White Ash Mountain

Razha takes point on the march up the forested slope of White Ash Mountain. With her rifle in hand, she stops at the edge of the thick undergrowth. She and Zal both poke their heads out into the clearing to look. In a narrow straight line path up the mountainside, every tree has been cleared out and their roots torn up. The company is very thorough.

Along this scar on the land stands a line of wooden poles made from the trunks of ancient trees. Long electrical wires stretch between these standing corpses, an unbroken chain reaching from a far off generator up to the mining site above.

“Utility easement,” Zal says. They pull their spyglass from their coat and extend it with a swing of their wrist. They look up and down the unnaturally straight path. “Building up there, don’t see anybody immediately in view. All clear down below. But it’s an unbroken line of sight, anyone who walked by and looked the right way while we’re crossing would see us.”

“Then we gotta be quick about it,” Razha says.

“You go first, and I’ll keep a lookout,” Zal says.

“Okay,” she says. She looks back on the others and signs, “Come.” She runs out from her cover and across the narrow clearing, into the woods again. She looks back as Nadia steps up to the edge. Zal signals the way is clear and she runs across to join Razha. Next is Maris, with his long double barreled gun and his bandolier of alchemical bombs.

Next Filla crosses, then the priest-apprentice Nisho, then Kurri, all unarmed except by knives. Then Krev crosses, he has a rifle on his back and a pistol at his side. Annia follows, with its electric crossbow and a portable battery pack on its back dwarfing its thin body. Lein comes across silently, then Ketha and Elliv. Finally, Zal runs across. To their knowledge they weren’t seen.

The march through the thick woods is slow when they are traveling so heavy, weighed down with camping supplies and clean water containers for a mission of several days. Taking the road up would have been suicidal. Their only option was to forge their own path through the unbroken woods. The only trails to follow in this wilderness are those made by wild drakes and other fauna.

“Please...” the young priest-apprentice says, out of breath. “For the love of the Goddess, can we stop soon?” Nisho clearly isn’t used to this kind of travel pace. Kurri is struggling alongside him. But the group is stopping to rest more and more often, and the sun is falling low.

“Just a little further, looks like a suitable campsite right up this hill,” Razha says. The crest of the ridge is in sight.

After an exhausting ascent up a steep hill, pulling themselves up by tree trunks, they reach the top. The ground levels off here, and the brush becomes more sparse. Razha tells them all to stay low as she and Zal look out ahead. As they reach the edge, they look down on a pit of despair.

Before them for a Distance ahead, the green of the woods vanishes, and the ground is as grey as the cloudy sky above. A vast piece of land, half of the peak of White Ash Mountain, erased from existence. The artificial valley here is further carved into a number of unnaturally flat plateaus. Between them, vast pits descend into the ground, with spiraling roads leading down. Not one thing is alive within except for the workers crawling about the ruin.

Even at this late hour they labor, shoveling the rubble and dust into giant bins, pulled along by work turtles, their huge shells grey with a thick layer of dust. Monstrous metal arms tower over them--the draglines, machines that tore a hole in the world, currently at rest as the spoils are swept up. And in the depths of the pit below them is the source of this despair, veins of black crystals which spread out across the ground like roots.

These are being more carefully extracted, but with haste, as the foremen nearby shout and provoke the workers to dig them up faster. One picks up a shovel and strikes a worker in the back, hard enough to knock him down.

The black death is stable and inert while buried deep in the ground, but once disturbed it becomes very dangerous. The explosives that break up the bedrock to dig these vast pits in the ground often cause a violent reaction, resulting in a much bigger blast than planned. Many workers die this way. Those who survive a life of labor in these mines will eventually contract blight. By then, the company is finished with them, and they are left to die while their children are taken to replace them in the mine.

Across the grey void from their position, a few buildings stand, temporary structures that move when the pit must be expanded further. And on the far edge a railroad runs from a row of concrete platforms and on down the mountain. Huge metal train cars piled high with discordium line up, nearly ready to be shipped off to the refinery in Korben. Work turtles drag heavy bins of black death up the winding grey roads to the loading platforms.

And standing near the edge of the flat mountaintop is a pool of water, so black it doesn’t reflect the clouds above. These discordium slurry pools are a feature of every mine, an attempt to collect the poisonous water and sludge in one place. Filled far beyond its capacity, only a hastily built dam holds it in place.

“Razha,” Zal says. She is gripping their hand so tight it must hurt. She didn’t realize it.

“It never gets any fucking easier, no matter how many of these I see,” Razha says.

Zal pulls her to them and holds her in their arms. “I’m sorry, Razha.”

“There’s nothing you can say,” she says, burying her face in the soft web of patched fabric of their grey jacket.

“I know,” they say. But a flatlander would never really know how it felt.