Land Below Duramas

Mana swirled through the air. Golden light weaved between the mauve colored hands of a young woman working within a shop that was dimly lit by only a handful of candles. Curtains lined the few windows, so she worked in silence and darkness with her magic dancing between her fingers. She lowered the light down to a stack of parchment laid upon a desk in front of her. The mana flowed through every word printed upon its surface until it was fully enveloped.

The woman looked up from her work at a glass case on the wall before her. Past the glass, she checked on the notes that explained how to continue the spell she was casting. Her focus waned as she caught her reflection in the glass, noticing a few strands of her ice white hair were freed from her ponytail and were now lightly obscuring over her oak brown eyes.

Vowing to fix the issue after her spell was finished, she lifted the shining mana off the stack of parchment. The light now took the form of the papers' silhouette as the girl shifted it over to a blank stack of parchment. She pressed the mana downward, watching as it perfectly copied the ink and writing from the previous stack onto the new one.

With the copying spell finally done, the woman adjusted her hair back behind her pointed elvish ears and began to tie the stack of parchment in a band, finally tossing it in a pile off to the side with the rest of the finished products. She took a deep breath and wiped away at her forehead, winded from the constant use of her magic. As she began to work on the next stack, she heard her co-worker moving from the backroom towards her.

"Nessa? Have you finished today's papers yet?" The elvish woman from the backroom called out.

"I have most of the routes done, but my mana feels drained. Do you think you could take over for the rest, Ava?" Nessa answered without looking up. Ava rolled her eyes in response.

"Fine, just deliver what you have now. I'll probably just teach the new guy how to do these anyways."

Nessa shied away following her co-worker's reply. She was ashamed that her poor mana pool was constantly getting in the way of her work and getting on the nerves of others. Trying to move on quickly, Nessa gathered up the papers that she copied into her satchel to prepare for her delivery route.

As she was finishing up, the bell near the front door rang as a new face stepped into the room. A young human who looked around the same age as Nessa stepped in and took a look around.

"You must be Darren, right?" Ava addressed the human from behind the counter, "I guess I should've expected you to be human from the name."

"Yeah, I actually moved here to Eil'Drawwt from the surface recently," Darren responded with a nervous laugh, "It won't be an issue, right?"

"Oh, of course not. I mean Nessa is half human after all." Ava motioned over to Nessa, who sheepishly waved to the human. They both shared the same eye type, a single color surrounded by white. Ava, meanwhile, had a unique eye pattern like other dusk elves, "Though I don't know why you'd want to move here. Vy'Es Dela'Ramar isn't an easy time for surface folk."

The two continued their conversation, effectively leaving Nessa out of it. Catching the hint, Nessa disappointedly lifted the satchel filled with papers and silently left out the front door of the shop. She stepped out onto the ground paved with stone bricks and witnessed the day shining brilliantly upon the underground city of Eil'Drawwt. A sun forged of gems known as star crystals sat carved into the cavern ceiling, illuminating the ravine that housed the city.

The wide bridge that housed her workplace was fairly quiet, only the faint murmur of conversation from around her and the distant sounds of the busier bridges echoed throughout. Towering lamp posts that housed miniscule gems lit the corners of the city that did not receive the crystalline sun's light. Nessa passed by young children playing in the quiet street and their guardians sitting just outside their homes of stone built upon the bridges.

Nessa eventually reached one of the larger bridges, passing by more homes and shops to leave newspapers at each of their doorsteps. As she emptied more and more of the papers from her satchel, her tome was revealed at the bottom of the bag. Nessa ran her fingers over the spine of the book and instinctively sighed at the sight of it. The tome meant a lot of things to her. It was a memento from her mother, vital to her own casting of magic, and held a great deal of spells she had independently learned over the years. She turned her attention away from it and continued on her way.

On her route, she came across a gathering of merchants selling a variety of goods, ranging from copper trinkets, dried meats, and mushroom treats. These marketplaces shifted between different bridges and locations over time, but they luckily never strayed too far from Nessa's route. Nessa approached the stalls, giving each of them the news for the day.

