I was woken up by a tiny man standing right next to my face. He was about the size of a pixie or brownie, and appeared to be older, about in his sixties for a human, with a full, long beard, broad mushroom cap hat that was bright blue, and clothes that reminded me of an old timey prospector, setting out to explore Suntorch in hopes of finding riches. He was even leaning on a pickaxe, scaled down to the size of a toothpick.

He was also ugly as sin – though, thinking about it, I’d seen the Avatar of Sin, and the Avatar had been quite pretty. But the little man was quite ugly, with wrinkles and hair exploding out of his ears and nose, dried snot dripping down his beard.

I mentally smacked myself. That was uncharitable of me to think.

“Wha?” I managed to get out, blinking my eyes, before the old man spat to the side. The spit made a strange tinging noise, as if it had hit metal.

“You there!” the prospector said. “Boy-thing!”

“Just boy. Or wait, no. Man,” I said, frowning in annoyance at the smallfolk before me.

“Hmph, fine. Man-thing.”

“There’s no -thing, I’m just a man. And human.”

“Man-thing human-talls?” the smallfolk asked. “That’s a weird name.”

I stared at him.

He stared back.

“Are you messing with me?” I asked him.

“I don’t know!” the man said.

“You don’t know if you’re messing with me?”

“I don’t exactly deal with…” he trailed off and gestured up and down at me.

“With the what?” I asked, a touch acerbically, still a little on edge from how I’d been woken up.

“Tall folk,” the prospector said, squinting at me. “Or… Human-talls? Not like you can blame me.”

“I don’t know if I can blame you or not,” I said, running a hand through my hair, pushing the black strands out of my face.

“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” the smallfolk said. “Let’s start over.”

“Fine by me,” I said. “My name is Malachi. I’m a human and professional mage, and I decided to take shelter in this cave because of the storm going on outside.”

“What do you mean, a professional mage? Magic is just something you do. It’s not a career,” the tiny man said, then shook his head. “Wait, no. Let me introduce myself.”

He took a deep breath, spat on the side of the ground again, and bowed slightly.

“I am Deep-cave-mushroom-thing,” he said. “I am a coblynau, and my occupation is that of a chained miner for the king of the depths.”

“So if I understand correctly, your name is Deep-cave-mushroom-thing?” I asked.

“Yes. I earned deep from being able to visit the depths of the mine. Cave from my occupation as a miner. And mushroom from my hat.”

“May I call you deep-cave?” I asked. “Deep-cave-mushroom-thing is a lot to say, but if it’s your preference, I can use the full thing.”

I winced, suddenly fearful he’d misinterpret my use of the word ‘thing’ at the end of my sentence.

“Deep-thing,” the minor said. “Deep-cave has no meaning.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “I think by your name system I’d be called Malachi-thing? Or maybe Apprentice-thing.”

“Wait, wait, is Malachi your hidden name?” asked the coblynau.

“Maybe? What’s a hidden name?”

“A name that is unique to you. There are at least a dozen named cave-things, and apprentice-cave-things. But you only tell your hidden name to family, close friends, betrothed or the like.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, in my culture, we have a very different name system. Our hidden names aren’t hidden, and we don’t use -thing at the end to describe what we do.”

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“But how does that work?” Deep-thing asked.

I spent a while explaining how names worked in Mossford and the Mossford Alliance, which wasn’t exactly something I’d ever thought I’d need to do. In return, Deep-thing told me about how names worked in his settlement’s culture.

“But how can one be an apprentice-mage-thing?” Deep-thing asked, stroking his beard. “I asked that earlier, but now that I’m a little more certain that we’re not just talking past one another, I am very curious.”

“I…” I frowned for a moment. “I’m not sure. I learn about magic, because it’s not innate to me, the way it is to estragon.”

I nearly said ‘beasts’, but then realized I wasn’t entirely sure if small folk also had innate spells, and didn’t want to upset him or cause another misunderstanding.

“Really?” the elderly small folk asked, leaning forwards. “Fascinating. I never knew tall folk were all crippled.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I said with a wince. “We do have a lot of versatility with our magic. I might not have innate spells, but I can teleport like a blink fox, store magic in my bones like a tortoise, and have dragon eyes because I’ve got an entire suite of sensory magic.”

“Interesting. So I guess learning to be a mage is a common thing in your culture?”

