[Deaths] well pre campaign
Title: and dust all in me hair
'Verse/characters: Deaths; unnamed
Prompt: 47A "the sunless way"
Word Count: 321
Notes: No, he doesn't know.
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The creak of the wooden waterwheels, and the breathing of the miners treading them, followed him up the hill from the silver mine; he might pick up a shift there later, if they'd take him.
If he came back up out of the tunnel, today.
The mouth of the salt mine smelled wet, as always, like the sea he hadn't seen in long years, dank and cold and like if you fell, down there, they might find you in a thousand years, cured like a ham in your clothes by what you went to wrest from the earth.
Like always, he took a long breath of the relatively cleaner air at the mouth, before he went down, into the dark.
The way was dimly lit, after the daylight outside, and he minded where he put his feet as he made his way to the wide spot, and the wooden slides that would bring a man down to the working areas of the mine.
He was so, so tired, but not sick. Only weary, and that was no reason not to go to work.
So he went, and touched hand to shoulder as he worked his way past the men bent double with sacks, heading out of the depths to bring the spoils into the air. The elevator that managed the salt, never men, unless they were dead, was run by a wheel like the silver miners'.
It'd been a while since he'd seen faces he knew, down here, smeared with salty earth and sweat and grime, but that was the way of a salt mine. Men died, caved in and dug out no longer breathing, or went down the hill and didn't come back.
He'd helped dig more friends from the long-dead sea floor than he wanted to think about, down here, where he had neither cup to raise nor priest to confess to.
So he only nodded to the new faces, touched their shoulders and wished them well, as he went to work.
'Verse/characters: Deaths; unnamed
Prompt: 47A "the sunless way"
Word Count: 321
Notes: No, he doesn't know.
---------
The creak of the wooden waterwheels, and the breathing of the miners treading them, followed him up the hill from the silver mine; he might pick up a shift there later, if they'd take him.
If he came back up out of the tunnel, today.
The mouth of the salt mine smelled wet, as always, like the sea he hadn't seen in long years, dank and cold and like if you fell, down there, they might find you in a thousand years, cured like a ham in your clothes by what you went to wrest from the earth.
Like always, he took a long breath of the relatively cleaner air at the mouth, before he went down, into the dark.
The way was dimly lit, after the daylight outside, and he minded where he put his feet as he made his way to the wide spot, and the wooden slides that would bring a man down to the working areas of the mine.
He was so, so tired, but not sick. Only weary, and that was no reason not to go to work.
So he went, and touched hand to shoulder as he worked his way past the men bent double with sacks, heading out of the depths to bring the spoils into the air. The elevator that managed the salt, never men, unless they were dead, was run by a wheel like the silver miners'.
It'd been a while since he'd seen faces he knew, down here, smeared with salty earth and sweat and grime, but that was the way of a salt mine. Men died, caved in and dug out no longer breathing, or went down the hill and didn't come back.
He'd helped dig more friends from the long-dead sea floor than he wanted to think about, down here, where he had neither cup to raise nor priest to confess to.
So he only nodded to the new faces, touched their shoulders and wished them well, as he went to work.