The Weeping Adit

House Vandahl's lowest silver gallery, a half-day's walk south of Valenfeld, drowned to the knee since the spring melt and rising — the town's first, smallest, most fixable problem, if anyone can be made to pay for it.

The Weeping Adit was cut two generations back when the near-town seams still ran rich; now it is the last working gallery House Vandahl has left, and it is losing a fight with water it cannot afford to win. A spring under the hill found the old timber props last winter and hasn't stopped since — first a puddle at the lowest face, now a slow black flood eating a hand's width of gallery every week. Foreman Durgal Quarn has shored what he can with green wood and prayers to a god who does not answer prayers about mines, and sent three requests up to the keep for proper Stoneborn shoring. Vandahl Keep has sent back two replies about the honor of the house and no coin. The ore is still down there, under the water, and every week it sits there it is worth a little less and costs a little more to reach — which is the whole of the Deepening in one leaking hole in the ground. Nothing in the Weeping Adit wants to kill you on purpose; the danger is drowning, rot-weak timber, and the dark, which is exactly why it makes a fine first lesson in respecting a hole in the ground before the Vale sends you somewhere that does want to kill you.