Gumbo is fun. Firstly, it’s cooked with beer, that’s a plus (admittedly, the alcohol cooks out). Secondly, making the roux for gumbo feels like an elaborate dare just how dark you can make it before it starts to burn.
Takes me back. We used to have enchanted jars to keep hot food with us, they were prized as much as a good pickaxe. I sold mine to buy my first lute. It wasn’t all that good, but it was a lute… Hm, I’m sure one could muse about selling your past to dream of a future…
But those were the times. A hard day of work, a hot bowl of stew, a quiet place deep underneath the earth.
That’s the thing, people often don’t know how quiet a mine can be. You see, if you’re feeling pompous and vain you carve big mountain halls. Large spaces, square angles, flat walls. Sound will bounce around like a tireless child. But when you’re mining, you don’t care about aesthetics. You don’t negotiate with the mountain about which path would look pretty, you choose the softer stone and avoid the harder bits. Some natural cavities here, a mined vein of ore there, and you end up with a ragged network of spaces where no two surfaces point the same way. And the way sound bounces there, not knowing which way to go, makes it sound unusually quiet and muted, like no other place in the world. A hard day of work, a hot bowl of stew. I remember I started to sneak away to find a secluded place, eat my food and hum melodies of fledgling songs. The birth of a bard, in the quiet of the mountain.

When the world is all weird angles, you don’t know which way to bounce, heh…