A new day brought a new task for Bomrek. He was awoken by Lushrir heavily shaking him and then stumbled to the others in the guardroom. After a quick breakfast and a tasting of the previously dried meats – Bomrek was very content with the results – Asen started to assign tasks.

Lushrir and Bomrek were to finish preparing parts of the deer and decide on the most crucial of uses for the products.

They went straight to work. The innards seemed to have already spoiled. "We could have used that gut." remarked Bomrek as he chucked the disgusting giblets onto the refuse-pile. "It's not like we won't have any more opportunities though!"

Other than that, they laid the sinews and skin out to dry. It wasn't a very warm morning, so they hung it on the drying rack with the remaining meat. Urist was with them outside, chopping firewood. They decided that leather and sinew would be best put into storage if any urgent matters arise. After a while, Umel came by. "Lushrir, I want to explore the area, find some paths, some places where the oxen can graze and such. Asen said you should help me!"

They were almost done anyway so Bomrek finished up, while Lushrir packed some supplies.

Alone and finished with the task for the day, Bomrek decided to check on Asen. Through the main portal to the right was the guardroom, the last remnants of the campfire faintly illuminated the walls, a lone candle cast the long shadow of Asen on the wall, slouched over a bord across her lap, on it a sheet of paper and the candle in question. He sat next down to her. "So, you really want to go through with that plea for help to the eastern kingdom?"

She only glanced over to him, not making any specific remark, then returning to her paper.

Bomrek tried to get a look at her face, but every time he leaned in, she buried it further. Finally, she stood up, crumbled the paper and threw it into the embers. The flames licked up and devoured it quickly.

"Treason should be somewhat well worded, don't you think?"

He needed a second to realize what she meant.

"Well certainly it is a matter to be considered for longer than it takes to write the letter." A short silence spread through the room, a single chop could be heard from outside. "Listen, you place a lot of weight on your own shoulders. You might think that proves how good of a leader you are, but some people might think you do not trust them and their skills!"

"I just want to get us to survive! We’re just nine, the others won’t arrive before spring, what else are we to do?” Asen looked at him. Her eyes told of a sleepless night. Just now, Bomrek saw a list next to where Asen had sat with the header “Allowances and requirements”.

Bomrek walked over to her. "Do not fuss so much over a minor detail. Let's just finish taking count, look at what we need and want and turn to the humans for now. When winter comes, it comes. And when the other settlers arrive it will be just fine!" He put his hand on her shoulder. "Tell you what, I will take this list for now and talk to the others to take count and you do something menial for a change. How does that sound?" She nodded and handed him the list. “I heard Rigoth is cleaning out the storage rooms. That’s important but menial. Go on!” He gave her a slight shove down the hallway opposite of the guard room that led to the eight identical rooms they used as storage rooms for now.

He decided to talk to Urist first and followed the sound of chopping outside. “Sure, Let’s go to where we put our supplies after arriving.” They went left from the to the first of those eight identical rooms, ten by twenty feet, the floor and walls roughly hewn, the ceiling just high enough for a dwarf to stand. With a prybar Urist opened the first crate. Sevenbread, from top to bottom nothing but sevenbread packed in waxed paper. Oh how Bomrek hated sevenbread.

Sevenbread was my by baking a salty dough all in all seven times. It was incredibly dry, impossible to eat without soaking it in water or ale first, but the majority of all rations, be it soldiers or miners. “According to my estimates.” Urist said, taking one of the roughly palm-sized square packages and unwrapping it. “This and the salted pork will last us well into winter, but not all the way through. But for now, with a little game, berries and roots to spice it up a bit, we should be able eat like... well not like kings, but better than soldiers.”

“That’s not a very high bar, I can tell you that much.” Bomrek marked down what Urist had said in “Allowances” and went on to the next: Farming.

“The quarry bushes on the guardroom’s roof don’t bear enough nuts to season a single bowl of salad. Whoever thought they can grow rock nuts in the blazing sun can go fall down a mine shaft. Umel already found a shady area of our little yard between the slopes.” Urist pointed to somewhere off outside. I’m sure she can give you a list of crop seed she needs.”

With that point written down, he went to the second room to the right, where he found Endok, Rigoth and Asen cleaning out useless junk, fouling wood and dirt. "Hey, you look well!" Endok greeted him. "We were just sorting some things out. We won't need it now that we have enough workforce to focus on something other than survival."

Endok came to Bomrek, stepping over some sort of broken chair or stool. "We cut these rooms out for all sorts of purposes. At the beginning some fortified sleeping quarters. We imagined this could be the barracks someday. For now, they are mostly storage rooms, but you new arrivals will need to sleep somewhere too, so we're making space." Bomrek nodded. He checked his list. "When do you think you can get back to construction?"

"I think I will get to making some decent pillars, maybe fell a tree or two in the next days. The stone circle around the fireplace could be our first meeting hall we had since we first got here. It will need an arch and a roof." As he spoke and made plans, a sort of hurried hope rushed across his face.

“I do not think we should focus on entirely new buildings for now. The guard room over there will do.”

