Cast Iron

The hammers in Ironforge never stopped. Mei Lin walked under a dwarven king the size of a small hill, past a forge that smelled of char and beer, past a beard the width of her shoulders, and decided she liked the place immediately and would have to come back when her ears had stopped ringing.

She had been told to find the Forlorn Cavern for the day's chore. "You will know it," the canal man in Stormwind had written on the back of the slip. "It is the part of Ironforge where the lights are lower and the dwarves are quieter and the fish are older. Bring patience." She had brought patience. She had also brought bread. Patience travels better with bread.

The Forlorn Cavern was exactly as advertised. Low ceilings. Quiet stone. A pool of dark water in the middle of the floor that someone had decorated optimistically with a small painted bench. On the bench sat a mage, casting a line into the pool, looking like a man who had been there since the founding of the city.

"How long?" she asked.

"Three hundred and sixty-six," the mage said, without looking up. He did not need to clarify what.

She winced for him. She sat down a polite distance along the pool, baited her hook, planted a small water totem on the stone behind her out of habit, and said hello to the spirits in the water. The spirits in the Forlorn Cavern were old and slow and a little drunk on centuries of beer steam and forge smoke leaking down through the rock. They were delighted to be greeted. They were too polite to say so. They leaned harder.

She cast.

On the thirty-third cast the line went taut wrong. She set the hook with a quick clean pull and brought up a thing the size of her forearm, dark as old iron, with a jaw that had clearly closed on a number of regrettable hooks over the years and was no longer fond of the experience.

Old Ironjaw looked at her.

Mei Lin looked at the mage.

The mage looked at Old Ironjaw.

Upstairs, the hammers did not pause for them.

"I am so sorry," Mei Lin said, and meant it.

"It is fine," the mage said. He was lying. "Take the fish."

"Are you sure. Three hundred and sixty-six. I will absolutely give him back. I can put him in the pool and you can catch him on three hundred and sixty-seven and we tell no one. I will not even tell the spirits. The spirits already know but they are reliably terrible at gossip."

"Take the fish."

She took the fish.

She also broke off a piece of bread and handed it to him on her way out, because patience travels better with bread, and so does losing a fish you have spent the better part of a season trying to catch. He took the bread without looking at her. He did not throw it. She counted that as a win.

On the way back up to the great gates she said, to nobody in particular, "There is some real iron-y in stealing iron from a mage." The dwarves passing her did not understand the joke and would not have laughed at it if they had. She laughed anyway. She had cast-iron guilt and a cast-iron fish and a daily to deliver, and a city full of hammering she was, against her own better judgement, beginning to enjoy.

She did not put the fish down.

— Mist

P.S. Daily delivered. The dwarf at the desk asked if anything interesting had happened. She told him the fish had been iron-y in catching. He did not appreciate the pun. He has, by all appearances, been having a long week.