Dwarf

The Dwarfs hold the alpine north, the only Faerie homeland that is openly hostile to the people living in it. Thin air, killing cold, and glacier-cut valleys mean that everything a Dwarf has, a Dwarf built. They are the Kingdom's engineers, and their fortress-manufactory in the flank of a peak is the industrial heart of the world.

Their natural wings are small and struggle badly in thin air, so most Dwarfs augment: propellers, springs, compressed-gas boosters, and small rockets, strapped on and tuned individually. A Dwarf in flight is loud, fast, and slightly on fire.

Appearance

Short, wiry, and weathered, with ruddy skin and frost-fern patterns on their wings that no two individuals share. Working Dwarfs are visibly modified — goggles, harnesses, brass at the joints — and consider an unaugmented body a sign of either youth or wealth.

Augmentation is also the province's quiet heresy. The Kingdom's doctrine holds that a Faerie's form is their station on the karmic climb; the Rimeward's whole industry is built on the position that a form is a set of parts, and that the parts can be improved this afternoon.

Attuned Magic

Cold. Not fire's opposite so much as its discipline: a nascent Dwarf chills metal to make it brittle or holds a workshop at a steady temperature. A powerful one freezes a waterfall mid-fall, sheathes a valley in ice, or drops the heat out of a forge fast enough to temper what is in it. Most Dwarf magic is applied to manufacture rather than to combat, which does not make it any less dangerous.

The most valuable working in the province is the dullest: holding a tolerance. A master can keep a pressure vessel at one temperature for eleven hours, which is why Winterworks gearing fits and nobody else's does.

Life

Company housing bored into warm rock, rented by proximity to a vent, with heat as the real wage. Work is the works: shifts, apprenticeships, and a rank ladder that follows craft rather than birth — the one genuine meritocracy in the Kingdom, sitting inside the most complete company town in either realm.

Names. Trade names, taken at mastery: Coilbrass, Springhale, Feltwright. Before mastery you are called by your bench number, and a Dwarf who introduces themselves by a number is telling you exactly where they stand.

Arrival. A new-metamorphosed Dwarf is indentured. Immediately, on arrival, into a twenty-to-forty-year apprenticeship — housing, heat, food, and training against decades of work — and it is presented as a rescue, because in the Rimeward it genuinely is one. The bond is the province's great kindness and its great scandal, and both readings are correct.

Cold work. Everyone knows the frostbite drills. Everyone knows somebody who did not get inside in time. The Rimeward is the only Faerie province where a wake is a scheduled part of the working year.

Society

The Winterworks is a company town and makes no pretense otherwise. Rank follows craft, apprenticeships run for decades, and the Foreman-Ascendant is closer to a guild-master than a lord. Thirteen percent of Dwarfs live in the one city, the highest urban concentration in the Kingdom, because the cold permits nothing else.

Tribes

Altitude sorts the Dwarves more thoroughly than any doctrine could.

• The Leprechauns (~120,000) cut their halls into the Crowns, keep the forges lit around the clock, and arm the Kingdom.
• The Wichtel (~160,000) make watches, jewellery and beer in Edelweiss, and celebrate something most weeks.
• The Fossegrim (~70,000) build instruments in the Misted Fjord and teach anyone who stands still.

The Crowns think Edelweiss frivolous, Edelweiss thinks the Fjord idle, and all three send their disputes to a Fossegrim to be sung at.

Currents

The Works Council. Nine master-crafters, formally the government, practically the Foreman-Ascendant's department heads. Two of them have started meeting without him.

The Apprentice Bond. Twenty thousand indentures. Legally students, practically the workforce, and lately in possession of a clause nobody has ever tested.

The Cable-Runners' Lodge. High-guides, lift-tenders, and rescue crews — the people who go where wings do not. Unbuyable, independent, and the one body the Council cannot replace.

The Scrap Trade. Bellowsgate's traders and their gremlin counterparts, running the Kingdom's only real commerce with the Wilds, entirely undocumented.

Relations

The nobility adores Dwarf artifice and looks down on Dwarfs for making it, a contradiction the Dwarfs have monetized ruthlessly. The Winterworks also holds the Kingdom's only real trade relationship with the Outer Wilds: ore comes up from the Kobolds, scrap comes in from the Gremlins, and no one at court wishes to inquire too closely about where a thing came from so long as it ticks.

Playing One

• You bring the gear. Prosthetic wings, pressure work, cold tolerances, and the one device that solves the problem — for a price you will itemize.
• Loud flight. Your augmented wings are fast, capable at altitude, and audible from a long way off. Stealth is somebody else's job.
• You are a tradesman at court. Received everywhere, seated below the salt, and perfectly aware of the arithmetic.
• A starting complication: you are eleven years into a thirty-year bond, you left without discharging it, and the Works Council does not need to send anyone — it simply needs to tell people who you are.