“People living deeply have no fear of death.”

- Anais Nin

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‘There are people who live deep, below the surface, of the Earth or the sea, it matters not, what matters is they live deep below us in the darkest crevices of our world and they do not fear death. This is key; it’s why I’ve brought them up at all. What I want to know is why; why don’t they fear death when we Upworlders are terrified of it.’

That had been Marcies homework question and it was currently baffling her. She knew of the Downworlders, everyone did, but that wasn’t the problem. Marcie knew of the Downworlders, but she knew nothing about them. For all she knew they feared death just as much as she did. And as nobody really knew much about them anyways she couldn’t research it.

Besides there were multiple species of Downworlders, maybe some of them feared death and others didn’t. How could she know?

Marcie couldn’t talk to a real Downworlder either; they avoided Upworlders for all they were worth.

Marcie knew she could have gone to the library and looked through everything they had on Downworlders, or gone through all the information sites she knew, talked to professors and Downworld experts; and she was sure that some of her classmates were doing just that, but Marcie was lazy and didn’t give a rats’ ass about Downworlders.

Then a thought struck her, while her professor had mentioned Upworlders he hadn’t specifically mentioned Downworlders, so Marcie chose a subject a bit closer to home. Her essay was a single sentence long; it went like this:

“Because corpses are already dead.”