Worn Thin
Nashkel announces itself by what it's built around.
Low buildings cluster along a shallow rise, all of them angled toward the hills beyond town, where the mines sit out of sight but never out of mind. Crates and carts crowd the edges of the streets. Tools outnumber decorations. The air smells faintly of iron and dust, but not the sharp tang of fresh work. It's old — worked over, worried thin.
"This is Nashkel," Imoen says beside me, peering past a pair of laborers arguing near a water trough. "I thought it'd be… bigger."
I don't answer right away. I'm watching the way people move instead. Miners without picks. Carts that look ready but never quite leave. Supplies stacked neatly, untouched, as if someone keeps meaning to come back for them.
Khalid adjusts his shield, then relaxes his grip when nothing happens. There's no obvious danger but the stillness presses in anyway. People glance at us, then look away. Not fear. Just fatigue.
Montaron slows near a weathered notice board nailed to a post. Layers of notices overlap one another — requests, warnings, promises of payment that feel increasingly optimistic. He doesn't stop to read them.
"Mm," he mutters. "They're hurting."
Xzar inhales deeply, almost theatrically.
"Oh yes," he says. "A town built on a single idea. And now that idea has stopped cooperating."
The observation settles uncomfortably. Entanglement. The sense that this isn't a place you pass through cleanly. You arrive, and something sticks.
Somewhere nearby, a voice snaps in frustration. A crate is dropped hard enough to split a slat. No one rushes to help. Everyone notices.
We move deeper into town without meaning to close ranks, but we do anyway.
Nashkel doesn't feel like a destination.
It feels like a question that's been asked too many times already.
We haven't gone far when Montaron stops.
"This is where we part ways," he says.
I turn, caught off guard despite myself.
Imoen's faster. "What? Why?"
Montaron doesn't elaborate. He adjusts the strap of his pack, checks the lay of his gear — small, practiced motions that tell me the decision was made before he opened his mouth.
"Because it's time."
Xzar smiles faintly, hands folding behind his back.
"Every arrangement has an expiration," he adds, pleasantly.
Imoen frowns. "You can't just—"
"We can," Montaron says. "And we are."
Khalid shifts beside me, uncertain, and looks to Jaheira.
Jaheira doesn't argue.
She studies Montaron for a moment — not searching his face, not weighing alternatives. Just acknowledging the end of something that was never meant to last.
"So be it," she says.
Xzar's gaze drifts — unfocused — and then lands briefly on my pack.
"Waste," he murmurs, almost to himself. "When knowledge goes unused."
I feel the words settle uncomfortably, like they were aimed without being directed.
"Some things," he continues lightly, "are far more instructive once they're internalized."
Imoen grimaces. "That's… ominous."
Xzar chuckles, but doesn't clarify.
Montaron shoulders his pack and looks at me once.
"Try not to make mistakes."
Then they turn away.
No ceremony. No lingering. Just a clean change in direction, carried out without hesitation as they melt back into the town.
For a moment, none of us move.
"I didn't trust them," Imoen says finally. "Not really." She hesitates. "But they did help."
"That doesn't obligate us to keep them," Jaheira replies, already facing forward.
Khalid nods once, settling beside her.
Imoen lingers half a step behind, glancing toward the street where they disappeared.
"…Probably for the best."
Jaheira doesn't disagree.
I stay where I am a second longer than the others.
I hadn't expected their absence to register at all. Suspicion had always come easier than attachment. Distance felt safer.
And yet —
I'll miss them.
The realization catches me off guard.
Not because I trusted them.
Not because I approved of them.
But because, somewhere along the road, I stopped thinking of them as temporary solutions — answers to problems I didn't want to face myself.
They walked beside me. Watched the same treelines. Took the same risks. Whatever else they were, they weren't interchangeable.
The discomfort that follows isn't quite guilt.
It's the realization that I'd reduced people to utility without meaning to. That I'd treated their presence as a buffer instead of a shared risk.
That thought doesn't sit right anymore.
I let it stay instead of pushing it away, then turn back toward the others as Nashkel's noise closes in again.
If nothing else, I owe it to the people still beside me to do better than that.
We don't have to go looking for the problem.
It finds us in the form of an argument that's already worn itself thin — not loud enough to draw a crowd, not quiet enough to be private.
A supply cart sits idle near the edge of the street, its bed empty. The merchant standing beside it keeps rubbing at his temple, like he's trying to press the thought back inside his head.
"I've told you already," he says. "I can't sell what I don't have. And I'm not advancing coin on iron that hasn't come out of the ground."
