reference material

He is an odd-looking creature. The dark elves always are. His skin shares the intense blackness common to his race – in all but the brightest light, he resembles nothing so much as a silhouette. His hair is shock-white and lays flat against his back, no errant strands. The irises in his eyes have a dim violet hue.

His body is quite scrawny, clad in a well-cut black jump suit – no adornments. Hanging on the coat hook not far away is a hooded red cloak.

A single candle burns on the table, providing the only source of illumination in the room. By this light he reads a book with singular intensity.

He sits in a bland room, locked in concentration, occasionally attended by the tiny invisible servants typical of his profession.

The book he reads is more unusual than he is. Hide-bound in the skin of some extinct abomination, with silver-edged pages, written in code, inked with blood and mercury, overflowing with eldritch diagrams - it is this book that lays flat open upon the only table in the room.

He sits on the only chair, reading this book.

A faint sound makes him look up – his long ears twitch once, then twice. The faint sound is repeated a bit more loudly.

He spits an oath, too startled to be really inventive with it. The rocky thud this time is definitely audible. The mage knocks over the chair and moves away from the sound.

The fourth thud is noisy. A steel pick breaches the far side of the room, knocking over a bookshelf. A commotion can be heard on the other side, and the impacts of more mining tools are audible after a moment.

The mage’s brows knit in anger and frustration. All that trouble, and still…!

The dwarfs (he knows from the cadence of their filthy babble) are creating a path into his room. Until today, it was sealed - with no way in or out beyond teleportation. The unseen servants moved air in and moisture out through a series of hooded vents to keep him from stifling.

None of that matters now. He cannot teleport out until the dwarfs are dealt with; too many of his books are here.

One of the dwarfs shoulders the last fragments of stone out of the way and stands astride the fallen bookcase. The mage flicks his hand. For one fragmented moment, he is connected to the dwarf by a brilliant arc of electricity. Then it is dark again, and the dwarf lies down and has a seizure.

Cries of anger and incredulity are heard from further back. Another dwarf rushes in, with a third hustling close behind them. The elf pierces them both with a long spike of ice before they can spread out. The fourth dwarf gets his heart punched out through the back of his plate mail by a shockwave of some invisible force.

An amusing few minutes pass while the mage picks off invading dwarfs, who must pass through the single opening in take-a-number style. After another four kills, there is only silence.

The mage and his servants laboriously clear the passageway, tugging the rotting meat further into the room. With his athame, he pierces each one through the forehead to ensure no further troubles. This policy proves wise when the last dwarf (the first to fall) is discovered to be almost not dead.

When that mess has settled, the mage takes a couple of breaths, then casts some abjurations. His feet lift an inch or two off the ground, hanging loose. A jumble of eight- and seven-sided shapes coalesce around him, then assemble themselves together into a spherical shell.

He drifts through the hole. It is pitch black, and he can see in the dark. He makes his way through a labyrinth of exploratory tunnels, moving mostly down-grade, and finally emerges from a quarry entrance in an underground cavern.

There is nothing immediately obvious other than a wagon loaded with mining gear. The mage scouts the area a bit, finds nothing alive, and decides to return to his room. He takes a long, deep breath – gathering power – and then flicks himself back to the study room.

It is as he left it. The secondary tunnels he was worrying about have failed to appear. He heaves a long sigh, releases the abjurations, and silently gives orders. His servants start floating the books back up through the vents. He ferries the largest ones himself, since they won’t fit. After seven teleports in as many minutes, he kneels in the surface safehouse (little more than a shack with some vents, which now is slowly filling with books) and rests.

Another hour of this work, and the underground study room has been cleared. He goes through the books from the fallen shelf one by one, carefully mending the damage.

When he is satisfied, he stands and goes outside. Outside is cool and dry. It is the twilight just before dawn, and the world hasn’t woken up yet.

He has placed his humdrum shack in the middle of the woods - within convenient reach of a town, but far enough away to escape prying eyes. Now he needs to move quickly since his library is relatively exposed.

He flicks himself to the town’s border. It is a tidy little village, with good architecture. He puts on his cloak, and glamours himself a bit – the obsidian skin draws too much attention in this region. Most of these people are the color of peaches, so he mimics them.

With the illusion in place, they will assume he is a high elf – with his features, probably somewhere out of the north. He is less practiced in casting glamours, so he doesn’t bother trying to actually disguise his features in any way. A strong nose, high cheekbones, and weary eyes emerge from the inky non-contrast of silhouette. He walks the rest of the way to the carpenter’s.

The carpenter is not up yet, so he stands by the door and waits for a while. After a half-hour spent suppressing his anxiety, the carpenter’s son shows up with a ring of keys, ready to open for the day.

“Good morning, young sir,” the mage says.

“Back for more, eh?” the lad replies. “Me pop will be glad to see you.”

“No doubt,” says the mage with a hint of a grin. “I’ll have to be brief today, though. Can you tell me when he’ll be along?”

“E’s just a minute behind me,” the boy says, opening the door and going in to the shop.

The mage tries not to look too visibly relieved. It’s more like five minutes, but the carpenter is along soon enough. The two of them meet in a back room, with the boy oiling blades and laying out tools somewhere off to one side.

“I need a carriage,” says the mage.

“A carriage?” The carpenter smiles. “Can’t ye just magisk up one o’ them floaty discus?”

The mage smiles back, just a little. “For the distances I have in mind,” he says, “that’s really not going to be practical.”