Stonewrights

Overview

The Stonewrights are the people of the Iron Backbone, the realm of earth, structure, and stability that holds the universe together. They are its builders and guardians. To them the universe is a structure to be maintained, and everything else in it looks fragile.

Appearance

A Stonewright is broad and heavy, taller than a Human and many times as heavy, built of living stone: grey granite across the body, black obsidian at the edges of the hands and face, and veins of metal, gold, copper, and iron, running through it and pulsing faintly. Its joints are articulated like machinery, with visible plates and pivots at the knees, elbows, and fingers, and they move with a slow, grinding precision. Its eyes glow a soft amber, like coals behind horn. It walks deliberately and is never pushed off balance. It speaks in short, precise sentences, in a voice like stones settling, and smells of wet stone and iron.

Habitat and Range

They live throughout the Iron Backbone, on its floating mountains, in its perfectly spherical caves, and along its upward-flowing rivers of molten metal, wherever there is building to do or structure to keep.

Behaviour and Temperament

They are builders and guardians. Strength, reliability, and the preservation of the past are what they value. They are slow, deliberate, and unshakeable, and they see visitors as fragile or unstable. They answer questions, briefly, and they do not like haste.

Abilities

They neither eat nor sleep, drawing their strength from the structural integrity of the plane, and they will not die while the Backbone stands. What they build is almost impossible to destroy.

Life Cycle

Stonewrights are said to be quarried rather than born, waking out of the plane's own living stone, and they will not die while the Backbone stands. A Stonewright that has suffered structural failure becomes one of the Cracked, and wanders seeking repair.

Uses and Dangers

Most travellers come to the Iron Backbone to forge unbreakable weapons or to retrieve ancient knowledge, and the Stonewrights are the ones who know how stone remembers. Their danger is only to those who try to damage what they keep.

Lore and Belief

The builders and mages of Backbone Magic on Caeldon train in Stonewright Guildholds, and the guildholds take their name from the builders of living stone in travellers' tales. Some say the oldest walls on Caeldon were raised by Stonewrights; nothing shows they ever crossed.

Where It Appears

• The Iron Backbone
• Writers' Guide: The Planes, The Ten Primes, The Schools of Magic, Glossary