THE LEDGER · THE VALE
The Sunken Cut
aka the old prospect, the low cut
A flooded valley-floor silver prospect a short walk southwest of town, driven and drowned by the prospector Alder Venn, played out and given over to ash-hounds and the Silt Hands' quieter business — now held by Venn's own granddaughter.
When the silver still promised, the prospector Alder Venn drove a test-adit into a low stone rise on the valley floor southwest of Valenfeld. For one season the assays sang. Then the vein narrowed to a thread, the thread to nothing, and the groundwater came up faster than he could timber against it; Venn wrote his last assay by a failing lamp and died owing more than he ever pulled from the stone. The town remembers him, if at all, as a joke about the Lean Years. The dark did not stay empty. Ash-hounds denned in the flooded mouth, drawn to the still water. Then the Silt Hands moved in — and the keeper they set over the cache is Mara Venn, Alder's granddaughter, who offered the one place no honest soul would dig again: her family's own ruin. She penned the hounds as a living alarm, dried out the old workings, and skims every crate that passes through, telling herself the deep still owes the Venns that much. The Cut is close enough to walk to that an outlander short on coin might risk it for a first taste of the deep, but screened from town by willow scrub and folded ground. The water is still rising.
KIND
cave
PARENT PLACE
Valenfeld
CLIMATE
damp, valley-cold, close
DANGER TIER
Tier I
Connected
Type Fields
All Relationships (20)
located_in
- →Valenfeld — The cut is a short walk southwest of town on the valley floor — close enough to be the first deep an outlander dares.
- ←quest.the-long-way-home (unresolved) — The expedition enters the abandoned Sunken Cut west of Valenfeld.
- ←The Deepcut Pans — Pan temple-bronze scrap from the flooded lower workings.
guards
- ←The Silt Hands — The Silt Hands keep a dry cache past the flooded adit and discourage curiosity about it.
- ←Mara Venn — The Cache-Keeper holds the deepest dry chamber and will not leave it.
references
- ←Dreva Velthys — Dreva points coin-short outlanders at the cut — honest work for the desperate, and a test of who comes back.
- ←The Last Assay — The assay names the exact depth the Cut's vein pinched to nothing.
- ←A Prospector's First Page — The first timber set in the Cut's west face.
- ←Scratched on a Brace — The warning is scratched on a support brace in the Cut.
- ←A Transfer Tally — The tally tracks the Cut's cache going live, water rising on the low drift.
- ←The Keeper's Private Ledger — The skim-book is kept behind a loose brace in the deepest cache.
foreshadows
- →Vallen's Barrow — A shallow, flooded foretaste of the true barrow road east — the same cold stone, none of the god-shard's weight.
- ←quest.gateward-crabs (unresolved) — Reading the shallow runoff and its scavengers prepares the newcomer for the flooded silver cut west of town.
hidden_in
- ←Saltkiss, the Fence's Knife — Left in the Cut's brick when a Silt Hands job went bad; never retrieved.
- ←A Pan-Shard — Panned from the Cut's flooded lower workings.
occurred_at
- ←quest.vale-finders-01 (unresolved) — Generated casting: site of quest.vale-finders-01.
- ←quest.clear-the-sunken-cut (unresolved) — The whole first job takes place in the flooded prospect southwest of Valenfeld.
- ←quest.the-cache-keepers-ledger (unresolved) — The recovery runs through the Cut's cache.
- ←quest.the-vein-that-lied (unresolved) — The assay is read deep in the Cut where the vein failed.
created_by
- →Alder Venn — Alder Venn drove the test-adit here chasing a silver seam that pinched out.
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