Predecessor-Frames

Overview

Predecessor-frames are the mindless workframes of Dwarven deep-hold craft, built for the work that maims or kills ordinary bodies, and the made ancestors of The Wrought. The first of them are undated and probably very old. In The Spread of the Predecessor-Frames (c. 16,000-c. 2,000 BR) they left the holds and were adapted across the Human corridor world as tools, until in The Awakening of the Wrought (c. 1,500 BR-c. 200 CR) frames in several places crossed into selfhood. A frame that has crossed is a Wrought person, and belongs to that people's own record. A frame that has not is a construct, and some still work, or stand, in the old works of the medieval present.

Appearance

A frame is shaped by its work. The first deep-hold frames were heavy, golem-like figures somewhat taller and much broader than a Dwarf, of dark stone and iron, heat-hardened and heavy-jointed, with thick plates over an inscribed core and limbs made for bracing gates and clearing vents rather than for fine handling. The oldest are blackened by forge heat and polished at the grips where generations of hands guided them.

Outside the holds the shapes diverged. Field frames are broader and simpler, of timber and iron easy to mend with local stuff; road and mine frames are long-armed and low; alchemical frames are sealed and glass-eyed, stained by what they handled; civic frames carry fine routing, sensor marks, and tool fittings; warframes are armoured and plain. A working frame moves steadily, creaks and clanks, and smells of hot metal, oil, and stone dust. A dormant one is silent and cold, and looks like a statue left in a passage.

Habitat and Range

For a very long time the frames stayed inside the deep holds, guarded as hold craft, in heat channels, vent shafts, stone pressure gates, and furnace halls. The Headwater Exchange Roads carried them out as lent, traded, and contracted labour, and from there they spread by sale, salvage, theft, and imitation through Human, Gnome, and alchemical workshops into farm estates, mines, roads, and military camps.

In the medieval present unwoken frames are found mainly in the Ironspine. In the forge levels of the Stonewake Deeps much of the most dangerous labour still falls to Wrought or to old frames that never woke, and deep works there still hold frames nobody has looked at in generations.

Behaviour and Temperament

A predecessor-frame has no temperament. It follows patterns, endures danger, and repeats work. It does not refuse, tire, fear, or choose; it does what its pattern and its owner direct, and keeps doing it after the reason is gone, so that a frame left in an abandoned working may go on bracing a gate that holds back nothing. Adaptation by adaptation its owners pushed it towards more self-direction and longer task-memory, and so, over thousands of years, towards a threshold no one was watching for.

Abilities

A frame endures what bodies cannot: furnace heat, vent fumes, crushing pressure, unstable stone, alchemical exposure. It cannot judge. A frame does not know a person from a load, a gate from a wall, or a rightful command from a stolen one.

Uses and Dangers

For thousands of years frames gave the peoples labour that could not refuse, and that was their use and their wrong. Much of the deep holds' worst work had long been done by Kobold vent-kin in bonded service, and the two peoples remember differently whether the frames were built to spare them or to stop paying for them. The danger now is the old frames: heavy machines without judgement in failing works, and the question that comes with every one found standing. In the Ironspine some old workings still hold the frames that once laboured in them, and nobody can tell from the doorway which of them are only tools.

Lore and Belief

Kobold underhouses remember the frames as the machines that took their place in the holds, and some Dwarven craft-lines remember them as a reform; Dwarven records do not say which. The Wrought themselves are divided: some keep old frames as kin who did not wake, some as ancestors, some as tools. Custom is no clearer. Not every old construct is Wrought, but nothing says what is owed to a frame whose awakening nobody saw, or who must prove it, and a frame found in a sealed working is salvage, hold property, or a person left behind according to who finds it and who can keep it (see The Mending Orders).

Where It Appears

• The Spread of the Predecessor-Frames (c. 16,000-c. 2,000 BR)
• The Awakening of the Wrought (c. 1,500 BR-c. 200 CR)
• The Wrought
• Kobolds
• Overview: Species
• The Mending Orders
• The Unmakers
• The Ironspine
• The Stonewake Deeps
• The Headwater Marches
• The Ages of Caeldon
• The Threads of Caeldon History