The Bluecap (mine-fae)
Leave my wage on the ledge. All of it. I've counted — I always count.
Who they are
The mine-fae — soot-blacked from the seams, a steady blue flame burning where a cap would sit, wings a thin blue membrane like marsh-light stretched over bone. The colliers' lore is blunt about his kind: the bluecap appeared in the deep galleries as a small blue flame and worked harder than any living putter — and expected a full working wage left for him in his own corner of the mine. Leave him too much, and he left the surplus untouched. Leave too little, and he touched none of it, and no work was done. He is kin to the knockers of the tin-country, who rap the timbers before a roof comes down and take the last bite of the pasty as their due. The unseen worker with perfect books, standing in a tunnel veined with gold.
Drawn upright — the teaching
Know exactly what your work is worth and don't take a coin less. Your rate, your salary, the labor at home nobody names — all of it has a true price, and the bluecap's law cuts both ways: not a coin less, and not a coin more. Integrity in the unseen places is its own quiet gold.
The working
Name your true price out loud — alone first, until your voice stops apologizing, then to the one who pays. Leave it plainly, the way the colliers left the mine-fae's wage on the ledge: a number, in writing, with no cushioning paragraph around it. Honor the other half too — where you're overpaid in credit or praise for work that wasn't yours, leave the surplus; clean books are what the unseen respect. Over the work itself, say it once: "The work is good, and the wage is the work's."
Drawn reversed — the shadow
Keep taking less than you're worth and resentment festers where no one can see it. Undervalue yourself long enough and something buried finally gives — the body, the temper, the spirit. Caves don't announce themselves; they just come down.
The undoing
Set your wage and refuse the work that won't meet it — once. One real refusal, spoken plainly and kept, resets the whole seam. The bluecap downs tools the day he's shorted; he doesn't grumble in the dark and keep hauling for half-pay. Learn from him: the refusal is the self-respect, and everything after it renegotiates around that fact.
Its tree · the ogham
Onn — the gorse, which thrives on the poorest ground and still puts out gold. The letter of honest worth in hard places: value that doesn't wait for rich soil to declare itself.
Sit with this
What are you being paid — in money, credit, care — and what are you actually worth? Mind that gap. It's where things cave.