Every village that he walked through told him that he was getting closer to the sea, but it was still almost another week before Jon finally smelled the sea. There were several villages he considered trying to settle down in, at least for a season, but for one reason or another, he always moved on. This one was too small, that one was too near a rail intersection, and the most recent one he walked through, Brambarin, obviously cared little for outsiders. 

Oh, they would take a few of his remaining coppers and exchange them for rags he needed to plug the holes in his boots and salt that he needed for the game he caught, but that was it. He could tell that if he lived here a hundred years, he’d never be more than an outsider, so after resting under a rail bridge that crossed a dry river bed that was obviously more fallout from whatever the dwarves had done with the water of this region, he was on his way again. 

He wasn’t sure he blamed them at this point. If he had a nice little village, he wasn’t sure he’d want some stranger to come in and cause chaos, either. In Jon’s case, though, the one place he most wanted to go was lost to him because he was certain if he ever went back to Dalmarin, Boriv would shoot him dead. 

Still, as he got into the lowlands of a place called Owen Valley, he knew that the ocean was so close he could feel it, and he resolved that he would go and touch the water’s edge and rest his sore feet before he turned eastward and began the next step of his arduous quest: finding his sisters and telling them what had become of their family. 

He made it down the low hills easily enough, but eventually, the muddy tidal swamps prevented him from getting within a couple miles of the water’s edge, and he was forced to divert slightly west and follow a dirt road that had been built up towards some strange smokey town on the coast. Jon was sure it was another dwarven monstrosity, but besides a strange low tower jutting up three stories from the middle of the swamp and the rail lines miles behind him, it was the only sign of civilization. 

No one bothered Jon as he approached the place, but thankfully he was able to finally find his way to the beach without having to go all the way there. Jon sat there on a rock and took off his shoes. Then he let the water lap at them as each wave made it to his ankles before they subsided. This was the first time Jon had been to the sea since he was a child, and he’d expected it to be a peaceful, almost meditative experience, but even over the waves, he could hear the distant sounds of clattering and banging as whatever the facility on the coast was. 

Jon wasn’t sure what it was, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t a forge or a smithy. It wasn’t just because the sounds were wrong but because of the dampness. He’d learned from his time at Khaghrumer that it was more than just rust and that a leaking boiler or a humid foundry could have any number of unwanted side effects when it came to the strength and durability of the metals that the dwarves made. They had more than a dozen different recipes for different steels, but to Jon, they all looked the same. 

“Maybe there’s some recipe that requires a nice salt breeze,” he said to himself with a smile before he leaned back against his pack and tried to enjoy the wan sun burning away the mist. That he eventually succeeded was a nice surprise, but that he’d enjoyed it so much he’d actually fallen asleep shocked him. He must have been more exhausted than he’d thought because it wasn’t until someone said, “Hey man, you coming from the east or the north,” that he finally stirred. 

“Wha-what?” Jon asked, looking around. For a moment, he feared it was bandits or perhaps dwarven soldiers that had finally found him, but when he looked over, it was just a young man not much older than him that was tossing rocks into the surf. “Excuse me?”

“I was just wondering where you’re from. Always interesting to see the new people before this place breaks them in,” the stranger answered, not bothering to look at Jon. “Seems like you’ve had it pretty rough. I’m going to say you’re from up north.”

“Wha-what makes you say that?” Jon asked, suddenly nervous. It was like this man could see right through him. 

“Well, You’re dressed kinda warm for a city boy, and those are the wrong sort of furs for the White City or wherever else people live that way,” the man said with a laugh. “I’m Rian, by the way, and I’d tell you to go back the way you came because the Pearl ain’t all the rumors say it is, but it doesn’t look like you got much else going for you.”

Jon breathed a sigh of relief as he realized the other man had just sized him up to be a country bumpkin rather than that he had some kind of inside knowledge about who he was or the things he’d done. Jon didn’t mind being thought of as some rural laborer down on his luck. He certainly looked the part. He was covered in scraps of clothing that ranged from filthy to falling apart, and his hair was nearly as mated as the pelts he’d used to stay warm the last few weeks. It was a wonder that he didn’t yet have lice or fleas. 

“Yeah. That’s close enough,” Jon agreed. “I came from up north, but I’d been planning to go east. I’m just taking a break from the road.”

“Looks like you need one,” Rian smiled, pointing at Jon’s boots and the visible holes in the left sole with a stick. “You’ve come a long way. Those were nice boots before you walked right through the bottom of them.”

