Instructor Silliuk was an impeccably dressed older elf. The inside of his dark silk jacket was vibrant red, and every bit of his clothing was tailored to his shape. Both his ears and his long eyebrows drooped down, but the instructor stood quarterstaff straight.

When the class quieted, Instructor Silliuk cleared his throat before speaking. “Welcome to The World Below. My name is Instructor Silliuk. I am Commander Pompadon’s aide and shall be covering the majority of the material for this class. Commander Pompadon is incredibly busy and has entrusted me with edifying you about the world below. He will be able to join us in a few moons for the most important of the topics we shall be covering.

“I am a traditional educator. I do not suffer from the hubris that my poor lectures could possibly compare to the erudite scrolls written by the most sagacious scholars of all time. Therefore, we shall spend our time reading and reflecting on those works.

“The first work we shall read is Yelva Twicespruce’s The Antebrumerian Landscape: an Anti-exegetical Approach to the Antecedents of the Brume. It is a marvelous book: insightful, clear, comprehensive, and impactful. More than that, it’s beautifully written and I find myself revisiting it regularly and finding fresh insights each time. I’m a little jealous that you all get to encounter Yelva’s words for the first time.

“Please, come up to the table to grab a copy of The Antebrumerian Landscape and begin reading. I expect everyone to complete it by our class next week. We’ll then have a small discussion about the essays that everyone will write before we embark on our next work.

“Finally, please read silently: I want to give everyone the chance to enjoy the book.”

After grabbing his copy of the book, Reg spent long minutes staring at the first paragraph of the introduction. His finger traced through word by word, trying to tease out meaning from the Old Elven. The vocabulary was foreign and even after he figured out what a word might mean, it took time to parse the meandering sentences:

The Achivian Guard occupies a uniquely liminal role within the societal structures of the Tree, responsible for traversing the bridge between the modern world and the brume-shrouded world of the below. The world below indelibly echoes the structure of the antebrumerian world; its patterns and systems providing reverberations that inspire the monstrosities, planar atria, and manias with which the guard of our Eternal Tree must contend when they venture into the brume. In many respects, the passage to the mist is a temporal one as well as a spatial one: a comprehensive understanding of these patterns is essential to the successful below-world navigation.

Yeva seemed to be on the same shaky branch that Reg was; she was slowly mouthing the words to one of the sentences over and over again. She shrugged at Reg when he looked her way.

On Reg's other side, Jashal had decided that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with the book and had fallen asleep in a way that made it look like he was reading.

Reg went back to the text: trying to puzzle out Old Elven wasn’t fun, but if that’s what he needed to do to join the guard, he’d figure it out.

Before delving into a comprehensive discourse on the antebrumerian world, it is essential to first describe the anti-exegetical theory and practice that this tome embraces. Most scholarly works that contend with the shape of antebrumerian world are based on contemporaneous accounts in the historical exegetical tradition. The historical exegetical tradition privileges hermeneutic interpretations of contemporaneous scholarly and arithmantic works that describe society and its structures from the perspective of an author living within that society. These contemporaneous scholarly and arithmantic works of the antebrumerian landscape were necessarily constrained by the bough on which they rested: the view during a self-dissection is inescapably circumscribed. A canopical examination of the antebrumerian world illuminates patterns and structures that an exegetical examination, limited as it is by its temporal and structural blinders, is unable to highlight.

While a synoptic view of governmental structures lacks nuance, it may serve as an elucidation of the anti-exegetical scholarly approach that this tome takes: contemporaneous accounts are unanimous in describing the central governing scheme as a monarchy with strong meritocratic opportunities; the canopical view concerned with structure and boughs would instead label it a plutocracy characterized by a high degree of intergenerational wealth transfer and de facto laws encouraging oligopolistic market structure.

None of this is to imply that critical exegesis of contemporaneous documents lacks merit: indeed, such an approach complements insights gleaned from an anti-exegetical scholarly exploration. A future syncretic amalgamation of these approaches offers possibilities of generating insightful theses for scholarly perusal.

Continuing on, even a compendious account of the antebrumerian world will elide and pass over essential nuance, but such an account does provide a seed from which our further explorations can sprout. From such a synoptic view, what fundamental structures form the trellis on which society grew?

Firstly, society was masonry-based and dispersed. The arteries of the society, masonry structures set into the ground called ‘roads,’ required significant government maintenance and afforded long-distance travel. Such long-distance travel was necessary because the agricultural underpinnings were grain-based and required large tracts of irrigable land. The masonry requirements of the socio-political structure required centralization of government power for efficient coordination of large-scale projects. Ironically, high population dispersal led to the creation of a strongly centralized government to deal with the needs of that dispersed population.

Secondly, because agriculture was based on limited amounts of widely dispersed land, wealth was primarily generated from ownership of the land and laws ensured that it demised smoothly from generation to generation. Along with rents, political power accrued to those receiving these large transfers of intergenerational wealth. This accrual of political power led to the plutocratic tendencies of local and regional governments.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Finally, population dispersal increased the geographic and metaphorical distance between most citizens and their centers of learning, leading to stark differences in educational attainment between the intelligentsia and land-bound serfs.

These synoptic sprouts shall be expounded upon in the chapters that follow.

Reg was shocked when people started getting up around him. Class had ended, and he was still puzzling over the introduction. He turned to Yeva and asked, “Any idea what kind of plant a ‘synoptic’ is? Seems like a tall one, right?”

Yeva shook her head, “No blighting clue. I was going to ask you: figure being a herder you might have run into one.”

“Ain’t never run into one.” Reg responded. “And we’re supposed to finish this book and then write an essay?”

