In the Lower Town of Grimwood Village, close to the river’s rocky edge, there is a half-buried set of stairs leading downwards to a secret shop. The shop itself isn’t truly a secret; that is, secrecy is not its intention, so much an inevitability of circumstance.
Those who know of this shop guard its existence well, for it is a preserved piece of the Before. Before the silver fires, before the ghosts, before the dread beasts rose and hardened myth into absolute truth.
This shop sells salt. Salt for cooking. Salt for bathing. Salt for cleansing, casting, and cursing.
The shop’s survival through calamity, the great ruin which burned half a town, adds to its own legend. Its salts must be precious indeed to be spared the ashen fate of the bookstore across the cobbled lane, or the bakery which resided three doors eastwards.
And thus, now, ten years after the cooling of flames and charred stone, the shop remains secreted beneath layers of shredded wood and crumbling marble yet to be rebuilt.
The source of these salts is an intentional secret. One which the owner’s daughter, who is now twenty-one years of age, will learn when the moon begins to wax.
Mother and daughter will steal along the river’s northern bank towards the Great Fall, inch their way along the narrow ledge known only to the thieves, the Rangers, and the daring and forgotten children, until the thunderous roar of falling water is behind them and a cave is revealed ahead.
Through the darkness of this cave they will travel, the way guided by the cool, metallic feel of a hidden vein of ore threaded into the black cave walls, until they reach a lightless place within the mountain which smells of ice and lemon peel.
Then, then, will the daughter be guided by her mother’s sure hand, in the dark and silence, to chip away at crystals, taller than any tree in the Darkwood, and gather the shards into pouches of black silk.
The mother will teach her daughter that they must never claim more than one pouch each of salt shards per moon, for the mountain will not abide greed, and the guiding vein of ore will lead them instead to their own lightless tomb.
And thus, it serves them well that their shop is accidentally secret, and that their patrons have deep pockets.
The daughter will nearly fall into the lethal churn behind the waterfall as they re-emerge into the pre-dawn night. The mother’s hand will steady her gait, as her own mother’s did before, and her mother’s mother’s before that.
Courage is less valuable on this journey than patience and surety.
For three nights hence, mother and daughter will grind, chant, and soak in fragrant oils their hard-gathered prize. They will tip these salts, transformed through will and labour, into small bottles of midnight-green glass.
They will sell them to third heirs of Noble Houses who wish to advance their station, to middling merchants who wish to advance their fortune, to the brothers of kings and the daughters of queens who wish to advance their Realms’ bounties.
And then, when the mother ages, and the daughter chooses her own child from the lost and forgotten dwellers of the old village roads, the cycle will begin anew.
The salt will reform, fawn steps will be steadied by wiser hands, and the shop will remain secret.
