Dverg / Dwarves

Once, in the half-formed age when the Mid-Realm lay brown and ragged beneath an empty sky, there walked a being the size of ranges and valleys. Its beard dragged like riverbeds; its footsteps hollowed basins that would later fill and become seas. The land offered it no companion, and its vastness made the small, careful things of the world vanish like dust beneath its shadow. Alone, enormous, and always reaching, the titan grew a terrible hunger for form.

That hunger turned to obsession. The titan wanted to carve the world into shapes its hands could understand. It wanted groves that matched the cadence of its palm, caverns that answered the angle of its jaw, and faces in cliffs that would whisper back. But scale betrayed it. Each strike it made was too vast to savour, each scoop of earth was a landscape lost. In the hollows of its skull chimmed millions of small, urgent urgencies like the scratching of a thousand chisels. They were the tumble of clay and stone lodged within its mind, the murmurs of possibility that could never be touched by such immensities.

Madness and grief braided until both were one. In a final, ruinous craving to know what lay beneath the crust, the titan repeatedly drove its head against the world. It stamped beds of stone into ragged oceans, and with every blow the ground answered in thunder. On the last strike, when the titan’s skull met bedrock with a force the ages remember as a bell of breaking, the crown of its head cleaved open. From the wound poured not only the titan’s blood and brain but the grit and marrow of the earth embedded in its skull. Flesh and stone spun together, seamed and cooled and breathed.

From that mingled ruin rose small, stubborn shapes. They stood with callused hands and clear, patient eyes; they felt in their bones the echo of a colossal grief, and in their minds the titan’s buried ache to make and to mend. They took the titan’s compulsion and made it fit the measure of their hands. Where the titan had shattered, they learned to shape; where it had crushed, they learned to refine. They went down into the ribs of the world and began, quietly and without flourish, to chisel a new order from the broken place.

Thus were the first among their kind formed, inheritors of a madness that had become craft. They carried in their blood the titan’s ruin and in their work its unspent longing, and by their labour the scarred face of the realm was given new measure and meaning.