The shadow mines of Mintle Moor are queer in their very special ore. Where dwarves in other halls sought the light of the earth hidden beneath in darkness, the dwarves of Low Mintle sought the shadows deep within the glittering crystals that made the land such a beautiful place. The crystals, despite their size and fluorescent color were by and large worthless, at least to anyone within a few hundred miles of the mines. They shone and glittered, but because of their prodigious number, most anyone who wanted one or two for their backyard already had one. The crystals possessed no magical, medicinal, or mechanical properties that most anything else wasn't useful for, and despite the great craftsmanship of the dwarves, they were unshapable, breaking down into dull shards instead of smaller pretty-things.
Inside these Crystals, beneath the pink and the turquise and the yellow that were so common, was the object that the dwarves really mined. Deep down were the sun was only reflected off the walls and had dimmed from repeated bounces, were deposits of shadow. To most men, a shadow would seem in no way more valuable than a shining piece of rock, but most shadows were not quite so malleable as these. Like water, when they were cracked out from the center of the stone, they would run down through the cracks, pooling in places but mostly seeping down deep into the earth. Men who were rich enough to even buy the substance told tales of the horrible chill it brought, slipping through your fingers like a shell-less snail. It absorbed light, flat black to the eye at high noon for as long as it didn't evaporate. As a gas, it was like the thickest fog, letting neither sound nor sight pass through.
Only the elves, living in their crystalline houses were skilled enough to turn it solid though. Some say they used moonlight and dark rituals, others speculated that blood was mixed into the darkness to coagulate it into a goo. The only thing most knew for sure was that the elves were fond of making cloaks of the stuff and sneaking up on anyone and anything that crept past their walls.
Needless to say, on the Mintle Moor there was more high tension trade secrecy than in most other places of the world. The dwarves would go on strike for mining, and the elves would rough up the distribution lines in the night. The trading posts dotting the land would hire guards and travel only at night, but wake in the morning to notes scrawled in blood. Or perhaps it was another cycle where the dwarves or trading caravans finally got fed up with the elvish monopoly and hired spies and wizards to find the shadow's secret, leading to dead bodies in the ditches. It would go in cycles of who had the upper hand, always with a rhythm through the decades since dwarves first mined deep enough.
It was not for a long while before the dwarves mined too deep.
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