Thirty-six residents, and every one of them turns up in somebody's lineup sooner or later. The compendium keeps a page for each: a face, a title, a history — who they were before they came down, and what they are like to meet on a floor.
You can play without reading it. Read it, and you stop guessing five names and start knowing which five hold together. The residents keep habits, and the dossiers are where those habits leave fingerprints — never written down as rules, but all over the margins.
The seven factions below are how the deep sorts itself.
- The Court
- The court above scattered; its habits moved down with it. The coins still get counted, the post still gets kept, the songs that got her banished still get sung. A title pays no wages down here and carries weight anyway. As for the crown with no owner — it has outlasted every owner it ever had.
- The Church
- Three of them, one relic, and a job that does not end. The Priest rations her holy water; the Undertaker carries bandages for the living and a last journey for the dead — both of them prepared for somebody else. The relic has been under bounty a hundred years, and the wording has never moved off recover. Nobody dares write seize.
- The Sellswords
- Five of them, five ledgers. One is saving for a sister's tuition, one for footnotes, one calls theft inheriting early. The veteran is the miner: the others count what the trip will pay, he counts whether the stone on this floor still knows him.
- The Undead
- The largest faction, and the only one still hiring. The Necromancer calls it recruitment and packs more registers than rations. Nobody asks the recruits — most of them no longer remember what they were called. One still paces the same stretch of deep corridor, waiting to be recognized.
- The Wilds
- Nobody sent them. They walked in. The Apothecary trades either way — the living buy remedies, the dead become stock; the Beast-Speaker, when he speaks at all, mostly does not speak in the tongues of men. The rest do not negotiate. The one on the ceiling carries off whatever it hears, and the one with the web spins it where you have already lost the way back.
- The Lair
- Whether the one at the bottom is asleep is still unsettled — everyone who tested it failed to come back and testify. The neighbors have each reached an arrangement: one drew itself a family tree, one has not moved in three hundred years, one simply rams the door. Down here, knowing better is not manners. It is seniority.
- The Vault
- Everything worth carrying out is on this floor, and one thing that would rather keep you. Old hands knock three times before opening — not ritual, they are listening to the echo. And the straw in a mercenary's purse is not for comfort: in the deep, coins that rattle are a roll call.
