Bestiary: what lives in the Lampway

Nothing in the Deep was put there to fight delvers. Everything there is there for one of seven reasons:

1. Native. Creatures of the dark rock that were there before the Keepers, or that came up from the deep fires.
2. Come down. Hill creatures, beasts and people that moved into the empty halls after the Fall.
3. Made. Things people built or bred: golems, the old royal menagerie's hybrids, gargoyles, mimics.
4. The dead. Those buried in the Ring of Rest whose last spark could not rise once the lamps went out.
5. The fire. Spirits and dragons of the deep fires, loose since the Ashborn left the Ring of Forges.
6. The dark. Scraps of Morrowgloom itself, and things from the Unlit Ring below it.
7. The light. Lost sparks: wisps that wandered off from a lamp, or starlight caught in the Ring of Glass.

Twenty-five uniques, each appearing once a game, and the boss. In order of depth.

"A rat as big as a dog, wearing a thimble for a crown." The thimble belonged to Marla Tunnick, Lanternhollow's founder; Whiskers' line has been passing it down for a thousand years. Kill him and the rats of the upper workings crown another within a week.

"The self-crowned king of the kobolds, and every one of them owes him money." Fenwick's great-great-grandmother seized the east galleries in 412 YH. Fenwick runs them as a toll road and a loan office, and lays traps for anyone who won't pay.

"A goblin who has stolen from three kings and every one of their cooks." The three kings were Fenwick, a goblin warchief and Old Whiskers. The cooks took it worse.

"A boar with one eye, many scars, and no fear at all." Lost the eye to Kessa Edgewright, who lost two fingers to him. Neither has forgiven the other.

"A spider as wide as a cart, ringed by her children." The great spider of the Ring of Stone. The Grey Widow, far below, is said to be her mother.

"A brigand chief who collects ears." A delver of the Free Companies who stopped going down for treasure when he realised delvers coming up carry more of it.

"A shadow in a stolen coat, with a sack full of snuffed lights." The first of Morrowgloom's servants to climb, seen since about 900 BH. Everything it snuffs goes into the sack, and everything in the sack goes down to its master. It snuffed every lamp in Lanternhollow on the Night of Open Doors. Killing it, the Keepers believe, would free every light in the sack.

"A crow as tall as a man, who speaks in your mother's voice." It eats the dead of the upper workings and keeps their voices. Since 1150 YH the crows of the Hollow Gate's dome have obeyed it.

"She kept the lamps of a temple once, and put them all out." A Keeper of Lanternhollow who listened at the temple floor until something listened back. In 911 YH she snuffed the temple's lamps in one night (all but the Eternal Lamp, which would not go out) and walked into the Deep. The fallen acolytes and grave priests of the upper rings follow her.

"An ogre cook who wants you for the pot." Cooks for the ogres of the Ring of Roots and argues with them about seasoning.

"A scarecrow with a candle for a heart, and it is lonely." Walked off its pole at the harvest fair in 1199 YH. The candle in its chest is a light Morrowgloom has not been able to eat, which is why the dark things of the Deep avoid it, and why it is so lonely.

"A necromancer whose servants are all former apprentices." Expelled from the Collegium in 1052 YH for keeping the bodies of his failed students. He has never stopped taking students.

"A troll so old her teeth have turned to granite." She was rubble in the Ring of Stone when the masons cut it, if the trolls' own story is true. The oldest troll in the Deep and the mother of half of them.

"She burned her own tower down to be free of it." A pyromancer of the Collegium who was bound by an oath to her tower and burned it to break the oath in 1183 YH. Now she is free, and finds she has nowhere to go but down.

"A worm the width of a corridor, that makes the corridors." Some say it, not the masons, cut half the passages of the lower rings, and that the shifting of the Lampway is only the Maul-Wyrm rearranging its home.

"Silk hangs from her like a bride's veil." Mother Bristle's mother, and the reason the Pale Bride passed safely through her ring: the two brides, they say, did not quarrel.

"A mimic that took the shape of a mirror, and then of you." What became of Queen Tamsin's Mirror, which showed the rings below. Left in the Ring of Rest for a thousand years, it learned hunger like any other grave good. If it still sees what the Mirror saw, it knows the whole Deep.

"A golem built to guard a vault that no longer exists." Built by Brassle & Vane in 700 YH, sunk with the vault in the Great Subsidence of 803 YH, and carried down by the shifting of the rings. The vault was broken and scattered long ago. Ironjaw guards the place where it thinks the vault is.

"Still in her wedding white, still waiting, still hungry." Princess Lisette of Aurenhold, who went down after her betrothed around 600 BH. She has walked down further than any living person would, still looking for him. She may be the first vampire.

"Weed in his crown, water in his lungs, and patience forever." King Oswy the Faithful, who drowned relighting his fathers' lamps on the Night the River Rose (640 BH). The flood carried him down the river's course into the Ring of Forges, where the river boils away against the deep fires. He walks the riverbed, waiting for the flood to carry him home.

"A frost giant who froze his own heart to stop it hurting." A Cragborn hauler's son who went down with the digging. When word reached him, centuries later, that his family above had died, he froze his own heart. The Cragborn still sing about him.

"Every mouth whispers a different lie, all at once." A horror from the Unlit Ring. It was the voice Sister Vesper heard under the temple floor.

"A lich who has not closed his eyes in nine hundred years." A Collegium scholar who went down in 307 YH to find the light that does not die, and found instead a way not to die himself. He does not sleep because, he believes, the moment he closes his eyes Morrowgloom will take him.

"An old red dragon who remembers the first fire." Hatched in the deep fires at the Bursting, she is the oldest living thing in the world. She allowed the Pact of the Forge for a price no one wrote down. The Ashborn half-believe she is the First Fire, or what is left of her. Her hoard may hold the last true ember.

"A fiend who wagered his kingdom and won yours." A fiend of the Unlit Ring who came to Aurenhold as a merchant prince and won the kingdom from Ysmer the Last at dice in 412 BH. He took the crown down into the Deep and wears it still. The Oathknights want it back.

"A darkness older than the stars, with your torch reflected in a thousand of its eyes." The last pool of the Gloam, trapped under the world at the Bursting (see Cosmology). It eats light, and every light it eats is a dawn that never comes. Its thousand eyes are the lights it has swallowed, still burning. When it is slain, "the darkness shudders and comes apart, … and the deep grows a little lighter": the lights go home.