The copper mines were backbreaking labor. Every moment breathing in this damp, humid hell, deep in the earth, was torture.
Ford cursed his miserable existence. He probably would have grown to a better height had he not been living underground, hunched in the darkness, for the last eleven years of his life.
And they told him he was lucky! The mine owner had taken pity on him, an eight year old orphan. His mother dead of disease after being impregnated by some foreigner, his uncle who'd been raising him crushed in a mine collapse. He was given his uncle's job so that he had a way to feed himself.
Otherwise, he would have been shipped off to the orphanage. And Foundrel orphanages were far worse than the mines.
There was plenty of work to be had back then. The war with Foundrel's neighboring nation across the river had taken many lives. His uncle could just have easily been killed in battle as in the depths of the earth.
Ford resented all of it.
