage cracking. The Glutton's Gauntlet had taken you in without ceremony, its stone throat swallowing the gray daylight of the world above. Your daughter's face—pale, fever-bright, the cough that rattled her small chest—hung before you like a candle in the dark. The cure was here, somewhere, buried in these halls that breathed.

Your boots echoed on flagstones slick with something that glistened. The air tasted of copper and old incense. Ahead, the corridor split three ways, and from the left passage came a sound that made your hand dart to your belt—a child's laugh, high and clear, impossibly familiar.

Your heart seized. "Elara?"

The laugh faded into the drip of water. A torch guttered in a sconce shaped like a grasping hand, and in its flame you saw her—just for a heartbeat—standing at the corridor's bend, wearing the same dress she'd worn the day the fever took hold.

"Papa," she whispered, and the voice was hers, and it wasn't. "You came."

The dungeon had your daughter's face. The dungeon had your hope. And somewhere above, the real Elara was dying while you stood here, listening to a ghost.