Dwarf

Every people in Valdrin can be turned. Corruption finds a crack, works into it, and what walks back out of the dark is no longer what you sent in. It has never once managed this with a dwarf.

Not slowly. Not rarely. Never. The rot enters dwarven flesh the way water enters granite: it lies on the surface, finds nothing to widen, and runs off, and the stone is exactly as it was. There is no dwarven word for a turned dwarf, because there has never been cause to coin one. The dwarves have had three hundred years at a stretch to consider what this says about them, and they have reached a conclusion, and they will happily tell you what it is.

A hold is a mine that refused to stop¶

Every dwarven city started as a hole dug for money. Then the shaft went deeper and the miners stopped walking home, and their quarters became houses, and the store-rooms became halls, and somebody widened a tunnel wide enough for two carts and it has been the main road ever since.

The Thorgaz took this furthest. Their great fortresses hold entire districts under the mountain: markets, temples, foundries, whole streets that have never seen weather, all of it strung together by tunnels that take a day to walk end to end.

Thorgaz is the largest confederation of holds and not the dwarven nation, a distinction dwarves consider too obvious to state and foreigners get wrong constantly. Independent holds are common. Some are one mountain with three hundred dwarves in it and a grievance about a lease from four centuries ago. Some are ancient, rich, and perfectly content to trade with Thorgaz while refusing every invitation to join it. A hold is a thing that keeps itself, and everything above that is an arrangement.

Nothing is plastered over. A dwarf sees no reason to hide a building's age, so old walls are patched and built into the new work rather than torn out, and every hall is a cross-section of everyone who ever owned it. The oldest walls are covered edge to edge in cut inscriptions: births, deaths, marriages, sieges, the completion of a good bridge. It is a city and it is also a record, and the dwarves do not really distinguish.

You do not have time to do it right, if you do not have time to do it twice.

Yewbrow, Royal mastersmith of king Durden IV

Three hundred years, and the witnesses are still in the room¶

A dwarf lives three hundred years, which is not long enough to be an elf and far too long to be argued with.

It means the family story about the flooding of the lower deeps is not a story. It is a report, from a dwarf who is downstairs, who will correct your version of it. Disputes over century-old grievances in dwarven society tend to end the same dull way: somebody sends for the person who was there.

This is why dwarven custom does not drift. Traditions elsewhere soften because everyone who remembers the original reason has died. In a hold, they have not died. Propose a change and you will not be refused. You will be asked, politely, to explain what is now insufficient about the old way, by someone who watched it being decided.

Stone forgives nothing and forgets nothing. Be more like stone.

Thorgaz proverb

Properly forged¶

The Church of the Anvil has an explanation for this, and it is not a modest one: dwarven flesh was forged, and forged well, and the other peoples were merely made. Corruption cannot get purchase on good work. That is the whole doctrine, and every dwarf who ever walked out of a foul place carrying nothing home in the blood is another line of evidence for it.

Individual dwarves take this anywhere from devoutly to not at all. Every one of them enjoys it.

The same conviction runs through the crafts. Dwarven ironwork, masonry and machinery are traded the length of Valdrin, and the highest compliment in a hold is not that a thing is beautiful. It is that its maker is four generations dead and the thing is still in daily use. That, to a dwarf, is proof the job was done properly.

The grudge that outlived its reason¶

Dwarves get on well with humans, who buy metal and sell grain and do not linger. Trade with halflings and Goetern runs easily enough. Elves and Naahri get courtesy and a certain distance. Two peoples this certain of themselves can share a table, but not gladly.

Orcs are another matter. Dwarven and orcish claims to the same mountains have been settled by violence for so long that many holds keep the casualty rolls as a formal archive. In more than one of them, the original quarrel is a matter of record and no living dwarf can say who was actually in the right. The archive is maintained regardless. The names are still read.

Minotaurs and giants receive no warmth at all. Both arrive from the high places, and in dwarven memory nothing has ever come down out of the high places to trade.

Ancestors watch. Do not shame them.

Thurin Thorium, the last Prince of the Eerie Peak

In your settlement¶

Strong of arm and no fool, dwarves are the backbone of any hold that has to be dug, raised or hammered, and they are the only workers on the map that a corrupting influence simply cannot reach. Post them where the risk is, because nothing else you own can stand there indefinitely.

The bill comes due in the nursery. Dwarves breed at half the human rate, and three centuries of life do nothing to speed that up. A dwarf lost in a bad season is a gap in your workforce that you will be looking at for a very long time, and their neighbours will not be filling it. The hold does not take in strangers. It outlasts them.