Saltminer

Saltminers need to cover every opening so they don't sustain damage.   A line of bent shoulders marches across the white mirror of the salt flats, skin cracked by heat, mouths dry with dust. The Saltminer’s pick scrapes salt-stone, each strike clinking like brittle promise. Salt dust coats their lungs; sweat filigrees their faces in salt crystal.   They are bound to the flats by debt or decree to Oligarch Romulan Mustafic—each miner a fragile shard of his fortune, turned face to the sun, hopeful for enough coin to survive another dawn. When the wind rises, Saltnadoes swirl like white devils; miners clutch their breath, their tools, their ragged clothes, seeking cover under spindly filtration screens.   Romulan watches from his ornate vantage in Cavahn or above the stormwalls, counting salt wagons, listening to rumours, ensuring the flats never still—and that every grain mined presses his power deeper into the bones of the desert.