We are the miners of the Ivory. We are the bravest there is for sure, and anyone who comes in these treacherous lands will be quick to understand it.
Here in the Sea of Ivory, west of the whole world, the land is your ennemy, and against him, you adapt or you die. The Sea of Ivory is not a sea, nor is it emerged lands. It's the cauldron of the gods' rage. Sen lets Caeia and Thaisse fight day and night around here, and Sides likes to spice it up whenever she pleases, just to nurture her siblings' wrath. This fight between sea and land makes it all crack, shake, immense waves can cover mountains whole, and Sides' fire rises from the depths, piercing through, to burn the land and fill the air with smoke.
And in the middle of it, we exist. We are the ones who dare defy the gods' power, because we find here what to make a living of. Most of us have come because we had nowhere else to go. We were exiled as criminals and misfits, and came in these lands out of desire for wealth, but let me tell you, I come to wonder if it's really worth it...
[...]
I have a wife, you know... She is in Aarden, with my two sons. But I am denied access to the city, it was either this or death. I was a younger man, a bit foolish and optimistic, I let myself go into some shady business, I was an honest bandit, got betrayed to cover for a bigger guy... Quite a classic life for a gangster. But the authority doesn't bother itself with little crooks, so not much choice left...
Now I can't say I have a happy life, but atleast, I can make enough money, I regularly send it to my girl for her to raise my kids. We see each other once a year, at my parents' for the
feast of Veesii, that's why I am here right now, on my way to them...
Anyway... You asked me what life was in the Ivory right? Well in a usual day, if we can call it that way, we leave the town (I live in Sayeri by the way) early in the morning, depending on the land's situation, and we gather at the amphibious carriage, to take off for exploited grounds. The tricky part is finding interesting grounds where we can find exposed veins of gemstones. It usually close to steady volcanoes, where we know the grounds to be useable for a few weeks. So we prospect, find valuables, and gather the most in a day. It goes from regular gypsum to precious crystals like rubies, even diamonds sometimes. Then we take it back, and the cleaning and sorting work starts, to then ship it away, we supply the whole world.
The dangers are plenty of course. We can lose a few teams every few days, to a tidal wave or a rock collapse, there's even a recent story of a team having been buried by a flash lava flow...
We talked a bit sooner about that odd mineral, Crematite. Well we do find some, ocasionally. It's mainly small quantities, and it quickly goes off when we unearth some. It mostly appears as combusted traces left on the surfaces, we can't make it a profitable resource; just imagine the amount of equipment we would have to carry just for a few grams... So sorry, but I can't think of a single person in the Ivory who can get some for you...
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