I celebrated a bit. I had a drink, some dwarven wine, which, unlike dwarven spirits, didn’t taste like piss and poison.

But it did knock me right out. I was asleep for almost ten hours before I managed to wake up again.

“God damn dwarven drinks,” I mumbled, searching my shelves for alchemical elixirs.

Eventually, I found a weak generic anti-poison elixir. I downed it furiously and laid down on my bed, waiting for the pain to subside.

It took almost an hour for the whole thing to clear out of my system and I hadn’t even drunk a tenth of the bottle.

I really should stop accepting drinks as a form of payment, I thought to myself.

But that was the way dwarves were, always drunk, never drunk enough. Their constitution made them incredibly impervious to poison. I’d known one dwarf who used poison pills as a sleeping aid and another who used snake venom as a pain reliever.

I got up, adjusting my robes and equipment and grabbing my staff on my way out.

I cast a cantrip, a simple directional spell that pointed toward the current direction of the sun.

A big arrow appeared in front of me, pointing directly down.

“Midnight then,” I mumbled.

I had to get my stuff ready. Now that I was finally off probation I could actually live where I wanted to live instead of this forgotten cave at the edges of the city.

I took one last look around at this place. The cave was large, well over fifty feet tall, and about one and a half acres wide, and my house stood meekly at its center, a hobbled collaboration of earth magic and shoddy engineering.

It had a lot of walls, too many walls really. I was afraid of the roof falling on my head while I slept, so I’d made a bunch of walls and pillars, just in case the thing decided to collapse on me.

I thought about hiring a dwarf to build me something permanent but I was only spending my probation period here, only about a decade. That’d be ages for humans but it was only a little bit of time for an elf. At least, that’s what I had told myself.

In reality, I’d grown quite fond of this place, spending days focused on magic, and reading old tomes and histories.

I liked the hermit lifestyle, though I was only seventy-eight, a young adult by elf standards. I was sad to see it all go, but it was a necessity.

I needed to find my mother’s killer after all.

I cast a second-tier summoning spell and waited. Teleportation was banned throughout the city unless you were in a special zone of some sort and even then teleportation-based summoning spells were banded.

Meaning the only summoning spells people could use were noncorporeal ones.

This specific summoning spell was pretty basic, yet pretty versatile. You essentially summoned a spirit from the spirit realm and told it to possess and bring you an object of your choosing. In return, you fed the spirit some mana and created a light bond between you and it for the duration of the spell.

And true to the spell, about ten seconds later my front door burst open and an old suitcase came rolling up on its own accord and plopped down beside me.

It was a sacrifice spell, one of the many methods of spellcasting. You gave some entity your mana and asked them to commit a task. Some people would argue there was a difference between this and holy casting, but those were just sacrifice spells done directly with the gods. That was what that damn truth spell had been, a spell cast by the God of Truth through the mana of one of his paladins.

And that was a fifteenth-tier spell.

I grinned harshly. It was always surprising how much mana and effort those bastards would spend just to extend their control of me. He could have healed people with that mana, cured sickness, and changed lives. But instead, he had chosen to point it towards me, even trying to bait me into attacking him.

Oh well, I was free of them now. Once I took my papers to a city hall and registered fully as a legal citizen, they’d have no rights over me. None whatsoever.

I tapped the old rectangle suitcase and it popped open in response.

“Time to clean house.”

I raised my staff, reading myself to use the same spell but at a different tier. This would be a fourth-tier spell. Elevating a spell meant doubling its original mana cost for every tier you raised it. This summoning spell cost me ten mana to perform at its basic level, which was second tier. At a fourth-tier level, it would cost me a thousand mana, which was around half of my total mana pool.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

But with my staff, I could lessen the burden, splitting the mana cost with the mana I had stored within the magic focus.

The spell cost me two minutes and three hundred mana units in total, the rest of it coming out of my staff. But when it was complete, it was as if the whole house had come alive of its own violation. Shelves, tables, chairs, and even clothing started out marching one by one.

I’d summoned about five hundred spirits and each of them had taken to an object, possessing it and marching over to my suitcase in a linear fashion. The clothing came first, a long-sleeved shirt to be specific.

It hopped over to me, saluted, and jumped, folding itself perfectly in the air before jumping into the suitcase. A pair of socks followed close behind as well as some pants and a clean pair of boxers.

I smiled.

This spell always had some personality to it. That was the fun with spirit magic. The spirits you connected to could be the type to salute you or the type to try and steal your soul at every turn.

In my case, it was the latter.

Eventually, the clothes, plates, and silverware were out of the way, leaving the furniture next.

A shy bookshelf waddled on up to me. It turned the top row of books to the open suitcase, as if wondering how it would fit, and then looked up at me with a frowning row of alchemy books.

I was confused for a second, then it waved its small decorative handles at the suitcase questioningly.

“Huh?”

