I’ll tell you, the air down in the mines near Minoc carries a grit that works its way into your teeth. I swung that pickaxe for what felt like half my life today—twenty, maybe thirty strikes into the same stubborn seam—before the stone finally cracked open with a sound like a dry laugh. My arms were trembling, shoulders slick with sweat beneath my tunic, but when the iron broke loose in a jagged chunk, there was a kind of music in it. I knelt there, brushing dust from the ore, thinking how each one of these rocks has slept under the earth longer than any of us have drawn breath. And now it’s mine to carry, to shape, to sell. I stacked it with the rest—nearly fifty ingots in my pack already, heavy as a drunkard’s regrets.
Back at the forge behind the Miners Guild South, the real work began. The coals were still warm from the last smith, thank the gods, and I fed them straw and scrap till they hissed and bloomed orange. But the tongs—cursed, rust-eaten things—snapped clean in two when I pulled the first ingot from the flame. I stared at the broken ends, smoke curling around my face, and nearly laughed. All that hauling, all that swinging, and now stopped by a bent piece of scrap metal. I cursed under my breath, kicked the broken tongs into the ash, and reached for the spare pair—duller, looser, but they’d hold. The hammer came down again and again, each strike ringing flat but true against the anvil’s crown.
I thought about Ambar, the guildmistress, turning me away when I asked for coin. “We don’t beg here,” she said, like I’d asked for a favor instead of a hand-up. But I didn’t come up from the dark to beg. I came up to work. And work I did—shaping crude plates till my hands blistered, selling what I could to the vendor outside the blacksmith, who barely looked up from his drink. Still, the gold clinked in my pouch. Enough to eat. Maybe buy decent tongs tomorrow.
Come dawn, I’m heading back down. The stone’s still waiting, and so am I.
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