The mountains that run throughout the Ash-Kingdom are rich in many materials, though most are not geared towards trade so much as war - though certainly war materials can be sold, and many of them are used for machinery too, making them doubly valuable; many of their priests are also smiths, and the ritual introduction of the carbon-rich ash that falls all over the country into their forging has allowed them to, over time, produce high-quality [b]steel[/b].

Other metals they harvest are stranger, however; deathiron, a grey-black metal much like its mundane counterpart, stripped from the most damaged of the ruins that are scattered across the landscape, and mined from the deeps, most notable among them. When properly forged, it forms something of incredible resilience, that even their best smiths have been unable to melt down again - but few outside the Ash-Kingdom would be willing to do so, for the process requires human sarifice to complete. Which, perhaps, explains its strangest properties: it feeds upon death and pain, and the more people who have died around it, or especially to it, the more of that energy is available to the wielder, though how it is used is seen as an intensely personal thing - some have managed to command the spirits of those they killed, others use it to enhance their physical capabilities, and a few have even found that they shape it to their will, to a point.

Maur's Skin is their name for the ash that falls throughout their land, reverently harvested and used in smithing - and it has properties of its own; despite being ash, it can be used to fuel fires that burn clean and hot (and it is used for their furnaces, as a result - furnaces that are, when possible, stoked by what they call Sister's Breath, the wind that comes out of the west, for their smithing is steeped in religion and ritual, creating from fire like their ostensible progenitor as they do); what else it can be used for, besides the forging of steel and refinement of deathiron, is unclear.

However, despite the Hearth and the herds of animals (including some megafauna) in the region, they simply do not have enough to support their population - especially if it continues to grow, and as such, they need to import [b]food[/b].