The Deephearth
A lightless immensity of root-caverns, worm-tunnels, and warm stone extending beneath a good third of the Kingdom. Gnome clans live in packed family hollows, hundreds strong, and there is no Gnomish king, duke, or governor — the Kingdom's attempts to install one have been politely absorbed and quietly ignored for centuries.
The Land
Measured by surface footprint, which understates it badly: the Hollows are a three-dimensional territory, and their deepest galleries lie beneath provinces that have no idea they are above anything. Warm, wet, and structurally sound, with deep waterways connecting most of the major clan-clusters.
The defining feature is the roots. The Greenmantle's giants send taproots down four hundred feet and the Hollows have been carved around them, so that a gallery is as often a space between roots as a space in stone. Root-wood is the local timber, root-sap the local sugar, and a living taproot the size of a tower is a landmark, a water source, and a listening post — sound travels along them for miles, and every clan child learns which knock carries where.
- Warmth without sun. The Hollows never freeze and never bake. Crops — fungus, root-crop, grub-pen — run year-round, and this is why 900,000 people live down here without a single field.
- Blackdamp. Bad air pools in low galleries, invisible, and kills quietly. Gnome parties carry a caged springtail; when it stops moving, so do they.
- Flood. The deep waterways rise fast and without warning after surface storms nobody underground has seen. High-water marks are painted at every junction and treated with religious seriousness.
- The settling. Old galleries subside. A hollow that has stood for four hundred years will give a day's notice in the form of a particular sound, and every Gnome alive can identify that sound, and there is a word for the people who ignored it.
Subregions
The Roots. Warm loam galleries built around the living roots of the High Forest above, kept by the Hearthkin, who tap the roots and trade their yield to the surface.
The Mines. Lightless bedrock miles beneath the Heartland, worked by the Deepfarers for ore and gems, and jealously guarded by things that live deeper still.
Sorrowloom. A melancholy underworld beneath the Twilight Forest built on the calcified ruins of a prehistoric insect kingdom, where the Sullen carve bone and chitin into art.
Flora and Fauna
| Feature | What it is | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Taproots | Living columns from the Greenmantle above | Timber, sugar, water, and the telegraph |
| Hollowcap | Farmed fungus in tiered galleries | The staple. Nine varieties, eight edible, one for dye |
| Glowcap | Bioluminescent understory fungus | The lighting, everywhere; a hollow's mood is its glowcap |
| Bloodveil | A red fungus that grows only on collapsed ground | A warning sign, read instantly by everyone |
| Earthworms | Large; tillers and tunnel-freight | The Hollows' entire transit system, and they are people |
| Moles | Large; blind, tireless, and represented at the moot | Neighbors. Dangerous neighbors, but neighbors |
| Springtails | Fine; compost stock and gas-canaries | Turn leaf litter into soil, and warn you before you die |
| Gigantean centipede | Huge; thirty feet of it, no natural enemy | The Hollows' apex predator, and the reason for the deep gates |
The Motherstone
A cathedral-sized geode at the confluence of the deep waterways, ancient beyond reckoning and magically resonant enough that words spoken at its heart can be heard in every clan-hollow connected to the stone. Clans send elders there to argue, trade, and reconcile.
So do moles, worms, and beetles. The Motherstone moot is the one formal body in the Kingdom where non-Faeries hold seats, which the Eternal City considers an embarrassing provincial eccentricity and the Gnomes consider none of the Queen's business.
Settlements
The Ninth Hearth (40,000) — Matriarch Dunnowar's clan-cluster, the largest single hollow, and the closest thing the province has to a capital in the sense the Kingdom means. Dunnowar would like it noted that this is the Kingdom's idea, not hers.
Tallow (12,000) — the sugar town, built around six converging taproots, where sap is drawn, boiled, and traded. Warmest place in the province and smells permanently of caramel.
Gate-Under-Stone (8,000) — the last legal hollow before the descent to the Kobold Deepworks. Officially a customs post. In practice a bilingual market town where nobody's paperwork is examined and two-thirds of the marriages are unregistered on one side or the other.
Wormhaven (uncounted) — a mole-and-worm settlement on the deep waterway, with seats at the moot and no entry in any Kingdom register. The Gnomes call it a town. The Chancery calls it a burrow complex.
Factions
The Hearths. Nine great clan-clusters and about two hundred lesser ones, each governed by its matriarch, each jealous of its galleries, and all of them united by a shared and entirely sincere refusal to have a king.
The Moot-Speakers. Elders, Gnome and otherwise, who hold seats at the Motherstone. The Basekin speakers are not a bloc, do not vote together, and have been quietly effective for so long that the Kingdom's assumption they are decorative is now the single most useful thing about them.
The Assay Office. The Crown's presence: a Chancery outpost tasked with surveying, registering, and taxing the Hollows' galleries. It has been at this for two hundred years and has mapped perhaps a fifth. Its surveyors are, by now, mostly Gnomes, and their maps are mostly wrong on purpose.
The Deepworks Trade. Not an organization — an open secret with a shipping schedule. Ore comes up, root-sugar and grain go down, and both crowns have been lied to about the volume for so long that neither has an accurate figure.
The Quiet Descent. Gnomes and kobolds who have stopped pretending, and who argue openly for a formal union of the underground against both surface crowns. Small, young, and taken seriously by nobody except the Chancery, which has a very thick file.
Sites of Interest
The Motherstone Deep. Below the moot chamber, where the geode's crystal runs into water, there is a gallery no clan claims and the moot does not discuss. Words spoken there come back — not as echo, but delayed by minutes and occasionally with different emphasis. Three separate matriarchs have gone down alone and come back with a decision they would not explain. The moles say the stone is listening. The Gnomes say the moles are being dramatic. Nobody goes down alone anymore.
The Drowned Gallery. A clan-hollow lost to flood four hundred years ago, still intact under thirty feet of standing water: houses, furniture, tools, and a great deal of pre-Kingdom stonework in a style that appears elsewhere only in the Hollow Marches. Undine divers have been offered a great deal of money to survey it. The Gnomes have refused every offer, on the grounds that it is a grave, and on another ground they will not state.
The Long Root. A single taproot descending past every inhabited level of the Hollows and continuing below the deepest gallery anyone has cut to. Knock-messages sent down it are answered. The answering knocks are not in any code the Gnomes use, they are not kobold, and they have been getting nearer at a rate of about a foot a year.
Gate-Under-Stone's Lower Market. Where the Kingdom stops being real. Kobold iron, Gnome grain, Rustlands salvage, and a standing arrangement that nothing said down here is repeated up there. It is the friendliest room in either realm and it is one bad season from being a diplomatic incident.
Hooks
- The Assay Office has a new surveyor from the capital, uncorrupted, competent, and unaware that accurate maps of the Hollows are worth killing over. She has hired guides. Everyone who applied is lying to her.
- Bloodveil is coming up in the Ninth Hearth's oldest galleries, in a pattern that does not match subsidence.
- A moot speaker — a mole of considerable standing — has been arrested by the Assay Office for the crime of holding office while not a person. The moot has adjourned. Nothing in the Hollows is moving until this is resolved, including the ore.
- The knocking on the Long Root has begun repeating a rhythm that a Tallow child recognizes, and cannot say from where.
- Two Deepworks caravans have vanished in the same month, and the kobolds — who do not accuse people lightly — have started asking whether the Gnomes have a debt problem.
Relations
At their lowest reaches the Hollows run into the Kobold Deepworks. The two peoples have been trading, intermarrying by metamorphosis, and lying to their respective authorities about it for a very long time. It is the oldest warm relationship across the Faerie–Goblin line, and neither crown has been told.