Dwarf

Dwarves claim to have been the first demihumans, a claim that even the elves do not deny. They were in some ways closest to the giants and were their favored servitors, willing to endure their tyranny when the other races rebelled. They mined and carved underneath the world as the giants above rebuilt it. They are also naturally a somewhat secretive people. Being seen as a “dwarf” is something that is tied to complicated cultural rituals, and they often keep traditions alive within other cultures that go back generations, so far back that even the dwarves practicing them rarely remember their origin. The only one that feels truly universal is the clan dagger, which is practiced by nearly all dwarven clans. There is a deep sadness and mourning of a lost collective memory among the dwarves, as they claim they once had a great civilization that spanned the Underworld, but was lost during one of the great Apocalypses in the past. They also have a long history of being exiled or driven forth from their holdfasts and domains, by goblins, the degenerate descendants of the old giants, the orcish host that now rules the Underworld, or even more horrible things beneath the surface.

Dwarves are short and stocky, with most averaging about four foot tall and the very tallest being five feet tall. They are however quite wide and broad in their frames, in both sexes, which both pride themselves on the length of their hair. These hairstyles are often part of the secretive traditions they keep among the cultures they adopt. There was a time where being beardless was in fashion in Gebroan, as a rejection of the Moresain and their ways, but it never quite became the norm. Beards are still deeply associated with dwarves, and even dwarven women are sometimes bearded, though usually less so than the men. Other than stature and their darkvision, the other thing that separates dwarves most from other demihumans is their longevity. Only elves are longer-lived: Dwarves reach maturity later in life at the age of twenty-five, and can live over three hundred years. This, along with their clannish nature, melancholic history, and general stoicism is the thing that most separates them from others of their Culture, as they tend to both have their minds on the long-term and a seemingly limitless patience, but also tend to nurse and hold grudges, famously so. “A dwarf rarely forgets, and never forgives,” goes the Skarrian saying.

Dwarves dominate the Gebroan culture, and the Moresain are exclusively dwarven, but quite a few have settled among the Keshkevarine and Myrcians. Across the Farther Waters, they are most associated with the Telvar Union, a decaying polity that controls the mountainous islands of Ornassus that lead southward to Zafara. A persistent cultural myth among the dwarves is of the “duergar”, or gray dwarves, an illbred race that haunts their ancestral memory, with innate shadow magic, glowing eyes, and hairless bodies. The ancient dwarven tongue used to be a secret, but during the Fifth World the script became the basis of most Talirean written language. In addition to their cultural naming conventions, dwarves keep a “secret name” that they earn upon adulthood that they never share with anyone else, and are also members of patrilineal clans that go back a staggering number of millenia.