Life at the Bottom

The Shaft

The shaft is a smooth-bored hexagonal hole, precisely 111 meters in diameter and 333 meters deep. No one knows how it was created or who made it, but its sides are unblemished and nothing grows upon it, or around its edges on the surface. 

Life at the Top

The shaft is strange and unusual. Occasionally, dwarven miners will travel from far-off lands to study its strange features. On very rare occasions, wizards will arrive, floating down from the sky or stepping sidewise through a tear in reality. They will pace its edges and mutter cryptically, then leave unsatisfied. 

The rest of the time, the shaft is just a big hole in the ground, and to normal folk, a simple curiosity. Children dare each other to step close to the edge. Lovers inscribe secret vows on stones and toss them into the depths. Criminals disposing of evidence heave their victims into its unquestioning darkness.

Life at the Bottom

But people live down there, in an expansive natural cavern at the terminus of the shaft. They are humans, or human-like, or people that were once human generations ago, but have turned into something else, something rich and strange. 

Light, Precious Light

Natural light is at a premium down there. Much more than space, or water, or soil. The sun is only an abstract idea to these denizens. The photosynthesizing plants that grow down here are carefully nurtured so that each receives enough light to grow, corresponding with its usefulness to the bottom-dwellers as food, or medicine, or something else. The walls of the shaft allow no purchase for growing things, but around the bottom, scaffolding has been erected from bone, metal, and stone, to ensure that whatever hardy plants can live on the thin, distant light are able to grow in abundance.

Beyond the scaffolding, throughout the cavern, there are mirrors. The mirrors are ancient, impossibly polished, seemingly perfect, perhaps left over from the same forgotten entity or civilization that carved the shaft itself. Placed carefully around the perimeter of the shaft-bottom, they expand the reach of the sun’s light.

Treasures from Above

Things fall down from above all the time. Most of it would be viewed by surface-dwellers as random, stupid, useless. But it is precious to the people at the bottom. Detritus is compost. Metal can be repurposed. Dead animals are like aliens from another world.

Venturing Forth 

The shaft is light and light is life. The first rule of the people at the bottom is to stay near the light, because it offers something that no one else underground has. Even with the scaffolding, even with the mirrors, even with mushrooms and deep-rooted geophytes; there is only so much food down here. The population must be strictly, mercilessly, sometimes cruelly controlled.

Some people don’t like it. Some people think there must be a better way. To go up. Not up the shaft, which is impossible to climb by any known means. Instead out, horizontally, and then up through the tunnels and caves and ancient dungeon hallways that spread out around the shaft.

Or… and this idea is only whispered by the most heterodox of the shaft-bottom-dwellers… go not up, or out, but down, further into the depths. The true heresy.

This is you. You are a level 1 adventurer. You are leaving the shaft bottom forever. Where will you go?