“It looked just like any other chest. That was the last thought many adventurers ever had.”

The dungeon master who had cursed him — a petty, vengeful sorcerer whose name Chester could not quite remember — had done it in anger, over a trivial dispute about a card game. One moment, Chester had been a perfectly ordinary cat burglar. The next, he was a box.

Not a metaphorical box. A literal treasure chest, iron-banded and bolted to the floor of level three, dungeon corridor F. He had spent what felt like decades sitting in the dark, listening to footsteps approach, watching torchlight flicker under the lid, feeling the anticipation of some adventurer about to make a very poor decision.

The teeth had come in around year two. He hadn’t asked for them. The arms had followed shortly after, which he found considerably more useful. He had learned to be still. He had learned to be patient. He had developed, over the centuries, what he could only describe as a professional attitude toward the whole affair.

The adventurers always reached for him. That was the thing about greed — it made people predictable. A glint of gold in the dark, a chest no one had opened yet, and they came, every time, fingers outstretched.

He did not think of himself as evil. He thought of himself as a lesson.
A recurring lesson, in a curriculum no one was passing.

Sometimes, in the very long stretches between adventurers, he thought about the card game. He still believed he had won fair and square.
He was also aware that this opinion had cost him considerably.