Dwarf

Dwarves are compact and powerfully built, their flesh and bone dense enough to turn a blow that would break another body. They hold this comes of an old kinship with stone and the deep places, and the kinship shows on them: in age, a fine mineral grain rises through the hair and skin, brightest in the beard, which a dwarf keeps oiled, polished, and cut to long custom.

Across the Vale, dwarves are the builders, engineers, and delvers, and their work is made to outlast them. They prize what is solid and proven over what is new: a method is kept because it has held, taught from one mason to the next with little change. They build down to bedrock and into cliff faces, and where they settle among other peoples they tend to take on the shared works no one else will, the walls and drains and foundations a town forgets about until they fail.

Their gatherings carry several purposes at once. One evening in one hall may hold a dispute, a celebration, and a remembrance together, settled through argument, song, and oaths spoken aloud so they are witnessed and cannot later be denied. This is how a scattered people keeps its memory and its obligations, in company rather than in writing.

Most dwarves hold that Ord made the world, and made it deliberately, every part set where it was meant to go. From this comes their watchword, “what will be, will be”: not a shrug at fate, but trust that a world built with such care runs to a purpose, and that work done properly will last because lasting is in the nature of a well-constructed thing. A dwarf rarely signs what they make. The work speaks for itself, sound and in use long after the maker is forgotten.