The Mineshafts and Caverns beneath the Surface belong to the undead: the Revenants, the Blockers, and the Bone Queen who rules them both.
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Revenants are animated skeletons, bare bone picked clean — most with the tall, slender frame of elves, for that is what they were in life. They are tireless and fearless, they do not bleed, breathe, or lose their nerve, and unlike the mindless Blockers they keep enough will to guard their tunnels with purpose. Bound by their Queen’s obsession with secrecy, they fight to annihilation rather than let a witness escape — relentless, but predictable.
Bone endures where flesh fails, and a Revenant is harder to lay to rest for good than ordinary undead. But it is brittle: shatter enough of the frame and it falls.
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A Blocker is a shuffling, walking corpse — slow, heavy, and dead-eyed, often blotched with patches of pale, creeping mold breaking through the skin. It is nearly indifferent to injury and pain, utterly relentless, and contagious: its wounds and spores spread the mold that made it, slowly turning the living into more of its kind. It is also utterly mindless — no cunning, no caution, no coordination. Dangerous in a tight tunnel; easily outrun in the open.
Some Blockers wade the deep, flooded passages of the Mineshafts, where the water teems with flesh-eating bacteria. The water strips them to the bone, and what rises is all but indistinguishable from a Revenant — and joins their number in the dark.
The Bone Queen rules the Mineshafts: a Revenant who still wears the crown, cape, and sceptre of the court she ruled in life, and has never set them aside. Where her subjects are dim, she is cunning and vicious, and she suffers no intruder to leave her domain alive — anyone who stumbles into the deep dark, she falls upon without mercy. She believes that each kill bestows the immortality she promised long ago. It almost never does.
Two stories meet in the dark of the Mineshafts. The Blockers were people long ago who bought a magic mold from the elves, hoping for bodies that would not break; the mold kept that promise and pilfered their minds as payment. The Revenants were an elf tribe whose queen bargained with the Reckoner for immortality; the demon kept its word in the cruellest way, unmaking her whole people into deathless skeletons, and the queen — vain even in grief — led her tribe underground to be seen by no one.
The Queen and the dim, bound will of her tribe hold that to be slain by a Revenant is to be granted that same immortality: an honour, and the keeping of her ancient promise. The gift almost never takes. Her victims mostly just die.