“Somewhat,” I said, then hedged. “Everyone learns a little, but most people learn it for a job, or only learn ungated magic.”

That led down another path of discussion about how jobs worked, and he seemed amazed by the entire thing, before looping back to his original question.

“If many learn magic for their job, what job do you perform?” he asked.

“Mainly I go around, find problems, fix problems or fight and capture monsters, and then hope I get paid for it,” I said, then paused. “Haven’t actually gotten paid for something in a little bit. Things have kind of been crazy with the Idyll-Flume and the Trial Trail.”

“The what?” the coblynau asked, which launched us down an entirely new series of discussion.

“You mean to tell me that there’s an entire town of tall folk not that far from here?” Deep-thing demanded. “What? How? How long has it stood there?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just a town. I’d guess a few hundred years? But that could be entirely off base, since I guess Edgar never actually talked about the town being around when he was born…”

“Fascinating,” Deep-thing said. “In the sixty-four years since I hatched from the stone, I’ve never heard of something like that. I thought… I mean… The king of the deeps said that we were entirely alone, and…”

“It is several miles away,” I said. “But yeah, you should probably head that way, if you’re interested in joining with a larger community. If not, do what you will. But who is this king of the deeps? Is he the leader of your village or something? You’ve mentioned him a few times now.”

The coblynau shifted uncomfortably, and took a deep breath.

“Well, apprentice-warrior-thing,” Deep-thing said.

I was tempted to cut him off and tell him that warrior wasn’t really the most accurate of terms, but I decided to let it go.

“The king of the deeps is the one who constructed this place,” Deep-thing said. “And in a fashion, he is the leader of our village, but the word leader has the wrong concept. Things weren’t always so bad, but ever since he died, things have gotten far worse.”

“Start from the beginning,” I said. “I’ve used a bit of psychometry on the stones and saw a middle aged man cutting the start of this cave.”

“It isn’t a cave, it’s a mine shaft, but yes, the king of the deep began the digging. That action was what caused us to begin emerging from the stone. He called himself king of the deep, and was as obsessed with digging through the earth for precious metals and stones and minerals as we were. He would leave every once in a while, and claim he was traveling thousands of miles back to civilization, then would return with items for us and begin digging once again.”

“He was either lying, or the town is way, way younger than that. Actually, come to think of it, he had to be lying. Even the capital isn’t thousands of miles away, and while I didn’t do great in my history classes, I’m sure that it was established at least a few hundred years ago.”

“Aye, well, we know that now,” Deep-thing said. “But regardless, back to my story. We dug up many things, smelted them, processed them into ores and cut them into gemstones, and the king of the deep was amicable enough. But as he aged, he got more and more demanding. He stopped doing the work himself, but kept ordering us to dig deeper, claiming we were close to what he needed.”

I winced, since I could take a few guesses about where this was going.

“We started refusing,” Deep-thing said. “We coblynau respect the earth. We wish to release its treasures, but we seek to do so at a rate that will not damage things. We overlooked the construction of the mineshaft as something that was dark but needed. When he pushed us too hard, we put down our pickaxes and started turning our magic to restoring the earth. And then the King revealed a saturated loyalty-lazuli.”

“I’m not a mineral mage,” I said. “But I’m guessing that’s some sort of mind controlling stone?”

“Yes,” Deep-thing agreed. “An Arcanist natural treasure that someone who works with the empowering of stone can use to enforce loyalty. He shouldn’t have been able to control it, he was too weak, but he did, and he died in doing so. And so, for twenty years, everyone in our village has been made to follow the bidding of the king, while the king himself digs ever deeper.”

“I thought you said he was dead,” I said.

“He is,” Deep-thing agreed. “He is dead, yet his corpse still moves. His mind is deteriorated, focused only on mining for the source of power he claims to know is down in the depths.”

“A revenant,” I said, shivering. Weaker than the person they were in life, as far as I understood them, they were rare instances of a shade and fragments of a ghost re-animating the body.

“If you say so,” Deep-thing agreed. “But you’re the second to come since his death to the cave. The first immediately started seeking for treasure, so we feared she would be the king by another name. But you seemed content to just sit up here and wait for the storm to pass.”

I got a bad feeling in my gut.

“You want me to fight the king and destroy the stone he’s still holding onto, don’t you?” I asked.

“We do,” Deep thing agreed. “Though, if you fear for your life too much… Please, tell one you would trust, who would have the power to save us?”