Alder Venn

The prospector who drove the Sunken Cut chasing a silver seam that pinched out, and died broke for it a generation before the Silt Hands took his works.

Alder Venn read a good seam in a low stone rise southwest of Valenfeld and spent everything he had — and a fair sum he borrowed — driving a test-adit after it. For one season the assays promised a Venn silver name. Then the vein narrowed to a thread, the thread to nothing, and the groundwater came up faster than he could timber against it. He kept digging past the point of sense, wrote his last assay by a failing lamp, and left the Cut to the dark. He died owing more than he ever pulled from the stone. The town remembers him, if at all, as a cautionary tale about the Lean Years: a man the deep promised silver and paid in water.