The Spread of the Predecessor-Frames

Overview

The mindless workframes of the Dwarven deep holds, the forebears of The Wrought, slipped out of Dwarven hands and were bought, stolen, copied, and driven as tools across the Human river and road world for thousands of years.

It begins with The Headwater Exchange Roads and ends shortly before The Awakening of the Wrought.

Frames in the Deep Holds

The first frames are old Dwarven craft, undated and probably very old, built in the deep holds for heat channels, vent shafts, pressure gates, and furnace work: the work that maims or kills ordinary bodies.

Much of that work had long been done by Kobold vent-kin bound in service since The Vent-Houses of the Furnace World. Whether the frames were built to spare Kobolds that work or to stop paying for it, Dwarven records do not say plainly, and the two peoples remember it differently. Kobold underhouses remember frames arriving and the Kobolds' place in the holds shrinking; some Dwarven craft-lines remember the frames as a mercy.

For a very long time the frames stayed in the holds, guarded as hold craft.

Out Along the Roads

The Headwater roads changed that. Trade, lending, and the heavy building along those roads brought frames out of the holds as hired and bartered labour. From there they spread by sale, by salvage from abandoned works, by theft, and by imitation in Human, Gnome, and alchemical workshops that could copy a frame without understanding what made it run. Frame-thieves worked the road camps; salvagers stripped the frames from collapsed workings; Dwarven holds sent hunters after their own stolen craft and did not always ask whose hands held it. Road inns of these ages told of a frame-thief who stole a forge-frame from under a hold's gate and walked it a hundred miles by night, and of the hold hunters who found him a year later running a smithy with it, and left the smithy standing and the smith in the river.

Historical Significance

The spread dates the made ancestry of the Wrought and explains why their bodies, memories, and traditions differ so widely by region and maker. It also explains the tangle of medieval ownership claims: frames passed through so many hands, by sale, gift, salvage, and theft, that almost any Wrought can be claimed by someone, and the claim usually goes to whoever has the men to make it stick.

It ties the Wrought to the Kobolds in a way neither people fully agrees on, which leaves an old, unanswered question under every shared underwork of the Medieval Era. Unwoken frames still stand in old works of the Ironspine and the Stonewake Deeps, and delvers who find one argue over whether to sell it, strip it, or leave it standing. The warframes are worse. Some still stand in the overgrown ditches of forgotten battles with the last order they were given, and a treasure-hunter who wakes one by accident may find out what that order was.