Endok nodded and hummed in agreement. “I guess you are right. In that case, I always wanted to enter floor boards. That way, the floor will be much more comfortable and they won’t drain the air of warmth so quickly. Oh, and some better doors while we are at it. It can get awfully draft here and the winter will freeze us in our beds.”

Bomrek liked that. “Okay. How much wood will you need for that? And what tools?”

Endok thought for a while. “I don’t want to use the palisades for that, they are in an awful state. They’re firewood at best. I can’t say how much exactly, but felling and cutting thirsty to forty trees into boards should suffice. As for tool: a few logging axes and a proper saw. I can make a sawing frame myself, so the saw can cut clean and regular boards, but the s aw itself, I cannot make.”

Bomrek noted everything down, then he walked over to busy Rigoth. “And you, what do you want to finish?”

Rigoth tossed another rotten board on the pile. “Not much. A few pillars to support the rooms. Maybe three or four trees in total. A few more chisels. That’s it.”

Bomrek wanted to move on when he remembered something. “I need to get a room for storing hides and sinews and other things I salvage from kills, do you think you can reserve this one?”

"Sure!" they said in almost unison.

Now it was on to Sigun and Stikus, who were down in the mine, examining ores, gems and rock.

The way down to the mines started in the entrance hall, directly opposite the main portal. The ramp initially was relatively wide, enough for maybe 3 or 4 dwarves shoulder to shoulder, but got narrower very quickly. It spiralled downwards, beginning slightly and getting steeper further down. Bomrek could almost see the desperation to find precious ores in the miners’ chisel strikes, the narrower and narrower hallway and the rougher and less even ramp as he went further down. Tunnels radiated out in regular intervals. After quite a distance of managing to not slip on the damp floor, he came by a large opening in the wall. A sort of break room was carved into the side as well as a storage area with shelves. Here, Stikus and Sigun sat at a table and looked at pebbles and rocks. As Bomrek cleared around the corner they looked up to greet him.

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"I just wanted to hear a short report from you guys, how is it coming along?"

Sigun stood up. "Well, the ores are magnificent, we can more than work with them. The stone here is still limestone, further down, it’s gneiss. Deeper down very little more can be found. But we are in luck, because limestone is much softer than gneiss and this one is unusually rich in content. The previous miners already laid bare a lot of veins and we can follow them deeper into the mountain, but they needed to dig for quite a distance before finding it."

Bomrek thought for a moment. "So, you have not yet explored the mines any further today?"

“Oh no, we haven't but you can accompany us, we did check up on the records though. They seem to be incomplete towards later times, so we want to make our own ones.”

Bomrek agreed to help them. He could not think of anything more useful for the moment either way, Stikus and Sigun were the last point on the list.

Stikus and Sigun explained the way the previous colonists set up the mine. Traditionally, mines are divided into several different categories: Prospecting, following and repurposing.

When a mine is first founded, a single central shaft, in this case the spiral ramp, is carved and from it, prospecting shafts are dug and further from them, too. If one of them hits a precious rock worth going after, they are mined. That's following the veins or hollowing out deposits. When that is done, the section of the mine is retired and cut into neat rectangular rooms with smooth walls, floors and ceiling to be used for other purposes. In especially spectacular deposits, entire rooms are left lined with precious ores and stones to show off the fortune of the mine. Large cavities are stabilized and made accessible with square sets, frames of wooden beams that fill the large cavity and are large enough to be repurposed as wood-furnished rooms. Via ladders or stairs, all the ore-bearing stone would be easier to access and the timbering would be stemmed against the stone walls, preventing collapse of the cavity.

“How much wood will we need for that?” Bomrek asked, returning to his own paperwork.

“Oh, barely any for now. None of the cavities are big enough for even one set so far, simple logs pressed between floor and ceiling upright should do. It is just for the future, you know, once we have more workforce.”

They went on with the cataloguing. Bomrek's task was mostly just holding a torch and a writing supplies for the other two to note down corridors, directions and ores found. Bomrek was used to more open spaces underground or natural caves, but the straight, tight corridors gave him no chance to orient himself. At one point he turned around and the spiral staircase was too far in the darkness to be seen. The straight, featureless corridor could go on for miles for all he could see. For a second, he felt like the entire world had just collapsed into this single straight line, surrounded by an endless void of rock and stone, going on forever in every direction.

The second passed and he was back in the real world, when Sigun asked him for another sheet of paper.

At the maybe fourth or fifth floor down they came to a point where the ground opened. The narrow tunnel walls gave way to an open area. Across the hole, which was maybe fifteen feet, a beam was spanning, with ropes tied around that reached downwards.

Sigun stood at the edge and picked up a small greyish-silver pebble reflecting the orange light in dozens of facets. "You see this? Galena! It's not just lead, it's SILVER! And this one is high-grade too! You can also use it to glaze pottery. The fine women of the Golden Isles use it for painting their faces nice. Now this is where the maps said that one of the large veins started. All the other instances where just small threads or pockets, but this is where the vein opens up." He took his torch and held it downwards. The dark void below was suddenly filled with hundreds, thousands of dim facets reflecting the torchlight back at him, sparkling like water in the sunset.