“Yeah,” Jon agreed, looking at Kaspov’s final gift to him. “I’ll get the resoled eventually, but I lack the funds for that right now.” In truth, Jon still had a silver eighth and a couple coppers left, but he was jealously hoarding them because he had no way to get more. There was no reason that a stranger needed to know that. 

“Really?” the other man laughed. “You think you’re going to walk another what -  fifty, hundred miles in those things?? You’re going to wear right through the soles of your feet, too, if you aren’t careful.”

“What is that place,” Jon asked, nodding in the direction of the noisy dwarven facility while he looked at his feet in the surf. Rian wasn’t wrong. His feet were in terrible shape. His calluses had calluses, and the area around the hole in his sole and both his heels had sores where they’d been rubbed raw. Still, he didn’t have much of a choice. 

“That?” Rian said with a grand gesture. “That’s the pearl! It’s the treasure of the sea for days in any direction!”

“Treasure? It looks like a machine shop to me,” Jon replied uncertainly. “Aren’t pearls supposed to be, you know, beautiful?”

“Well, I’m surprised someone from a little mountain village knows what a machine is,” the other man said, making Jon worry he might have already said too much. He wasn’t in the deeps anymore, and though he’d heard the word plenty when he worked at the depot, it wasn’t a concept he would have used when talking with his friends. “It’s sort of… a machine made of machines, if you like, which has to be pretty beautiful for a dwarf. Every day it takes the bounty  of the ocean and the wetlands, and then it mixes them with the lives of expendable men like you and me that have nothing else to do with their lives, and it crushes them into little cans of tin before it sends them on a train to the Gods only know where.”

Jon could tell him exactly where those cans ended up as he realized he’d probably eaten food from this sort of place. He almost blurted out, ‘That’s a canary, huh?’ but he realized that would have only raised the other man’s suspicions further. Instead, he asked a different question. “So if it’s so awful, why do you work there?”

“Same reason everyone else does,” Rian answered. “It pays well. Well, more than you can get outside of one of the big coastal cities. They work you like a dog, but they pay 3 coppers a day. A man could get rich if they didn’t find a way to take all that back in the form of cheap food and a cheaper bed.”

“That doesn’t sound like any way to live,” Jon said with a shake of his head as he tried very hard not to think about the powder mill or even the rail yard. He’d played this game on and off for years now, but somehow what resonated the most with him was the itemized bill for the food he’d eaten in Khaghrumer.

“For me? It’s not, but I’ve got my sister to think of,” Rian said with a sigh, “but for a man with holes in his shoes that just needs a few coins before he heads on down the road, it might be okay for a few weeks.”

“If it’s so awful, then why do you think I should give it a shot,” Jon asked, laughing.

“Misery loves company?” Rian asked uncertainly, but when he could see Jon wasn’t buying it, he leveled with him. “Look - I like to make jokes, and sometimes the dwarves - they don’t think they’re so funny, but my shift is always short-handed, so I figure, maybe I bring my overseer a new recruit, and he lets things slide.”

“I don’t know,” Joan answered doubtfully. He’d have been happy to work in the fields or the barn of a human, but working under the dwarves again rubbed him the wrong way.

“Come on, don’t you see? It’s providence!” Rian insisted. “I came out here to let Bomer cool off, and I find you in desperate need of my very specific skills.”

“Oh?” Jon asked. “Just what is it I’m in desperate need of besides new boots.”

“From the looks of things?” Rian smiled, “A Bath, a haircut, and a good meal or two, in that order. Your shoes aren’t even in the top ten.”

“That bad, huh?” Jon asked sheepishly. He knew he stank, but if he truly looked like a wild man, then maybe that was a better explanation of the reception he’d gotten than clannishness or simple unfriendliness.

“Well… yeah,” Rian said as he burst out laughing. The good humor of the man was infectious, and soon Jon was laughing as well. 

After that embarrassing exchange, they discussed the specifics, and eventually, Rian persuaded Jon to give it a few weeks. As long as he didn’t spend all his money drinking and gambling, Jon would be back on his feet in no time, the stranger promised. It was a strange situation, but even stranger was the fact that Jon believed him. 

While he didn’t like the idea of working for or near dwarves, he did need to replenish his resources somewhere before he wore himself down to nothing, and this place was as good as any. It wasn’t like anyone in the part of the world had any idea who Jonathan Shaw was anyway. Now he was just a stranger who was down on his luck, and according to Rian, that described half the men working at the plant.