2025 Mar 29: Buried in the Deep

 One of the easiest ways to deal with a demon or malevolent spirit is to trap it in an incantation bowl and bury it in the ground. However that is not not the only way evil can get buried underground. Powerful sorcerers can trap various entities in other items (usually statues of the entity in question), or cursed items can get buried deliberately. Sometimes these buried dangers are older than anyone can remember, and indeed some are even said to have been left behind by Those Who Came Before. 

Needless to say, this makes mining, sapping, or digging any kind of tunnel or even just a particularly deep ditch potentially quite dangerous, and usually before starting such works, it is customary to perform animal (sometimes even human or other sentient creature) sacrifice, both to seek the help of the more benevolent gods in protecting the diggers from these dangers, but also to the buried things themselves, in order to placate them. The other common way to mitigate these dangers is to employ the services of arcane specialists who can detect such dangerous buried magic. This usually takes the form of dowsing using a rod, but other methods are also known, such as carrying a bowl of water from a sacred spring (which becomes cloudy or dirty when it is carried above buried dangers), magical trances during which the participants get to see where things are buried, or using special incense sticks, where the smoke from the incense twists in response the danger.

The undisputed masters of such divination are the Bronze Elves, and their priests and priestesses are often requested even by emissaries from faraway lands to perform these services. Of course if one knows how to perform these feats themselves, it can be quite a lucrative profession, although sometimes the tunnel or ditch absolutely cannot go anywhere else, and in those cases it is up to the ritualist to handle the objects, which can easily lead to catastrophe, if the ritualist isn't powerful enough to safely contain the danger.