"Good afternoon, Nessa." One of the trinket salesmen with small reading glasses perched upon his nose greeted her as he took up one of the papers, "Anything interesting happening in here?" The man took the stack of parchment and placed it closer to him so as to not deter attention from his jewelry of dull silvers and other such oddities.

"Good news at least," Nessa answered, "The adventurer's guild finally caught that outlaw from a few weeks back." She explained the gist of the news as per usual and then continued onto the rest of the stalls to place the news on their countertops.

"Nessa, dear," An older human woman with a collection of surface candies whispered softly as the news was placed on her stall, "Have you had enough to eat the past few nights?"

"Yes Ms. Maye, I promise," Nessa responded reassuringly, "My route was extended so I've been making enough coin for both my brother and I."

"You let me know if you need anything deary." Maye reached over Nessa's palm and dropped a few small wrapped candies to her, "Save some of those for your brother this time." She scolded playfully.

Nessa giggled as she dropped the candies in her satchel before saying goodbye to the merchants to continue on her route. On her way she crossed paths with several guards, travelers, and workers. Adventurers and mercenaries loitered around deciding on their next job or course of action, and occasionally, carriages pulled by centipedes the size of horses would carve a path through the bustle of the bridges. Though those native to the underground were used to the insectoid livestock, foreigners occasionally stood around to gawk at the creatures they assumed were too absurd to actually exist. Nessa, for one, ignored the beasts of burden as they scuttled along, pulling the carriages with the harnesses attached beneath their armor-like exoskeletons.

As the bridge stretched on, teams of adventurers grouped up more and more outside of a bulletin board watched over by a pair of guards. Nessa squeezed through the crowds of waiting adventurers and caught the attention of the guards. They nodded and granted her permission to approach and edit the bulletin board herself.

She set the satchel down next to her with a handful of fliers in her grip. Scanning the board, Nessa began to take down outdated information and replaced them with updated bounties, quests, and the like. The adventurers watched attentively as new quests were posted and some scoffed as some were now marked as completed. When her job was done she put the outdated posters in her satchel and headed out to allow the crowd to take a closer look.

Before leaving for the next part of her route, Nessa turned back. She noticed a large number of the teams wore the emblem of the local guild on their sleeves or chest. The emblem depicted a comet piercing through the surface into the underground before ending with a collision on a shield. She stared at the armors they wore and the weapons at their sides, but most importantly paid attention to the mages in the midst of the crowd. Nessa looked at their tomes and wands and felt envious of their position. Her hand patted over her waist, making sure that her own wand was still on her person before finally hurrying off to the next section of her route.

The midday traffic on the bridge picked up as Nessa reached the western wall of the ravine. A grand shelf of towers and homes stacked atop each other colored the ravine wall, and the luminescent lights of the star crystals shone out of the wall like spider eyes. With nary a moment to lose, Nessa reached into her satchel once more for a handful of posters. She patrolled the caverns that dug into the wall and worked to put up posters of an outlaw on the stalagmites outside the long chain of shops within the caverns. As she put them up, she took note of the individual on the poster. He was a demiserpus, a man with snakelike eyes and patches of scales on his otherwise human skin.

The crowd of civilians around Nessa had expanded significantly from when she was on the bridge. This gave her little space to move and made the job a little more stressful for her. Nessa groaned in frustration as she struggled to reach for where she intended to place the poster when she felt a weight suddenly lifted off of her. As she turned to check what happened, a blur fled from the crowd to swipe the poster out of her hands violently and then disappeared to blend in with the wave of civilians.

Her satchel was gone, cut off her shoulder and slipped into a thief's hand. All of her supplies from work were stolen away, but more importantly, her tome was lost with the theft. The crowd parted only slightly to the perpetrator's direction before losing interest and continuing on their way.

"Hey! Stop, you thieving jerk!" Nessa stumbled over her words and attempted to sound tough even as her voice cracked. She chased in the direction that the crowd parted for. Barely seeing a foot in front of her, she pushed and shoved her way through the crowd in hopes to catch up with the thief. She hadn't yet identified the thief, but a quick flash of her white satchel slipped through the crowd, revealing the thief's position as they shot out to the right.