One of the miners scrubs a hand down his face, leaving a streak of dust across his cheek. He looks exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with a single bad night.
"It's not for lack of trying," he says. "We go down. We work. And some days we come back up with nothing worth carrying."
"That's still nothing I can sell," the merchant snaps. "The forges up north are rationing. No iron means no tools, and no tools means no one takes risks."
Imoen frowns. "That doesn't make any sense."
The miner lets out a short, humorless breath. "That's because it doesn't."
The second miner shifts his weight, eyes flicking briefly toward the hills before returning to the street.
"We don't get enough out anymore," he says. "Not steady. Not safe. Tools wear down faster than we can replace them. And every week someone decides it's cheaper to leave than to wait for the mines to behave."
I listen, trying to put a shape to it.
Attrition.
If this was unfolding the way I remembered, the answer was simple.
But the longer I stood there, the clearer it became that the world wasn't obligated to follow the same steps.
Jaheira steps in then, her voice even, careful.
"And the mines themselves?"
The merchant exhales, long and tired.
"They're still there," he says. "But iron you can't count on might as well not exist."
No one argues with that.
Khalid folds his arms, brow furrowing the way it does when a problem refuses to be met head-on.
"So there's still work," I say slowly. "Just no certainty."
The merchant nods. "Exactly."
The argument doesn't resolve so much as give up. The miners drift away toward the road leading uphill. The merchant turns back to his empty cart, adjusting straps out of habit more than hope.
We step aside, but the conversation sticks with me.
This isn't panic.
It's erosion.
In the game, this would have been a clean hook. A problem waiting for the right sequence of actions.
Here, it feels heavier than that.
People aren't afraid yet.
They're just tired of explaining the same loss in different words.
We don't seek anyone out.
That doesn't matter much.
By the time we reach the center of town — if it can be called that — the looks linger longer. Like people deciding whether you're a solution or another delay.
A man breaks away from a small knot of townsfolk and approaches us with the tired confidence of someone used to being listened to.
"You," he says. "You're not from Nashkel."
"No," Jaheira answers calmly. "We're passing through."
He exhales. "That's what I was afraid of."
He introduces himself without ceremony and gestures vaguely around us — not at the buildings, but at the people moving between them. People watching, waiting.
"Nashkel exists because of the mines," he says. "When the iron stops coming out the way it should, everything else starts fraying."
Imoen shifts. "You want help."
"I want someone willing to look," he replies. "Ask questions. Go where my people won't."
I feel the weight of it settle — not as urgency, but as expectation.
If this was unfolding the way I remembered, this was the point where the path narrowed.
But nothing about Nashkel feels narrow.
Just worn thin.
"I can't promise answers," I say.
He nods. "I'd settle for clarity."
Jaheira inclines her head. "We'll see what we can learn."
His shoulders sag slightly, like a man setting down a burden he's been carrying too long.
As he turns away, I shift my weight — and regret it.
The wound Jaheira sealed days ago doesn't reopen. There's no sharp pain. Just a low, stubborn ache that runs along my side, the kind that waits patiently until you stop pretending you're fine.
"The healing helped," I say, more to myself than anyone else. Then, after a beat, "But I don't think it fixed everything."
Jaheira looks at me immediately.
"I can keep going," I add. "I just wouldn't mind a little time before we commit to anything underground."
Khalid nods before she answers. "That's reasonable."
Jaheira studies me, then inclines her head. "Pain that lingers is information. Ignoring it is rarely wise."
She glances toward the hills. "Nashkel has been waiting. It can wait a little longer."
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
We're still standing there when Imoen shifts beside me, glancing toward the eastern road.
"You hear that?" she asks.
At first I don't. Then — faint music, just barely threading its way through the town's noise.
"Carnival," Imoen says. "It's set up just east of town. Close. People were talking."
Khalid blinks. "A carnival? Here?"
"Close enough that half the town's pretending not to notice," she says. Then, quieter, "I've never been to one."
I look at her. "Never?"
She shakes her head. "Candlekeep didn't really do… this."
Jaheira considers that. "And you're suggesting this because…?"
Imoen gestures toward me. "He asked for time. And it's right there. We don't even have to leave Nashkel, really."
I shift again and feel the dull reminder in my side.
"It's close," I say. "And above ground."
Jaheira listens, then nods once. "Very well. Briefly."
Imoen's smile is quick and unmistakably pleased.
As we turn east, toward music that doesn't belong to a town this tired, I realize the ache hasn't gone away.
But neither has the sense that stopping — just for a moment — might be what keeps us from turning every problem into something that has to be solved immediately.