Minoc’s mine forge was thick with the smell of soot and old iron when I stumbled in last night, pack nearly splitting with nearly fifty ingots riding my shoulders like a mule’s burden. I’d been swinging that pickaxe since dawn in the tunnels west of the blacksmith—thunk, scrape, thunk—each strike sending a jolt up my arms, the rhythm so deep in my bones now I dream in echoes. The stone there’s stubborn, veined with iron so dark it almost glows in the torchlight, and more than once I thought the pick would snap clean at the neck. My hands were raw, knuckles split and crusted, but I kept at it. You don’t stop when the vein’s singing to you.
By the time I hauled myself up into town, the sun was bleeding red over the rooftops, and I could barely lift my arms to knock the dust from my coat. I went straight to Alethea—she runs the weaponsmith’s shop near the stables, a no-nonsense woman with soot permanently etched into her palms. She didn’t even look up when I dropped the ingots on her counter, just ran her thumb over one, nodded once. “Good weight,” she said, and slid over the gold. That moment—when the coins clinked into my palm, warm from her grip—something in my chest loosened. Not just the coins, but the knowing: I’d wrestled this from the earth myself, shaped nothing into something useful. Even the ache in my back felt honest.
But the real truth came later, sitting on a barrel behind the Minoc Provisioner, sipping cheap ale that tasted like burnt barley. I watched the tongs I’d left cooling in the forge’s edge, warped from yesterday’s heat, useless now. I’ll need a new pair. Maybe tomorrow I’ll make them myself—start small, something solid. There’s a rhythm to this life, same as the pick in stone. You break, you build, you sell, you return. And somehow, you keep swinging.
No replies yet.