The frenzy cooled like a red-hot blade plunged into ice-water: hissing, steaming, and emerging harder than before. The wildfire of exhilaration guttered out, leaving behind no ash of doubt, only crystallised steel.
Amanda stood on the outer wall of Ironhaven, wind knifing through her cloak, and let the cold do its work.
The part of her that had been laughing like a lunatic was gone. In its place ran an abacus of pure threat assessment.
Who could she trust?
Humans? Greed incarnate. One careless glance at her too-clean hands and the rumour would spread faster than plague.
The Phoenix Guild? Neutral until someone waved something brighter than neutrality in their faces. A mithril vein would burn that neutrality to vapour.
Elves? They would weep poetic tears over “tears of the Moon” and then lock the metal away in a single perfect artefact to be sung about for ten thousand years. Suggest mass-producing invisible war-plate by alloying it with “leprous” Imperial orichalcum and they would kill her with exquisite, millennia-old contempt.
Dwarfs? The only race that might actually understand.
But they would also declare the discovery an insult to their ancestors. A human girl with wolf eyes and no clan name finding a true vein? They would either brand her thief or, worse, claim ninety percent “ancestral tithe” and chain her to a forge for the rest of her life while they turned her miracle into their legend.
Conclusion, cold and surgical:
Trust no one. Ever.
Despair tried to slither in (quiet, sticky, familiar).
She was cornered. Allies meant betrayal; solitude meant impossibility.
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Then her lips parted in something too sharp to be called a smile.
“I’ve been thinking like an idiot,” she whispered to the night. “Like someone who finds a diamond mine and tries to carry it away in a wheelbarrow.”
You don’t move the mithril.
You move the knowledge.
Not ore wagons.
A map inside one unbreakable skull.
No miners. No caravans. No noise.
Just a few fingernail-sized shards, chipped away in total silence over weeks, months, years if necessary, until the vein was bled dry and no living soul ever knew it had existed.
And one special piece (she remembered it perfectly): the sample where a hair-thin filament of mithril ran through rough country rock like a silver vein in a corpse. Proof. Irrefutable, geological proof that this was no stolen trinket, but a mother-lode.
That piece would be her scalpel.
She spent the next thirty-six hours without sleep, returning to the cave again and again, memorising every twist of the approach path, every landmark, the exact depth, the angle of the vein, the grain of the surrounding stone. She built a perfect three-dimensional map behind her eyes and hammered it into permanence until her head throbbed.
At dawn on the second day, filthy, hollow-eyed, swaying on her feet, she chipped two more shards and walked out for the last time.
She did not go to the Guild.
She did not go to the merchants.
Her boots carried her straight to the one district in Ironhaven where ideals came to die: the Tendzi Quarter.
Here, the only gods were complex technical problems and immediate, anonymous, fat stacks of coin.
She pushed through the smoke-stinking door of the tavern everyone just called the Greased Cog.
Oil, booze, scorched insulation, the tang of molten solder. Perfect.
In the back corner, surrounded by half-disassembled arcane engines and blueprints held together with spit and curses, sat the goblin she had come for.
Not a miner.
An engineer-mechanic who owed three different loan-sharks, drank like a forge bellows, and (most importantly) could build anything if the money was right and the client never asked where the parts came from.
Amanda dropped into the chair opposite him, slid a single sparkling mithril chip across the scarred table, and spoke the six words that would change the world:
“I need a quiet mining machine.”
The goblin’s yellow eyes widened until the goggles squeaked.
For the first time in two days, Amanda smiled a real smile (small, lethal, and very, very rich).