The Ironspine Holds

Overview

The Ironspine Holds are the oldest major stabilized Dwarven civilization on Caeldon, in the mountains of The Ironspine. Every Dwarf still measures a hold against theirs: gates cut into living rock, halls older than any Human memory, and forges whose fire has never been let out. The deep Stonewake Compact is a civilization within them.

Hold oaths, walls, and gates are sworn under Kerrund the Stone-Warden, the Dwarven god of held gates. The holds keep The Held Covenant in its outward-facing gate practice, which leans on Kerrund's question: will you hold?

How It Holds Together

The Holds have no king. Their heart is the hold: a fortress-city cut into the mountain around a gate, a forge, a granary, and the tablets of its dead, kept by people who believe that whatever holds up a roof deserves respect and whatever does not deserves none.

Inside a hold, the elders and great houses judge by custom and oath, and a household that defies them finds the forge, the granary, and the gate closed to it. Between holds there is no crown, only old oaths and the strength each can bring, and a hold's word is worth what its walls and warriors are worth. Hold grudges are carved, not spoken, and a feud between two holds over a seam, a road, or an insult at a gate-feast can run for a thousand years, fought by ambush in the underways and remembered on both sides' tablets. The full balance is set out under Peoples and Power.

Daily Life

Life behind the gate, from the outer courts to the cradle-chambers, with its work, food, slow childhood, and Festival of the First Stone, is told under Ordinary Life in the Ironspine. What the Holds add is the way a household answers to its hold.

• Naming. A child's name is cut on a small stone kept in the cradle-chamber until the child is judged able to carry it.
• The gate oath. A young Dwarf's first oath is sworn at the gate, before a custodian of the Covenant who asks Kerrund's question aloud.
• Marriage joins two households' names on the same archive tablet, with each household's craft and burdens read out so the hold knows what the new household will carry.
• A proving. When a returned exile, a changed survivor, or a contested heir asks to be taken back, the hold-elders call the Proving of the Unbroken Line.
• Burial is a last hearing in miniature: the dead are declared to have held, and sealed with care.

What the holds fear is set out under the Ironspine's dangers: winter on the passes, stone cats and pass bears, flood and bad air in the mine-edges, Brace-Gnawers in the props. Older and quieter is the fear of the doors that were shut with people behind them, and the knocking that still comes through some of them. Behind a few, keepers who would not leave their refuge have become Burden-Stays, and a hold that must open such a door sends its oldest wardens, not its youngest.

Medieval Role

The Holds open and close much of the trade that the cradle-web's uplands live on.

• A gate hold may close its stretch of a road after a rockfall and keep it closed, turning back anyone who cites keepright with spears if words fail.
• A hold may sell ore, tools, and smithing to Headwater towns and buy back the grain, wool, and timber it cannot grow.
• A foothill town that loses the confidence of its gate is soon a poor one.
• A Kobold compact may refuse a working, and a hold that will not pay for danger finds its narrow repairs left undone.
• A leading hold may speak for the Ironspine before the Crownbough Courts or a Human lord's hall, and any other hold may decline to follow it.
• A hold may send its axes down an abandoned working after thieves who stripped forge-work from an empty hold, and hang the ones it catches at the gate; the dark keeps the rest more often.
• The empty holds of the first ages are the great lure of the mountains: forge-work, old weapons, and hoards of metal no archive remembers, with unwoken frames standing between the door and the find, any of which may be only a tool.
• A Headwater lord may hire Dwarven axemen to clear a pass of outlaws, and find that the hold now wants a share of every cart that goes through it.

The holds cut their heroes into the gate-stones, and a Dwarf going out touches them for luck: the gate-warden who held a breached gate with her shield against a pass bear and the winter behind it until the inner door was barred, and the miner who walked back into a flooding seam three times to bring out the Kobold crew that warned him. At a gate-feast the first cup is raised to the bread, for the hold that stood a whole winter's siege by a rival and then sent the besiegers home with loaves, so that every Dwarf would know which hold had held. Climbers wear a crag eagle feather for a high road walked, and every gate-child knows the warning a cat on the stair, the pass by the morning, for the pale stone cats come down just before the snow.

History

The holds stand on very old ground. Before any Dwarf, the mountain depths separate out in The First Regional Differentiations of Caeldon, and the stone-bound ancestry Dwarves descend from forms in The First Material Lineages of Caeldon. Dwarves adapt out of the older Backbone-linked ancestor condition in The First Dwarven Stabilization (c. 475,000-c. 425,000 BR), and hold-world life hardens in The Holdmaking of the Ironspine (c. 465,000-c. 445,000 BR). The Holds consolidate as a civilization in The Founding of the Ironspine Holds (c. 460,000-c. 438,000 BR).

The deep holds grow out of them in The Dwarven Deep Holds (c. 405,000-c. 330,000 BR). Stonewake deepens in The Deepening of Stonewake (c. 365,000-c. 350,000 BR) and is founded as a civilization in The Founding of the Stonewake Compact (c. 360,000-c. 348,000 BR).

Tensions

• Gate and seal. Gate practice accuses the seal practice of the deep holds of closing what should hold; seal practice accuses the gate holds of holding what should close.
• Keepright at the gate. Edgeway kindreds who have cleared a culvert longer than the nearest hold has kept tallies do not accept that the hold may close the road it serves, but the hold has the gate and the spears.
• An old feud. Two holds sworn to each other's ruin over a seam neither has worked in an age have both sent axemen to the same abandoned hold, where a delver swears she saw a forge still burning.
• The knocking door. A basin merchant house has hired a sellsword company to open a sealed door in an abandoned hold, behind which the knocking has never stopped.
• Older claims. Underwall Goblin households still name seams taken in the Enclosure, and Kobold underhouses remember their place shrinking when Dwarven frames arrived.
• A stone that cannot be carried. A child's name-stone has stayed in the cradle-chamber far past the usual years, and the household, the cradle-keepers, and the child no longer agree on why.
• A shut road, a seam beneath a summit, a pattern claimed as craft, and an underwall grievance are the holds' quarrels this year; the Ironspine's Tensions tells them.