✅ No plot spoilers here — this is lore about the Deepfolk race. Come right in.
"Humans and Highfolk — scratch the feathers and the pride, and you find the same creature underneath. Frightened, hungry, in love, afraid to die. The Deepfolk are something else. Every answer you find is a door into a darker room."
— Thalis of Aeloria, Notes Toward a Comparative Ethnography of the Three Races
The Deepfolk are the third of the world's three sapient races, inhabiting the vast subterranean network of caverns, tunnels, and chasms that lies beneath the surface realm. They call themselves Gharzhen — Stone-Kin, or Earth-Born, depending on the clan and context. Humans who have never met one tend to call them dwarves, which is inaccurate on every count and offensive enough that most Deepfolk, on hearing it, simply stop speaking to the person who said it.
They are not short. They are stocky and powerfully built — denser bone structure, broader shoulders, a physical solidity that makes humans standing next to them feel slightly underbuilt — but they stand at ordinary human height. The dwarf assumption comes from stories, and stories come from people who have never been underground.
Most humans never see a Deepfolk in their lives. Those who do, in the trading ports or at diplomatic occasions, encounter a race that is simultaneously easier and harder to understand than expected. They speak directly. They deal fairly. They are not cruel. But they are not human either, and the longer you spend with them, the more apparent it becomes that the similarities on the surface — two arms, two legs, a face that emotes recognisably — are somewhat misleading about what lies beneath.
Deepfolk are a silicon-carbon hybrid species — the only known sapient race with this biology. At a glance, a young Deepfolk reads as almost human. The differences are subtle: skin with a faint grey or brown mineral tint, hair that is usually dark and sometimes carries a slight metallic sheen, eyes that are brown or grey or, less commonly, carry a faint luminescence in low light. Young Deepfolk could pass at a distance in poor lighting. They do not, and would not wish to, but they could.
Age changes this. The silicon component of their biology — minimal and invisible in youth — increases steadily through life. Bones become partially crystalline. The skin takes on more pronounced grey and stony texture. Veins may show as darker lines against the greying skin, like fault lines in rock. An elder Deepfolk in their third century is unmistakable: powerful still, but visibly as much stone as flesh, moving with the deliberate weight of something that has become, in some real sense, partly geological.
The progression is gradual enough that Deepfolk rarely notice it in themselves. Others notice it for them.
Deepfolk are stronger than humans pound-for-pound — the denser bone and muscle structure that reads as stockiness in youth becomes formidable physical power in maturity. They require only four hours of sleep. They can work for twenty or more hours without meaningful fatigue. They are comfortable in extreme heat — near lava flows, in deep geothermal areas — where humans could not function. They can see in very low light, not quite total darkness but close enough for practical purposes underground. They sense vibrations through stone: a limited seismic awareness that gives them early warning of cave-ins, structural shifts, and the movement of large things through rock.
A Deepfolk without a Bloodstone lives approximately 250 years. The stages are distinct:
Youth (0–50 years): Appear and function much like humans. Learn clan skills, find their role, establish themselves. Silicon component effectively invisible.
Maturity (50–200 years): The long prime of life. Physical peak, maximum capability, silicon content increasing but fully managed. Clan leaders are almost always drawn from this period. Barash of Clan Monolith, at one hundred and sixty, is in his full maturity.
Elderhood (200–250 years): The Crumbling begins. The silicon-based tissues start to lose cohesion — not all at once, not quickly, but steadily and without reversal. It typically starts in the extremities: fingers or toes becoming brittle, movements stiffening. Over ten to thirty years it spreads. Strength largely remains but flexibility decreases. The skin takes on pronounced stone-grey colouring. Eventually the vital organs fail as their mineral deposits can no longer maintain structural integrity.
Deepfolk face the Crumbling with stoic acceptance. They do not speak of it as tragedy. They speak of it, when they speak of it at all, as the earth reclaiming what was always part of it.
The Bloodstones can extend life by approximately a century — stabilising the silicon tissues, preventing the crystalline decay, allowing the Crumbling to be deferred. See The Bloodstones for full detail.
