The Deepening of Stonewake

Overview

In the Stonewake Deeps, one unusually dense knot of Dwarven holds grows into a people of its own before the Stonewake Compact is sworn.

These are the generations in which the deep Dwarves go down past the mountain roots, into heat, bad air, and stone that has never held a hall, and learn what it costs to keep the ways open there.

Below the Roots

After The Dwarven Deep Holds, the lower Ironspine is no longer only the old hold life carried deeper.

In the Deeps the passages meet, the great reservoirs lie, and the archive chambers fill. A hold that holds a junction or a reservoir holds every hold that needs it, and those holds obey. The rule of the Deeps is simple and old: whoever keeps the water running and the ways open for many gives the orders.

The cost is paid in lives. Gas gathers in dead pockets behind silted vents and kills whole work-gangs in their sleep. Heat in the lowest levels builds faster than a draught can clear it. Brace-gnawers hollow the props from inside until a gallery comes down on the crew who trusted it. Every hold of these years has its wall of names. Beside the names hang the trophies of the deep's long war on its keepers: a brace-gnawer's stone hide, the jaw of a beast no hold has a name for, a raider's sword taken at a breached seal.

Seals

Here Sealing Authority becomes a defining Stonewake custom.

In ordinary times a great closure needs the word of several hold-keepers, because one hold's convenience must not wall off another's passage. In a crisis the keeper on the spot may seal first and answer for it after. The accepted reasons are few: collapse, flood or a failing reservoir, contagion, a failure running from route to route, or an enemy breaking through. Speed is forgiven when the wider deep is at risk. A keeper who seals without cause can lose rank, owe a heavy blood-price to the holds cut off, or be driven out.

Every seal leaves someone on the wrong side of it. At the closing of a seal Stonewake keepers still raise a cup to the keepers who sealed a breaking gallery with their own gang still inside, and turn the cup down for the ones who held the door open too long. Behind some old seals the knocking of seal-knockers is still heard, and no one agrees whether it is the dead.

Before the Compact

The deepening makes no state yet, but it makes one possible. By the time Stonewake has hardened around its heavy duty of keeping, the holds that later swear the Compact, as told in The Founding of the Stonewake Compact, already know one another as the ones who answer for what cannot be allowed to fail below.

It is also why the later fighting over The Rootstone Heartwell is so bitter there. Stonewake already knows itself by what it keeps, and by what it would lose.

Historical Significance

The deepening separates the birth of the Stonewake Dwarves from the swearing of their Compact. It makes Stonewake a counterpart to the other new peoples of these ages: the Thornbound and Crownbough Elves above, the Gloamroot Covenant below, and, much later, the Human river towns.

It also leaves the Deeps many of their ruins. Galleries these generations cut and later gave up now lie below the lowest kept ways, beside the lost pressure holds, and delvers still go down into both after Dwarven craft. Some come back with it. The treasure-tales speak of forge-work no living smith can match, of keepers' keys that open seals no archive remembers, of a reservoir chamber floored with sunken silver. The deep holds count the takers as grave-robbers and brand the ones they catch; the lower galleries punish the rest with bad air, heat, kiln newts in the hot stone, and props that look sound until a brace-gnawer has been at them.