Second Chance

In the remote south of the Karhold Mountains that flank the Platinum Empire on the east stands a little-regarded mining village called Second Chance. Second Chance was founded only twenty-five years ago after a discovery of a rich mineral vein sparked a gold rush among the hardiest of local prospectors. The settlers were mostly humans; the others comprised a few dwarves who for one reason or another had abandoned their clans. Among the settlers was Ava Stone's father Jared, and Ava grew up in Second Chance.

The mountain lived up to its promise, delivering an abundance of gold ore to the miners, but the work was backbreaking. No one could extract the ore alone, and so the men of Second Chance quickly learned to work together to harvest the riches. Their wives and children, meanwhile, struggled to coax food from the mountainside. In good years they barely subsisted; in bad years the settlement would have been abandoned if not for the few daring merchants who braved the mountains to trade food and supplies for the miners' hard-won gold.

The two individuals who stand out most clearly in Ava's memory are her father Jared and her workmate Master Doundair. Jared, a human, epitomized the frontiersman, never happier than when he was pushing his body to the limit to shape his environment to his will. As his wife had died in childbirth, he did the work of two, mining by day and farming in the evenings, yet radiated joy in the face of hardship. As a result of his energy, talent, and seniority in the town, Jared became a pillar of Second Chance.

Master Doundair was in some ways the opposite of Jared Stone. A Cairnhew dwarf, the elderly Doundair swung his pick only half as often as the other miners; yet each swing did three times the work theirs did. As a result, he was the de facto foreman of the Second Chance mines. As he worked, Doundair would complain - mostly about the presumptuousness and ingratitude of humans. Ava, working nearby, silently resented the old taskmaster for slurring her father's people and for working her personally twice as hard as anyone else. It was Doundair's stony hardness, however, that sculpted Ava into the best miner in Second Chance by the time she was a teenager.

Ava left Second Chance after her father died when she was eighteen. By this time the miners were seriously worrying about exhausting the mountain's ore reserve. Ava has never been back to the town she called home and doesn't even know whether it still exists.