It grows in low cushions a hand high, with wiry stems and small, narrow, grey-green leaves that are thick and slightly waxy. In early summer it covers itself in tiny five-petalled flowers of rose pink, darker at the centre, and a patch in flower shows as a pink stain on grey stone from far down a valley. The leaves of plants on the richest ground take a faint blue or rusty tinge. It has a dry, slightly metallic smell when crushed.

It needs open, poor, stony ground and tolerates soil that would sicken other plants, so it holds mountain outcrops, scree, and the spoil of the mines and quarries from the foothill valleys up to the high pastures. It grows thickest where a vein comes near the surface, and spreads along it.

A long-lived perennial that roots deep into cracks and spreads slowly by seed, one cushion living for decades. On a new spoil heap it is the first plant to arrive.

Its use is as a sign. Human and Dwarven prospectors walk the slopes in early summer to read the pink, and a line of cushions across a hillside is followed with the hammer. Workers of Backbone Magic, whose Foundation Sense reads strain and voids in rock, use the lodewort to choose where to listen first. It is not eaten by grazing beasts, and its leaves are bitter. It harms nothing, except the hopes of those who take a patch of it for a fortune; lodewort shows where metal lies, not whether it is worth the cutting.

Headwater miners say it grows where the mountain bleeds iron and that the pinker the flower the richer the vein, which is roughly true. Dwarven holds hold it in mild regard as a plant that knows the stone, and some leave a cushion growing at the mouth of a new working for luck. Children who pick it are told they are picking the mountain’s purse.

Prospectors who follow the pink flowers into unclaimed hills are the first to be robbed and the first to be found dead in a ravine by those who want their vein; the Headwater songs have a whole cycle about one such strike and the feud it began.