THE DWARVES

The First Opening

The Dwarves did not dig into Khevari. They woke up inside it. Their oldest songs speak of the First Opening—not a birth, but an awakening. One moment there was stone. The next moment there was stone that knew itself, that felt the weight of the mountain above as comfort rather than crushing, that understood darkness as home rather than absence.

The Dwarves believe they are Khevari's consciousness given form: the world's attempt to know itself from the inside. This origin shapes everything about them. They do not see themselves as inhabitants of the land but as expressions of it.

When a Dwarf dies, they are returned to stone—literally calcified through sacred rites until their body becomes indistinguishable from the mountain. The Holds are riddled with these ancestor-stones, some so ancient they've been carved through by new tunnels, their features worn smooth by generations of reverent hands. A Dwarf touching stone is not touching something separate from themselves. They are touching family.

The Holds

The Holds cluster in three major mountain ranges: the Brennmarr Spine in the west, the Kaethvul Deeps in the east, and the Thornback Reaches in the north. Each range houses between four and twelve independent Holds, depending on how one counts—Dwarves argue constantly about whether a "true" Hold requires certain depths, certain populations, certain ancestor-stones.

The Holds were never unified under a single ruler. Each Hold is sovereign, bound to others through kinship, trade, and the Tunnel Accords—ancient agreements about passage rights, rescue obligations, and shared defense. A Dwarf from Kaethvul owes no allegiance to the High Seat of Brennmarr, but they will die for each other if the tunnels are threatened. The stone connects them. That is enough.

Emotional Transparency

Dwarven emotional transparency is not philosophy—it is physiology. They lack the facial musculature for subtle expression. A Dwarf's face shows what a Dwarf feels, fully and immediately, and their culture evolved to match.

This makes them exhausting to other races and deeply comforting to each other. There is no Dwarven word for "polite fiction." Gatherings are loud: joy bellows, grief wails, anger roars. A quiet Dwarf is a sick Dwarf or a plotting Dwarf, and the latter is considered a kind of illness too.

When dealing with Dwarves, expect exactly what you see. They will tell you what they think of your proposal while they're thinking it. They will laugh at your jokes or stare blankly—nothing in between.

Sacred Craft

Craft is sacred to Dwarves. Not because objects matter, but because making things is how Dwarves understand. A smith knows metal the way a lover knows a body—through touch, through heat, through patient attention. The Holds produce metalwork, stonework, and engineering that surface races consider magical. It isn't. It's intimacy.

A Dwarf crafting something gives it the same focused presence they would give a partner, a child, a dying friend. The object receives their full emotional transparency, their complete attention, their genuine care. This is why Dwarven goods are treasured across Khevari. You can feel the attention in them.

Watching a Dwarf work is considered intimate. Interrupting a Dwarf mid-craft is considered rude in the way interrupting sex would be.

The Listeners

The Listener Collective has no single leader. These Dwarves spend their lives pressed against stone, interpreting vibrations, mapping surface movements. They know more about Khevari than any other group and share their knowledge with studied neutrality.

Becoming a Listener requires decades of training—learning to distinguish an army's march from a merchant caravan, a stampede from an earthquake. Master Listeners can identify individual species by footfall. The most skilled claim to feel emotions through the stone, though this may be poetry rather than fact.

All Holds rely on them. None fully trust them. The Listeners know too much and share too selectively.