Corathus Creep

Ak’Anon Expedition 328

The official strategy guide says that about a century and a half ago King Ak’Anon paid for a drilling expedition to look for mithril far below the Steamfont mines. Its members were the first to use a great new invention, the Burrownizer, a powerful drill that bored deep into the earth with gnomes and clockworks riding inside.

When the mechanism that swept away the rubble jammed, the engineers soon saw that the only way left was down. They traveled for two and a half years on a fifteen-degree slope before crashing into Corathus Creep, and worked out that they were somewhere under Antonica, probably beneath Nektulos Forest. One community copy of the text calls it the Mithril Expedition.

Sources: EverQuest: Depths of Darkhollow, Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Games / SCEA, 2005) · Library of Erudin: Depths of Darkhollow, Part II

The gnomeworks

The survivors kept their failing bodies going with salvaged clockwork parts until they were almost entirely machine. Most kept some of their personality and memory in Fibblebrap gems, named for the gnome who invented them, and lived on as what they called gnomeworks.

The miners among them, the Creep Reapers, have nearly forgotten they were gnomes and think only of mining corathus. They hate the other survivors of Expedition 328 who will not work the mines, and they have largely overrun the Corathus Mines. A 2009 official article says most of the gnomeworks are now trying to find their way back to Corathus Creep.

Sources: EverQuest: Depths of Darkhollow, Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Games / SCEA, 2005) · EverQuest.com (2009): Underfoot, the gnomeworks

The sporali

Around 4900, the guide says, a thinking fungus spore got into the groundwater through a pool in the lair of Clan Runnyeye’s goblins, and found its way through cracks into Darkhollow. A 2009 official article tells the same story but says the spore leaked into the Underfoot instead.

The colonies began to harvest corathus, a strange substance secreted by the corathus worms, which that article calls corath worms. The sporali shamans pooled their stocks of corathus and fed them to one spore king, and so Antraygus was born; the article names him Antraygus the Root Father.

In the wars between the shiliskin and the sporali, the sporali bred many plants as weapons, among them mindspore and retch weed. The shiliskin eventually gave up corathus and turned to nargilor, the magical coral that grows below Illsalin. Besides the sporali themselves, many deadly plants guard the colony from intruders.

Sources: EverQuest: Depths of Darkhollow, Prima Official Game Guide (Prima Games / SCEA, 2005) · EverQuest.com (2009): Underfoot, the sporali