Suddenly a book popped out of one of the slots, floating in the air for a moment before trying to force itself back in there. But the slot seemed to have shrunk, not allowing the book to even put its covers into the empty space.

‘I can’t fit in that,’ seemed to be the message it wanted to convey.

“Oh don’t worry. It’s a magical suitcase. You’ll fit.”

The bookshelf looked elated, jumping in happiness before diving right into the suitcase, which expanded to swallow it up. The floating book, which had been left behind by its owner, dropped onto the ground, then got up, waddled to my suitcase, and jumped right in.

The rest of the furniture seemed relieved at the sight and started to follow through, jumping into the suitcase one after another. One couch gave me a handshake before jumping in, another gave me a bow.

“So much character,” I mumbled as the last row of items filled in.

After it was all said and done. I closed my suitcase and waited. All I had on me now were my cloak, my clothes, my staff, and a few other miscellaneous objects.

I cast the sun catrip again and this time it pointed a little to my left.

“About one thirty am then,” I mumbled.

I still had thirty minutes to wait before my ride got here.

Then the cave started rumbling. The familiar roar of the drill taxi was heard and the giant metallic machine burst through the cave ceiling and onto the cave floor, right side up this time.

The engine shut off and I heard the sound of a door swinging open, but I couldn’t tell with all the dust in the air. A little dwarf emerged from the dust, wearing tight sealed goggles and a dusty taxi driver’s uniform. Grunder walked up to me, smiling happily and holding out his hand.

“I’m a little early laddie but I hope ya don’t mind. Figured you’d want to be early with getting to city hall and all. It’ll be a direct drive, about two hours, two fifty before taxes and three hundred after. But for you, we’ll keep at two fifty. Lots to do lots to do!”

I cast a cleansing spell, pushing all the dirt off his body before shaking his hand.

“Oh, you surface men and dirt. I don’t know why ya bother. You came from it, you eat from it, and you’ll go right to the ground at the end of it all like everything else that’s ever lived.”

“Hello to you too Grunder,” I replied.

“Yes, yes, hello Elurn. Nice day, great weather, same weather. Tough times, shall we get going?”

“Yeah alright,” I said, grabbing my suitcase and heading to the passenger side of the drill taxi. My suitcase shrunk as I entered the cabin. It grew to the size of a fingernail and lay on the floor like a pebble within seconds. I picked it up and shoved it into my pocket.

Grunder was my primary ride while I lived here. The guy was always on time, if not early, and always eager to work. He didn’t have a family or a home. In fact, I think he slept in random caves and worked at almost all other times of the day.

He had what the dwarves called ‘Miner’s Disease.’ It was a self-explanatory name, but basically in the olden times, the dwarves had been blessed by the Lady of the Earth and her husband the Lord of Metal. The blessings made the dwarves love the earth like a man would love a woman and care for steal as a woman would care for her husband.

That’s the way they spoke about it, anyway.

The blessing was gone in most dwarves. They still preferred to live underground but they didn’t mind the light of day too much and liked a bit of fresh air every now and then. But Grunder had caught a heavy case of whatever blessings remained in his bloodline, making him euphoric about being buried deep beneath the earth and extremely agoraphobic about anything else.

I had the urge to cast a cleaning spell and clear out the outside of this dirty machine, but I didn’t. I had once, and the dwarf had damn near stranded me for the action.

“That dirt comes from every layer I traveled through, from down-side to a hundred miles below the deep! How dare you throw it away like that!”

That had been a day. We’d gotten more familiar since then but still, I didn’t want to mess with the dwarf and his dirt-coated machine.

“So what are you gonna do with the cave?” The dwarf asked me.

“I’m gonna collapse it. I don’t want those bastards to plant stuff here and frame me.”

“You could sell it?” The dwarf offered.

“No one wants to buy anything down here,” I said shaking my head. “There’s no ores, no food, no magic. And if anyone did buy it, it might lead to the Celestial Order harassing them for information about me.”

The dwarf nodded in unmindful agreement.

“Well, collapse it then,” he stated.

“What, right now? Don’t you want to get away from it first?”

“Why would I want to do that?” The dwarf asked me.

“I don’t know. Can the taxi withstand that type of-”

“I’ve been jammed between tectonic plates I’ll have you know! My sweet baby could be stuck between the Lord of Metal and Lady of Earth and even they couldn’t fuck hard enough to bruise this beauty!”

I looked at the dwarf with befuddlement. Blasphemy was common, but hearing a dwarf diss the gods that had blessed him was a little much, even for me.

“Alright then,” I mumbled, activating the wards hidden throughout the property.

A large groan came from the earth and thousands of tons of compressed rock and earth started to fall upon us.

It was loud, incredibly loud. It sounded like the earth itself was knocking on our doors, but to the dwarf's credit, even though we shifted and rocked in the craziness of it all, we were unharmed.

“Don’t you ever doubt my beautiful girl ever again!” Grunder shouted, flipping on a few switches before drilling through the earth with a smile.