Nessa weaved to the right and managed to escape the grip of the crowd, but was met gut first with a guard rail that protected her from a dip into the lower levels of the city. Her eyes darted around the scene as she spotted a hooded figure far below her, gripping onto a series of safety ropes and nets designed to protect citizens from falling into the ravine below. He swung from net to net dropping down several stories to get near the bottom levels of the city.

Nessa's thoughts raced a mile a minute. She attempted to lunge herself over the edge into one of the closer nets, but a shiver washed over her as she even moved to make the attempt. With a deep breath, she collected herself and made the leap onto the first net. From there, she struggled and eventually flipped off to the next net to chase after the thief.

Taking notice of the woman foolishly following him, the thief got onto solid ground and ripped a dagger out from beneath his vest. He brought the blade to one of the ropes connecting the safety net and carved away at it. As the net snapped, he sprinted with his prize into a crevice in the ravine wall, a dark alley.

Nessa failed to recognize the thief's plan as she was falling to the next net. She ended up seeing the snapped safety net at the last moment, desperately reaching towards the ledge only to get a grip of the disconnected rope. Dangling a few meters away from the ledge, she hesitantly looked below her. She gasped with slight relief as the ravine bottom was not below her, but instead more levels of the city, though a fall from her height would still be damaging for sure.

With several exasperated breaths, Nessa closed her eyes and attempted to concentrate, muttering under her breath memories of study and knowledge. She couldn't afford to take out her wand at a time like this, so she intended to cast magic with her bare hands, even if it was risky. With her plan in mind she began to build momentum swinging from the rope. She was too far down to jump to the ledge, but that was not her intention. At the very moment the broken net connected with its other half, a spark traveled from her palm up the silk rope. A surge of weak mana connected the two rope links back together, undoing the thief's earlier attempt.

Dangling no more, Nessa climbed up the net and crawled out onto the ledge. She looked down at a faint smoke rising off a scorched patch of her palm, no doubt a consequence of casting a mana intensive spell without her wand. She waved it off and approached the crevice that she witnessed the thief flee into. There she found the thief at the very end of the dead end alley. He was rummaging through her satchel set upon the ground, but quickly sprang to his feet quickly and brandished his dagger at the half dusk elf once he noticed her approach.

Nessa saw a glimpse beneath his hood. His snakelike eyes and the glint of his fangs. It was the same demiserpus from the poster she was putting up. No doubt trying to cover up his bounty and hide away.

"Give me back my stuff, before I call the guards on you," Nessa choked out through exhausted gasps of breath. She lifted up her shirt slightly to pull a wooden wand out from beneath her clothes, and pointed it with a shaky grip at the thief. A violet light sparked out of the wand's tip as mana surged from Nessa's hand. The thief nodded and kept his grip onto the satchel.

"All right all right," He spoke, his voice quiet and almost inaudible, "Just put the wand down. We don't need to get all heated up." With the satchel in his hand and the dagger lowering in the other he slowly stepped forward to hand over the bag. Nessa backed away and kept her wand at the ready.

"Just drop the bag and leave." She stammered in her request and took a few steps back, but he only picked up his pace. His dagger suddenly lashed out to stab out at Nessa before she could react. A flash of steel in his hand lunged out towards her face as she flinched waiting for the blade to strike her. Her eyes were shut, but she opened them again when she heard an unfamiliar sound.

The thief's lunge was parried by an invisible force as his dagger flew out of his grip. Before he could comprehend the situation, a bright light surged from the mouth of the alley and soared in to strike the thief in the chest. He was knocked onto his back from a concussive burst, remaining on the ground as he was left reeling from the spell. Nessa turned to face the light that shone from behind her. Standing at the mouth of the alley, a dusk elf woman who looked about a decade older than Nessa held one of her hands forward with a staff gripped in her other hand.

"I knew I heard some sort of altercation. Take your belongings and get going, civilian," The dusk elf spoke with a dignified and noble tone as she brushed her long lavender hair out of her face. Nessa's attention drew to one thing, the one thing labelled on her white priestess gown. It was the same emblem of the guild that was stitched onto her shoulder.