“This is where the survivors said they started all working together. They must have stood in this ditch and slowly worn it downwards. They probably didn't even care about stabilizing it properly, because THIS…" he kicked the wooden beam. "…won't do. We'll have to redo it so we can properly walk here, maybe lay down some planks and in time square sets, obviously."

Then he pulled a small greenish pebble out of his coat pocket. "We found this earlier. Malachite, finest copper! If we find sphalerite…” Stikus interjected "We won't find sphalerite, believe me, the others checked the gneiss layers well enough.”

Sigun rolled his eyes at Stikus, then turned back to Bomrek. “either way, if we get our hands on some tin, we can make bronze, which is sufficient for simple tools and nails until we get a skilled smith to make things of steel. Even if not, Copper and Silver! Just think of the riches! Praise the miners!”

His words travelled through the tunnels like bellowing breeze. Bomrek made sure to not tin bars down under “requirements”. Then he asked his usual question. “How much will we be able to produce and until when?”

Stikus counted something on his fingers. “Well, we need to refine about a ton of galena to get a pound of silver, most likely more. So, before winter hits, a few coins.” He looked to his cousin, who merely nodded. Bomrek noted those numbers down.

“And when we’re done impressing the fine dwarves and humans into supporting us, we can make silver crafts, beautiful

Bomrek picked the goblin issue up. "Either way, I want to set up a proper defensive wall first. The colony sits in a very easily defended position, all we need is a well and a wall and we can wait out every possible siege. For that we will need stone blocks that fit together properly, not the crude, loose chunks that lay around up top, that should be your first concern.”

“Yes of course, wall first, of course.” Stikus and Sigun eagerly agreed with him on that point. “But we can't cut the stones for that down here.”

“Why not?” Bomrek was confused, had they not talked about hollowing out chambers and rooms down here for all this time?

“Well think about it stupid! We need the stone blocks topside; do you want to haul them all the way up the ramp?”

Bomrek was embarrassed and shook his head. “I had not thought of that, you got me there!”

Sigun laughed and slapped Bomrek on the shoulder. “Do not worry, that’s what we are here for! Anyway, is there anything else you need from us?”

“No, that is all. See you at dinner!” Bomrek excused himself and went back topside. There was more work to check up on. The trip up the ramp seemed so much longer than the trip down. Huffing and puffing, he arrived at the top and saw that the sun was still up. He guessed he had spent around four hours in the mines and it was now afternoon. Urist was no longer chopping wood. He walked outside and let out a sigh of relief, the cool autumn air cooling his lungs, the birds serenading his ears, the sun kissing his skin. If the tunnels were not lined with moss and fungus, the smell of cold, damp, blank rock was not in any way to his liking.

He heard birds of prey call from high above the mountaintops, where they were circling the skies in search for their next catch. A single screech reached Bomrek’s ear and echoed off the walls of the quarry. He breathed out a last time and returned to completing the list, including Umel's requests for seed and food. Then he went back inside to look for Asen.

The guardroom was empty, but he could still hear noises of rummaging and clearing from down the hallway. He went down there, one room further this time. Rigoth, Endok and Asen had cleared and swept out the previous room. There it was, in all its empty glory. In the next room Bomrek found the three, hard at work. This room had only a bit of rubbish and was mainly filled with firewood for the winter. When Asen saw him, she walked over to him.

He pulled the folded lists and handed it to her. “I got the list all filled out. I think everything is in here!” he handed her the sheets of paper.

Her face looked less troubled and her eyes much clearer. “Thank you, Bomrek, really. Thank you. We will assign duties at dinner.”

Asen Put the folded sheets in her skirt pocket and turned around to start cleaning again. Bomrek decided to help them. Together the four managed to clear the fourth and fifth room before sunset and found enough time to move the drying rack and all the salvaged materials from the deer into one of the cleared rooms.

As they sat again in the break room and ate of their supplies and the shot game, Asen stood up and started addressing them: “We did some good progress today. Good job, everyone! Tomorrow, we will start a rotation, so that the specialists have the help they need and everyone learns some of the crucial jobs. We wouldn’t want to end up with no miners or no masons due to some tragedy.”

She turned to each dwarf individually. “Endok will take care of felling trees and repurposing the old palisades as well as general cleanup; we cannot saw the logs into boards yet, but we can stockpile. Sigun will do quarrying work topside; we need many blocks for a new wall and what we might want to build after that. Stikus will do mining and smelting down rockside, we should smelt a few coins and maybe crafts as proof of our riches to attract more migrants. These are the crucial tasks that should concern us most for now. We have enough stored supplies to last for now. When we have smelted enough silver from the ore, we will travel to Eslettad for crucial tools and supplies. We will also send out letters and silver from here, as well as those up north that signed on my endeavour already. The trip round will take us nine to twelve days in total.”

She sat back down and the round began to talk among each other. Bomrek could still tell Asen was still worried and nervous about the entire situation. He decided to have a talk with Endok. About their times in service, about ideal woods and about floorboards.

One by one, they went into their sleeping quarters, Bomrek too. A small candle on the floor cast its yellow light on the bright limestone, turning the floor into waves of frozen fire. With such images for his eyes, he fell asleep.