Gold

Chronicle Entry

Recorded by Brother Wyn of Caermynach, Anno Domini 923

Welsh Name: Aur
Dragon Tongue: Gwreichion y greadigaeth (sparks of creation)
Day Made: Third
Status: Present in mountains, dangerous near thin places

The Property

Gold is the only metal that refuses to forget.

Silver tarnishes black with age, copper turns green when rain touches it, and iron breaks down to red rust that stains everything it meets. But gold pulled from the earth after a thousand years in darkness shines as bright as the day dragon fire made it. This behavior suggests memory rather than simple resistance to decay.

The metal is soft enough to shape with stone tools yet weighs more than its size suggests. Raw gold, still bearing marks of the stone it was torn from, presses into your palm with unusual weight. Gold melts at temperatures a good forge can reach, but reaching them requires skill and effort and fuel enough to make you earn it. The Romans managed well enough once they learned the trick, though their smiths would tell you it takes more work than bronze or iron and burns through charcoal at a rate that makes the accountants weep.

How It Was Made

On the third day when earth rose from the waters, the Lord called dragons to give the mountains their bones. He showed Brenin Fawr where to breathe, and the eldest dragon bent to the work.

Dragon fire in those first days carried something of the light that had divided darkness from day. When it touched rock in the mountain's roots, the stone shuddered and remembered the voice that had spoken it into being. Some stone held this memory so tightly it changed, became something that would carry that moment forever.

The dragons called this gwreichion y greadigaeth. Men later called it gold.

Brenin Fawr worked the lowest veins for six days. His fire ran through cracks where the world's bones pressed hardest, and where his breath touched stone, gold formed in seams that would last longer than the mountains themselves. The work felt right, the way work does when you have found what you were made to do.

On the seventh day he made a different choice, but the gold had already been formed by then and could do nothing about what came after.

Where to Find It

Gold appears in veins running through quartz in places where ancient mountains have been ground down by time. Rivers carry it as dust and nuggets, having torn it free over ages. In Cymru the richest deposits lie in the Mawddach Valley and near Pumlumon, where rocks predate Rome by margins that make Roman history seem recent.

Men follow these veins into darkness, chipping away stone to reach seams no wider than their fingers. The mountains give up their gold slowly and with reluctance, which seems fair given that someone is removing pieces of their internal structure.

Most Welsh gold feels ordinary when you hold it. Substantial, certainly, but no more than it should be. The temperature matches what you would expect from metal pulled from underground.

Gold from certain places carries a different quality. Near springs in the high valleys where the veil runs thin, the gold remembers more loudly. The metal burns with a chill that goes past the skin. The weight presses as if something is trying to speak through it but lacks the shape for forming words.

A Healer's Account

Hywel of Buallt kept records until the Night of the Hidden Blades found him. Among his writings:

"I have treated three men who brought gold from the thin springs above Garn Dwad. All three suffered the same progression. First, dreams of fire and mountains taking shape. Then waking visions. Sounds without source, voices in a tongue that predates language. Finally, compulsion. Their hands would not open. One man died after eight days holding his nugget, the edges cut through to bone."

He added: "The gold carries no curse. It simply remembers what made it, and we are not built to hold such memories. Consider a man staring at the sun until his eyes burn. The light does no harm to anything properly equipped to receive it. We are not properly equipped."

The Church melts down gold brought in from veil-thin places, reshapes it into crosses and chalices. The memory fades in the melting, though the priests who do this work sometimes wake screaming.

What Lives in the Metal

The surviving druids say gold carries two memories with equal permanence.

The first is Day Three when Brenin Fawr breathed fire into willing stone and made something that would endure past the ending of ages. Mountains learning their shape. Joy in work done well. Purpose discovered in the act of building. Creation while it was still innocent.

The second is Day Seven when he could not wait one sunrise longer. The conspirators gathered in darkness beneath mountains they had raised. The choice to take rather than receive. The war that left scars the earth still carries. The empty seats in heaven meant for builders who served faithfully but went instead to those who waited when waiting proved harder than grasping.

Both memories remain in the metal with perfect clarity. Gold holds both truths with impartial permanence. Memory offers neither mercy nor forgetting. It continues being true whether anyone wants it to be or otherwise.

Scholar's Note

The piece on my writing table came from the smith at Buallt. He found it near a spring where the veil runs close. It gave him visions of fire and falling, so he brought it to me and asked that I melt it down. I told him I would. At my age, with fever settled in my chest, one more lie seems unlikely to change whatever accounting is being kept.

When I cannot sleep, I hold the gold and feel what Hywel described. Mountains taking shape in darkness. Work done with joy. And underneath, running through it like a crack through good stone, the sound of choosing wrongly.

Tonight I held it while writing this. My hand shakes where the metal burns with a chill that goes past flesh. The unusual weight makes my wrist ache. By morning both memories have bled together until I cannot separate the joy of the third day from the grief of the seventh, the faithful work from the fatal choice.

When I die, let someone bury this with me or throw it into the Wye where the current runs strongest. Some truths are too burdensome for the living to carry, and gold holds truth longer than anything else ever made.

Gold is the only metal that refuses to forget. This makes it either the most honest thing in creation or the cruelest. Tonight, with my hand shaking and the metal burning through my palm, both seem true.

Gold holds contradictions that would break anything less permanent.

Brother Wyn of Caermynach
Anno Domini 923