I’ll tell you, hauling nearly fifty ingots up from the deep seam near the Minoc mine forge tests a man’s back and his patience both. The pickaxe rang true all morning—clang, clang—like a blacksmith’s hammer on hot iron, each strike sending sparks skittering across the damp stone. My arms burned, but there’s a rhythm to it, a kind of prayer in the repetition. You learn to listen to the rock: some strikes echo hollow, promising ore; others thud dead, just waste. I’d filled my pack twice already, trudged back to the bank, dropped the weight like shedding a cursed armor, and turned right back around. The air down there’s thick with dust and the iron scent of crushed stone, and by midday, my throat felt like I’d swallowed embers.
But it wasn’t the weight or the dust that nearly broke me—it was the tongs. Third batch out of the smelter, glowing cherry-red, and the damn thing snapped clean at the hinge. Just ping—like a lute string giving way—and the bar of iron clattered onto the anvil, then rolled, hissing, into the soot. I stood there, heart hammering, staring at it. Twenty minutes of work, half a day’s effort in raw ore, wasted. I kicked the broken tongs into the corner where three others already lay rusting. That’s the truth of it: mining’s hard, but the forge? The forge judges you. One slip, one weak tool, and it laughs in your face.
I ended up selling what I could to that quiet smith near the Warriors Guild—steady hands, never haggles hard. Took the ingots off my back and a bit off my pride. Felt lighter walking away, even with only two gold pieces more than I started. Tomorrow, I’m fetching new tongs from the Minoc Miners Guild. Good ones, dwarven-forged. And maybe I’ll take a walk past the carpenter’s—saw a lad shaping hafts earlier. A proper handle might just make the difference between a tool and a curse.
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