Gnome

Dark-skinned, broad, and deeply magical, the Gnomes hold the lightless immensity beneath a third of the Kingdom. They live in family hollows packed hundreds deep — siblings, children, elders, and pets in one warm stone room after another — and they have never produced a king, a duke, or a governor. The Kingdom has tried to install one several times. Each attempt has been received with great courtesy and quietly absorbed.

What the Gnomes have instead is the Motherstone: a cathedral-sized geode at the confluence of the deep waterways, resonant enough that words spoken at its heart carry to every clan-hollow linked to the stone. Clans send elders there to argue, trade, and reconcile.

Appearance

Stocky and strong, with skin in deep browns and slate greys and eyes adapted to near-total darkness. Their wings are short and broad and almost never unfurled — there is nowhere underground worth flying — which the court cites as evidence of a race in decline and the Gnomes consider a sensible response to having a ceiling.

Attuned Magic

Earth. A nascent Gnome works stone like clay and forges sand into sandstone by hand. A powerful one shakes the ground, opens rifts, raises walls, and animates golems out of raw rock. Gnome earth-magic is the most practical craft in the Kingdom and the least admired, on the grounds that it produces useful things rather than beautiful ones.

Society

Clan first, always. A Gnome's obligations run to their hollow, then to the neighboring hollows, then — distantly and grudgingly — to the Kingdom. Property is held in common within a hollow and disputes are settled by elders who have known both parties since their metamorphosis.

The Motherstone moot is the one formal body in the Kingdom where non-Faeries hold seats. Moles, worms, and beetles send speakers, and their voices carry the same weight as any clan's. The Eternal City regards this as an embarrassing provincial eccentricity. The Gnomes regard it as none of the Queen's business.

Relations

Genuinely good with the underground non-Faerie races, which is rare enough to be politically significant. At their lowest reaches the Hollows run into the Kobold Deepworks, and the two peoples have been trading, intermarrying by metamorphosis, and lying to their respective authorities about it for a very long time.