Moleville
In the middle of the Seventh Century an expedition of Nerrid engineers and historians descended on Phelandria, their goal to dig through the rubble of the old city buried deep in the cliffside. And for thirty years, they worked away until funding from the Le Carre Family dried up. The old duke had died and his son had little interest in financing what he called "digging in the dirt."
The process had been, necessarily, painstakingly slow. Between the need to reinforce the unstable passages that they dug and their determination to reconstruct every square inch of the city's collapse, the dig had proceeded at a glacial pace. Archeologist removed one pebble at a time, dusting off fragments of bone and pottery with tiny brushes. Of course, in true Nerrid fashion, they catalogued everything meticulously and the resulting 57 volume work resides safely in the Nerrid National Library, the Le Carre's uninterested in paying for their own copy.
Moleville, as it became known, grew out of the areas cleared by the dig. Unlike Eldorians, Nerrid have millennia of experience building networks of tunnels, making the area immune to the shifting topology and ceiling collapses common elsewhere in the ruins. While the area only covers about three hundred (Nerrid-sized) paces into the ruins, it does run the length of the middle shelf on Evenglow. Shortly after the Nerrid left some of the city's poorest residents moved into this lightless warren, turning it into a slum. Today its residents consist of those luckless, ambitionless, unscrupulous or simply insane.
Afternoon in Moleville
The foundations of buildings remain and, after the excavation cleared them of debris have been used by the areas new residents as a platform upon which to build. Crude structures of emerged, patchworks of mismatched stone, scavenged wood, and the odd brick carving the area into cell-like homes for the squatters. While the area remains generally lawless, the Eldorian Thieves' Guild does its best to control crime, knowing that a simmering slum provides them with opportunities for black markets, illicit gambling dens, and other profitable opportunities while complete bedlam would quickly lead to a visit from the Lionguard.