Brace-Gnawers

Overview

Brace-Gnawers are heavy burrowers of the deep rock under the Ironspine and in the Stonewake Deeps, beasts whose hide has grown as hard as the stone they push through. They live in the cracks and soft seams of the mountain and in old workings, and they have a taste for the timber the holds brace their tunnels with. Every vent crew and bracing warden knows the signs of them, because a gnawed prop looks sound until it gives.

Appearance

A grown brace-gnawer is the size of a large hog and built like one, low and barrel-bodied, with a short, blunt snout, small dark eyes nearly closed, and short, thick legs ending in broad digging claws. Its hide is the thing: grey and lumpy, with plates and ridges over the shoulders and back that are hard and cold as rock, flaking at the edges like weathered stone, and often crusted with grit. The belly is softer and pinkish grey. It moves slowly and heavily, grinding as it squeezes through a seam, and it grunts and clicks its teeth as it works. It smells of wet stone and old wood.

Habitat and Range

They live in the deep rock around the holds, in soft seams, fault cracks, and abandoned workings, and they come into used tunnels wherever timber is. They are scattered and solitary, a few to a hold's workings.

Behaviour and Temperament

A brace-gnawer eats roots that reach down into the rock, the soft rot of buried wood, fungus, and above all old timber, which it gnaws from the inside of a prop outward, leaving the bark-side shell standing. It widens cracks with its claws and its hard shoulders, and its runs come out through the backs of side-tunnels and vent runs. It is shy, avoids light and noise, and turns its armoured back to anything that corners it; cornered hard, it charges.

Abilities

Its hide turns a pick and a blade, and it can push through cracked and rotten rock that would trap any other beast. The hide is said to harden as it ages, and an old one is nearly stone.

Life Cycle

They bear one or two young in a chamber dug deep in the rock, and the young are soft-skinned for their first year and stay close to the mother. They live long, perhaps as long as a Dwarf's childhood, and an old one dies in its own run and is found, if ever, years later, a shape of stone in a crack.

Uses and Dangers

The holds count them as a hazard of the bracing, like rot and damp. A gnawed prop holds until load or a knock crumbles it, and a run behind a vent gallery can drop its floor or let bad air through. Kobold crews listen for their teeth in the walls and chalk their warning marks on gnawed timber. Their hide plates are prized for small shields and for gate fittings, and the meat is coarse but eaten in the Deeps' lean seasons.

Lore and Belief

Dwarves say the brace-gnawers are kin of the stone, beasts the mountain has made more like itself as it made the Dwarves, and some holds will not kill one in the deep workings but drive it off with noise and light. They are right: the gnawers come down from the same lithic ancestor field, shaped by the Iron Backbone's pressure, from which the Dwarves themselves descend, a beast line that stayed a beast. Many in the holds take this for a deep-miners' saying, and Humans of the gate holds laugh at it. Kobolds say only that a gnawer's teeth in the wall mean a prop to be changed, and they are right more often.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Touched Beasts