Ember Soil

"Hands clogged with mud, faces dirty and the pervading stench of the swamp around us we toiled. Day, Night, Evening and morning, the swamp gets in everywhere and everything. You eat, you taste ember, you drink, you taste ember. I thought back to a previous life and it too was engulfed in the taste of ember. I will die here, future generations will unearth me much as I am now.... I just wish death would come for me sooner" - Exerpt from a journal found during a ranging expedition, Source unknown.

Ember Soil

Ember soil, one of the primary heat sources in homes, furnaces, and anywhere else there is a need to burn fuel for heat, is a substance found almost exclusively within the confines of the Ember Soil Swamp, a huge expanse of marsh and swampland that extends south from the mountains of southern Huldath. Specially adapted caravans travel to Ember Slough, the semi-permanent town within The Ember Soil Swamps, to haul it away and distribute it.
Ember Soil mining is not a particularly dangerous past time in and of itself, however, the swamps, creatures that lurk there and the distances that need to be covered in order to find new untapped reserved within the swamp mean many Soilers (the colloquial name for Ember Soil Miners) have short and hard lives whilst extracting the material.

Extraction

Extraction of ember soil is, compared to other traditional mining methods, fairly straightforward. Soilers will dig down between 1 and 15 ft to remove the topsoil of the swamps in areas where it is dry enough to do so using shovels, picks and other digging implements. Once a layer of Ember soil has been reached they will begin the process of squaring and lifting the ember soil in squares of roughly 1ft. it is loaded onto sleds, rafts, or other large structures and hauled back to Ember Slough.
During Extraction, the main hazard to Soilers is that they may encounter "Mold Folk" Burrows within the soil. See "Mold Folk" for more information on them.

Uses

Ember soil is Primarily used as a heat source, either for heating homes, forges, or other uses. The burned ember soil ash is commonly used in mortar for stone walls or as an additive to clay bricks to increase their resilience to water.

Type

Organic