Loshev's ancient bridge

Gray stone with veins of ore running through it, worked by a method nobody in Loshev has ever explained. It is Mól work, the same stone that holds up the town hall, and the metal threaded through it like filigree through marble is electrum, which conducts magic. The span is a beautiful piece of design and has been badly kept for as long as the town has had it. Set along its length are pedestals where statues once stood. What they were, and whether they fell or were carried off, was never written down.

It runs south out of Loshev over the river, and it is one of only two bridges across Idir’s rivers. The other is at Harad, downriver and west of Haudh-Gwenn. There is no crossing at Forven at all. A traveler who will not ford and cannot hire a boat uses one or the other, which is most of why either town matters. It is a guard post besides: a man was set to watch it once on the jailer Dan’s order, and a guard of the town still stands on it.

It has been coming apart for hundreds of years. A large section of the deck was already broken long before the company first crossed it, and stone goes into the water often enough that the town has argued about the repairs, on and off, for longer than anyone has counted. A person on foot crosses without noticing. A loaded wagon is another matter.

Campaign Updates

Coming home after dark at the end of the third season, two horses on the broken stretch brought another piece of it down. Nobody was hurt. Koa decided on the spot that the thing had to be fixed and spent the next month at the council about it, carrying a petition that read, in its entirety, that the signatories thought the council should fix the bridge, please, and three lines for names. The council funded the repairs. The merchant Leon Yaegar would not risk laden wagons on it meanwhile, and was paid the extra guards it cost him to go the long way down the western bank.

The work began as a survey. A crew of four or five had tables and measuring instruments set up at the near end within weeks, and their estimate was years: something this old, with the tools and the skill available, cannot be hurried. A season later they were still checking measurements, on the grounds that nobody wanted to order the wrong stone, and the difficulty had moved to quarrying and sourcing the material at all. Merrigan Fox has the job, sixteen years old and making his name on it, which is why his own family has had to send to Peredhel for an architect of their own. Some of the laborers are local and some are not. One who was not turned out to be feeding information to Beltran Grayeras of Haudh-Gwenn, and Constable Tariq al-Mahir took him that same night so that the rest of the crew could be put to questions.

The bridge may not have been falling down only on its own. Cleven Gemsmith, working a scheme to change Loshev that a demon had put in his ear, wrote the bridge into his own notebooks alongside burned estates, and was accused to his face of having sabotaged it. Which damage was his, if any, was never established. The night the horses brought a piece of it down, nobody standing there thought it was anything but old.

It is still being rebuilt, and the difficulty the surveyors ran into at the start turned out to be the whole problem. Nobody alive can make the electrum-veined blocks the span is built from; the craft went with the Mól. The only source of the stone is other Mól stone, which means hiring men to strip it out of ruins, which has quietly turned ruin-stripping into a trade. The nearest whole district of it stands in Haudh-Gwenn, a city that puts no value on the rubble it is built among and needs money more than it has ever needed it.

Buying that stone is beyond what Loshev has, so the council is raising the money off the river. Foundations are going into the water itself for a gate: something that decides who comes up and down the Nahr Al-Bahr, and charges them for the passage. A town that argued for generations over who should pay to keep the bridge standing has settled on travelers.

Crossing it is meanwhile no easier. A rider takes his horse over carefully, and a wagon stops the work entirely while it goes through.