I ACCIDENTALLY MARRIED A DUNGEON

Dune hugged him back softly, gently patting his shoulder once as if comforting some scared animal.

The chime rang out one last time near the floor level, and Felix found himself looking at a rat racing along the baseboards of the corridor with a thin chain of charms attached to an ankle clamped between its teeth.

He released Dune immediately, clearing his throat and taking a step back, as if the past ten seconds had never happened. "Sorry. I thought that was something else."

"You were afraid," Dune commented. "Your heart was beating very fast."

"I wasn’t afraid. I was just cautious." He took a card out of his pocket and threw it at the rat, hitting the floor next to it hard enough to make the little animal scurry off into the hole in the wall, leaving behind its anklet which Felix quickly picked up and held in his hand; the thing was silver and definitely not counterfeit – a rather nice item to sell to anyone interested.

He was about to put it in his pocket when an unpleasant thought occurred to him; that it most likely belonged to some person who wore it and was now searching for it somewhere in this house. So he placed it carefully on the nearest table, not wanting to upset someone whose face he could not see.

"Right. Let’s move on."

The two went on walking until the corridor ended in a large junction where three separate corridors spread out from it in different directions, each one just as dark as the others.

"We’ll cover more area if we go our separate ways," Felix suggested. "You take one and I’ll take another. We can meet back here in twenty minutes."

Dune raised an eyebrow. "That’s dangerous."

"It’ll be efficient." He instantly regretted saying that as soon as the words were out of his mouth because some primal instinct within him was shouting that going their separate ways in an abandoned haunted house was exactly the sort of thing that got people in adventure stories killed. "We’ll be fine. See you in twenty minutes."

Dune simply nodded and took her way down her corridor without any more arguments while Felix reluctantly made his way down his own.

Several minutes later, his thoughts returned to normal, and he noticed a door located further in the hall, which was more hygienic than others, and there were no damages to its wooden surface, nor dust was gathered at the edges of the door frame. The very fact was sufficient for him to slow down and approach.

He lowered himself and slid a card between the gap of the door and floor, waiting for some reaction, but there was nothing – no sounds, no fluctuations of Numen from the other side of the door.

"Maybe I am too cautious." He stood up and stretched his arms, then pushed the door open. It did not resist and moved quietly like if it had been oiled today.

Felix entered the room, and his orb light lit several meters ahead, revealing a room, which appeared to be larger than he thought. There was a bed placed against the left wall, where curtains were pulled tight in front of a window. Several hand mirrors and pieces of jewelry were scattered on a table near the bed frame. He stopped himself from touching one of the necklaces.

He made his way to the right end of the room, where the walls were covered by several wardrobes. The contents of the first wardrobe included women’s clothes, dresses, night gowns, gloves and wide-brimmed hats, all expensive and enough to pay for his food supplies for a month.

Then his hand paused on a black blouse, which was located at the rear of the wardrobe. The blouse had a rather coarse texture in comparison with other items. Opening it, he noticed that the stitching of this piece of clothing was not very neat and seemed to be done in haste after it had been torn apart with some sharp tool.

"I wonder why," he thought, throwing the blouse into the wardrobe again. There were several perfume bottles in the last drawer of the wardrobe, and he took one of them, removing the stopper. The smell of it was sweet, with tones of vanilla and night-blooming flowers.

He shut the first wardrobe and proceeded to the second one, which had an old canvas with dust on it hanging above it. He lifted his arm and wiped it clean using his sleeve. There was a family of four in the painting, yet no face in any of them had been completed; instead, they were all blurred, as if the painter hadn’t had enough time or the intention of completing them.

He placed the canvas back to its place and then he opened the second wardrobe. Again he found more clothes there, along with a small shelf filled with books and a portrait standing against the rear wall.

He took out the first book. He couldn’t understand the language in which the pages were written and just the first line seemed enough to give him a headache. He kept the book aside and then went through the other two books. Both were romantic books. They were soft in covers and soft in their plots as well. It was the story of a poor man who betrayed again and again until he crossed paths with an old woman on the road. He helped her without asking for anything back, and watched her transform into an angel with four wings who blessed him with fortune and power and never left his side after that.

"Only if this would’ve happened to me." He put down the book and then picked up the portrait.

The woman in the portrait seemed to be of middle age. Her hair was blonde and fell past her shoulders. She had very attractive green eyes.

"Gorgeous." The words escaped his mouth softly. "I should have married her, not the dungeon."

It was something about the look she had in her eyes in the portrait that made his heartbeat race involuntarily.

"No." His fingers clenched around the edges of the frame.

"Get back to work." He shook his head, and noticed the Numen fluctuations inside his body without his permission.

"There is something really wrong here."

His eyes fell back to glance at the room behind him, the doorway still wide open, everything in exactly the same position as it had been when he’d walked in.

"I thought so," he said, crouching to look down at the ground. "No footprints of mine, or anyone else’s.

The dust was undisturbed across all the boards of the floor, enough so that there should be an unmistakable print left of his boots, starting from the doorway right where he was standing now.

His fingers brushed two fingers against it, and the dust stuck to his finger like powder, gray and fine, but nothing in the layer on the floor had been disturbed, no indentation, no sign that anything had ever even pressed into it.

His hand came up, and he blew the Numen across it. The dust floated off in a cloud and dispersed into the air until it vanished entirely.

"I’m standing in a room I never actually walked in."