“What’s worse is it seems like this won’t be the first one.” Yeva added with an exaggerated shudder that made the trinkets braided into her hair clack. “I’d thought this was going to be about the twists below and how to kill ’em. That class would be worth something.”

The two headed off to lunch, commiserating as they went.

At lunch, the non-elves sat down together as had become their habit. Annise occasionally sat with other groups: she had friends and acquaintances throughout their cohort. But the rest of them didn’t feel welcome joining any of the other tables.

Val started chattering excitedly as soon as Reg sat down at the table, “What a great book! Chapter two was so much fun. I hadn’t ever thought about agriculture and food as having such an impact on what kind of government you end up with. And grains? I’d love to find some when we go down into the mist. I have such a hard time picturing what a plant that grows in the ‘ground’ would actually look like. And grains are supposed to grow pretty close together, maybe like a moss? What did you think?”

Reg ducked his head, “I didn’t make it through the introduction.”

Val’s eyes widened, “Really? I know it was a bit dry, but the content was so exciting! I just wish it were focused on the environment beyond agriculture. I’d love to know more about forests, mountains, streams, hills, and canyons. Oh, and caverns! I’ve read that some of them can have their own ecosystems.”

“I don’t even know what most of those things are.” Reg admitted. “I’m struggling with the Old Elven. I’m fine reading normal stuff, but I just don’t know what most of the words even mean.”

“Oh, that makes sense. Do you want some help?” Val asked.

“Does a beetle want to wallow? I’d love help!” Reg answered.

“Deal! But you have to promise to help me with Arms.” Val said. Bartholomew, perched in his nest in Val’s dreaded hair, nodded seriously as she said this.

Reg was quick to agree, but he felt like he was getting the better of the bargain by far.

For the early afternoon, Reg had Advanced Arms. In the dimness below, the Instructor of Arms had them running sprints holding heavy sacks, balancing on the thin, suspended line, running through exercises with the heavy staves, and learning to juggle while holding a deep squat. It was another session where they didn’t even touch a weapon and they all left the session feeling wrung out.

During the post-session trip to the Infirmary, the healer, a younger elf woman with vibrant makeup and scarlet hair, held Belladonna and Reg back for targeted healing: Belladonna on a knee and Reg on his shoulder. The healer muttered complaints under her breath while painting healing sigils on both Reg and Belladonna with a silvery paint that smelled of cinnamon and numbed the area it was applied to. Reg only caught a few of her complaints: “blighted twist thinks healing is free,” “Instructor Versa never…”, “working me harder than a porter,” and “figures I’ll be the one milking the serpents,” but the overall impression Reg got was that the Instructor of Arms was a recent addition who’d been creating a lot more work for the infirmary staff.

While the healer was working on Reg’s shoulder, Belladonna peppered him with questions about life on the lower branches: “Why are so many buildings weirdly square shaped?”; “What do you mean you make them without druids?”; “Does everyone have a beetle to ride?”; and “Is it true that you marry before you’re forty?” She seemed particularly intrigued by spider herders and asked a lot of questions that Reg didn’t entirely understand: why would herders need to carry larger staves than anyone else? Why would they be able to recover from exercise more quickly? And why would knot-tying be important at all?

When the healer finally let Reg go, he was running late for his next class. He wished Belladonna well, her knee needed a bit more work, and sprinted off towards the archery range for remedial archery. The small class was already there and shooting downrange: Yeva, Val, and three elves: Rowan, Alba, and Elric.

When Reg arrived, Instructor Brilleye stalked over to him, “So nice of you to show up, Mr. Olverspiel.” Her mask hid her expression, but her tone was cold.

Reg panted out his excuse, but the instructor seemed unmoved, “Don’t let it happen again. You clearly need every minute of practice that you can get. I want to make it clear that if you fail remedial archery, or any other class for that matter, you’ll be removed from the guard. We have standards: if you are not able to hit the target six times in under a minute in two moons, you’ll be out. Six times in a minute is pitifully slow, so I think even you lower branchers might be able to do it. Now, go grab a bow and a bracer and hop to it!”

Reg grabbed a bow and set up in a lane next to Val. The short gnome was struggling with the too-large bow. She didn’t have the strength to draw it and she was swinging it around wildly. It was more under control than she’d been during the trial, where there’d been a possibility that she’d shoot an arrow towards the recruits, but none of her arrows came close to even making it to the target. She was breathing heavily and Bartholomew was stroking her ear.

In a low voice, Reg caught Val’s attention and asked, “Are we just supposed to be shooting? No drills or nothing?”

“Yes. She just told us to start practicing and then ignored us! She didn’t tell us anything at all. Just to start practicing. I don’t even know what I’m doing wrong! How am I going to hit the target once in two moons? And she’s just been sitting over there not giving us any instruction” Val said in a voice that sounded on the edge of tears.

Reg frowned: it seemed like the instructor wanted them to fail. “I don’t know archery, but maybe practice drawing the bow first without the arrow? I don’t think trying to shoot the arrow is helping.”

Val mumbled agreement and then tried drawing the bow without the arrow. She got the bowstring a bit further back than before, but it still looked incredibly awkward, but Reg couldn’t tell what she was doing wrong, apart from using a bow that was far too large for her. Reg muttered encouragement to her while shooting his own shots. His weren’t that much better: he had the range right, but his arrows were incredibly inconsistent. He had the sense that he was doing something wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. And Instructor Brilleye only gave feedback to the elves in the class and walked past Yeva, Val, and Reg without saying anything.

During the whole class, Reg fretted. Did all of his classes have an exam in two moons that they’d need to pass to stay in the guard? How was Val going to pass archery without a bow her size? What if he never figured out evocation? And how was he possibly going to pass The World Below?