Weeds Among Stone

Jura City, the city of dwarves, the workshop of the world, is now middle aged. Once-beautiful, she is now an opium addict dressed in silken rags and living in filth. Where she was once the envy of the world, now she dreams in a smokey den, heedless of the future and fearful of her own sobriety. Unable to rise from her bed of gold, she wastes away under her own indolence, a mockery of the very values that she claims to hold. Where there should be hard work, there is no work. Where this was supposed to be equality, none are equal. Where once there was a city by dwarves, for dwarves, human refugees seeking safety from war now dwell in squalor.Into that city walks the dwarf Maran Zarander, barefoot and hungry, a widow seeking her way in the world. She is an honest woman doing the best that she can for her family and herself. Like so many of her people, the Loam, lowest of the dwarves, she expects to work as a cook in some great guild, just like in the olden days. But the old days are old for a reason. The world changes and prejudices give way to hate.The Loam are a dwarven people of agriculture and pottery. For years they worked as the lowest of the low in Jura City, doing all those jobs that others would not. What house would be complete without a Loam in the kitchen? What is more dwarvish than curry? But when times get tough, hatreds boil over, and somebody needs to get blamed. So the Iromongers used axes and guns to drive the Loam from Jura City, out of their fallen dwarven paradise, to live among plants as elves might do. For those Loam who would not go, who sat peaceably against the injustice, they paid in blood, buried in urns of iron. The remaining Loam fled, and so the Day of Hard forgiveness is remembered.Twenty years later, Maran dares return, the first of her people to do so, ignorant of friend and enemy. With no money to her name, she takes refuge in the human dominated slums outside the city walls, down among the whores and the poets, and down where the Ironmongers turn iron into steel. With no prospects, she must turn her eye toward the Ironmongers, fearful of their gaze, but there are more fearful gazes out that that no one ever wants.An unkind god looks upon Jura City and she needs a servant for her work. The work is dirty, and who better to do this work than a Loam?