Stonewrights
The Stonewrights are the people of the Iron Backbone, the realm of earth, structure, and stability that holds the universe together. They are its builders and guardians. To them the universe is a structure to be maintained, and everything else in it looks fragile.
Appearance
A Stonewright is broad and heavy, taller than a Human and many times as heavy, built of living stone: grey granite across the body, black obsidian at the edges of the hands and face, and veins of metal, gold, copper, and iron, running through it and pulsing faintly. Its joints are articulated like machinery, with visible plates and pivots at the knees, elbows, and fingers, and they move with a slow, grinding precision. Its eyes glow a soft amber, like coals behind horn. It walks deliberately and is never pushed off balance. It speaks in short, precise sentences, in a voice like stones settling, and smells of wet stone and iron.
Habitat and Range
They live throughout the Iron Backbone, on its floating mountains, in its perfectly spherical caves, and along its upward-flowing rivers of molten metal, wherever there is building to do or structure to keep.
Behaviour and Temperament
They are builders and guardians. Strength, reliability, and the preservation of the past are what they value. They are slow, deliberate, and unshakeable, and they see visitors as fragile or unstable. They answer questions, briefly, and they do not like haste.
Abilities
They neither eat nor sleep, drawing their strength from the structural integrity of the plane, and they will not die while the Backbone stands. What they build is almost impossible to destroy.
Life Cycle
Stonewrights are said to be quarried rather than born, waking out of the plane’s own living stone, and they will not die while the Backbone stands. A Stonewright that has suffered structural failure becomes one of the Cracked, and wanders seeking repair.