The Dwarven Deep Holds

Overview

Caeldon's earliest Dwarven hold world spreads through the mountain roots and then drives deeper, until a few great holds below rule the rest.

It runs from the older Dwarves of The First Dwarven Stabilization and the hold-cutting told in The Holdmaking of the Ironspine to the broad Ironspine Holds, and on down to the deep holds later sworn into the Stonewake Compact in the Stonewake Deeps.

The Ironspine Holds

The first lasting Dwarven world forms across the Ironspine, hold by hold, with no single king over it.

A hold leads because it endures: because its gates hold through siege and avalanche, its stores last the winter the passes close, its archive remembers the seams and the old grudges, and its halls do not come down. Holds that fail are emptied, and their gates stand open on the mountainside for later delvers and for whatever moves in. Hold-folk call such a place a cold gate, and every Ironspine child knows the warning: a cold gate has a beast in it, a treasure in it, or both, and the beast is not asleep.

Going Deeper

Over the ages some holds cut down past the mountain roots, where passages meet, reservoirs lie, and the warmth of the lower stone makes long halls possible. Those holds grow strong because others cannot live without them. A hold that needs another's water does as that hold says, and a hold that will not finds its ways closed.

Depth is paid for. Gas, heat, and flood kill work-gangs; brace-gnawers hollow the props; galleries come down on the careless and the unlucky. Holds war over junctions and water, and some of the oldest Dwarven grudges begin with a door shut on a rival's crew. These wars are fought in the dark: gangs sent through forgotten adits to flood a rival's lower galleries, a gate held by a dozen axes against a hundred, a junction taken and retaken until the dead are walled into its sides. The grudge-tallies of the Ironspine still name who did what, and some holds will not trade with the descendants. The deepest holds are the ones that keep the most alive, and they rule by it.

Stonewake

The clearest result is the rise of the Stonewake Compact. In the Stonewake Deeps, holding the routes, the archives, and the deep reservoirs makes one of the first great named Dwarven peoples within the wider Ironspine world. Stonewake keeps the old hold virtues and turns them downward: the strongest hold is the one whose ways stay open and whose water does not fail.

That also draws the deep holds into the wars that follow. A people that rules by keeping the routes and reservoirs is bound to fight over a place like The Rootstone Heartwell, above all once the Gloamroot Covenant is forced to rebuild below.

That fighting is told in The Roothollow Rupture and The Heartwell Struggles. Stonewake's own hardening is told in The Deepening of Stonewake and its swearing in The Founding of the Stonewake Compact.

Historical Significance

The Deep Holds show how the Dwarves parted without ceasing to be one people. Later Dwarven power works at two sizes at once: the broad old weight of the Ironspine Holds, and the harder, narrower power of places such as Stonewake.

They also show how Dwarves inherit. Routes, reservoirs, vaults, and archives pass from generation to generation like crowns, and whoever holds them holds the right to rule. The holds abandoned along the way are among the oldest ruins in the mountains, and the treasures and dangers left in them have drawn delvers ever since. Not every one was emptied of its dead. In some last refuges burden-stays still bear the roof, and hold-folk warn that whoever frees one is buried with it; in others the gate-hall is a den for stone cats and the hoard-room is already bare, robbed by someone who did not live to spend it.