Weight-Bearers
The Weight-Bearers are the natives of the Gravity Well, where weight rises from double at the rim to crushing at the heart. They are built to bear it. They call themselves miners and architects, treat the Well as a quarry of endless worth, and build there structures that nothing outside could make.
Appearance
A Weight-Bearer is short and very broad, the height of a Dwarf’s shoulder and wider than a Dwarf, with a thick neck, short heavy limbs, and wide flat feet. Its skin looks like compressed stone, dark slate or bruised grey with a dull metallic sheen, and its bones are denser than diamond. Its heart beats slow and hard enough that a hand on its chest feels the blow.
It moves with a slow, deliberate gait, muscles rippling under the strain of every step, and never falls. It speaks in a low rumble that carries poorly in the thick air of the Well. It smells of wet stone and iron.
Habitat and Range
They live and work in the Well’s heavier depths, in halls cut into the compressed rock, closer to the centre than anything else can go. A Well holds a working community of them.
Behaviour and Temperament
Weight-Bearers are slow, methodical, and unshakeable. They value strength, patience, and endurance, and think outsiders fragile and flighty, a judgement visitors gasping at the rim seldom dispute. They are not unfriendly. They trade with prospectors at the edge, send the Floaters to fetch what drifts outward, and once they have decided to help a visitor, they do it thoroughly.
Abilities
They bear weight that would crush any other body, close enough to the centre to work where wood grows hard as iron and water turns to crystal ice. They draw sustenance from the minerals in the rock. Their strength in the Well is enormous; outside it they are merely very strong, and seem to float.
Life Cycle
They are believed to be slow-growing and long-lived, and time near the centre of the Well runs slower, so a Weight-Bearer may outlast the generations of the world above. How they fare when a transient Well closes is not recorded.
Uses and Dangers
They quarry Well-Iron and other compressed metals and gems, and some of what prospectors carry out came from their hands. They are dangerous to no one who deals fairly, and to anyone who does not they can simply push, a push no one in the Well can stand against.
Lore and Belief
Miners say the Weight-Bearers hold the mountains down, and tap the rock three times before a deep cut to warn them. Others believe a Weight-Bearer’s bone is what makes Well-Iron; it is the Well that does that.
Salvagers who go down for the treasure the Well has swallowed say a Weight-Bearer will let a respectful salvager pass and crush a greedy one, and that the difference is in how much one tries to carry out.