Deepfolk eat what humans eat and need less of it — their metabolism is more efficient, and they can digest matter that humans cannot, including partially spoiled food and tough underground plant matter. Whether they also consume certain stones for minerals, or absorb energy from geothermal sources, is suspected by surface scholars but unconfirmed. Deepfolk consider biological questions rude.
"Do you eat rocks?"
"Mind your own digestion."
Reproduction is similarly opaque. Birth rates are lower than humans. Children are rare and precious and raised by both parents with significant clan involvement. Everything else about Deepfolk reproduction is information they have chosen not to share with anyone outside their own people. Scholars have been asking for centuries. The answer remains the same.
A persistent mystery among surface scholars — discussed more openly in Aeloria, where Thalis has made it something of a specialty — is the question of Deepfolk women. Male Deepfolk appear in trade delegations, diplomatic contexts, and the few Deepfolk settlements near the surface. Female Deepfolk are, to surface knowledge, never seen. Whether this is by choice, custom, or something stranger remains unknown. Theories exist. None have been confirmed.
Deepfolk society is organised into hereditary professional castes. You are born into your caste. You cannot leave it. Within it, merit determines everything — the most talented miner in a mining caste family can rise to lead their clan, while a chief's child who shows no particular ability will not. Birth determines your domain. Ability determines your ceiling within it.
This is not experienced as oppression. The castes are ancient, deeply embedded in identity, and a source of genuine pride. "I am a miner. My father was a miner. My children will be miners." The caste is not a limitation on who you are — it is who you are. The idea of abandoning it would strike most Deepfolk as a form of self-erasure.
The major castes include Builders, Smiths, Miners, Merchants, Scholars, Farmers (underground fungiculture and cave agriculture), Guardians, and Healers, with others varying by clan.
Clan identity precedes personal identity. A Deepfolk introduces themselves as of Clan Monolith before they introduce themselves by name. Individual ambition is acceptable — even celebrated — but only when it serves the clan's advancement. Personal glory pursued at the clan's expense is the deepest social failure a Deepfolk can commit.
They rarely travel alone to the surface. Trade delegations travel in groups of ten or more, move with coordinated purpose, and present a unified face to the outside world. A Deepfolk travelling alone on the surface is a signal that something has gone significantly wrong.
They are direct in speech, brief in emotional expression, and honest to a degree that surface people sometimes experience as bluntness and Deepfolk experience as simple courtesy. Lying is shameful. Emotional theatrics are baffling. Humans find them brusque. They find humans exhaustingly verbose.
The absolute foundation of Deepfolk civilisation is a single prohibition: killing another Deepfolk is the greatest crime. No trial is needed for immediate exile. Even accidental deaths in mining are thoroughly investigated. The reasoning is practical as much as moral — the Deepfolk population is small, every death weakens all clans, and unity in the deep darkness is survival.
The one legal exception is ritual combat between clan chiefs — exoskeleton duels fought to settle disputes that diplomacy cannot resolve, witnessed by representatives of all nine clans, to the death or submission. They occur perhaps once every fifty years. The combat suits are clan treasures, passed down through chiefs. Songs are sung about famous duels. The last was seventy-three years ago, between Clan Bastion and Clan Forge over mining rights. Bastion won, barely.
The Council of Nine — all clan chiefs — meets rarely, only for matters affecting all Deepfolk. Between meetings, clans govern themselves entirely.
The worst individual punishment short of Nullification is exile — being declared removed from the clan and the people. Name stricken from records. Family forbidden to speak of you. No other clan will take you in; all honour the exile equally. You are consigned to the surface world or the unmapped deep.
Most exiled Deepfolk choose what they call "uniting with the earth" within days of their exile. What this means is genuinely unknown. Some surface witnesses claim to have seen it happen — a Deepfolk placing their hands on stone, a faint glow, and a slow sinking into the rock, features remaining visible for a moment before fading. Deepfolk refuse to discuss it. "What happens to the exiled is between them and the earth." Whether it is a form of death, a literal merging, or a transformation into something else is a question Clan Abyss may know the answer to. They are not saying.
The Deepfolk cosmology holds that there must always be nine clans. This is not a political arrangement but a theological certainty — the Forge-God created nine, and nine there must be. The destruction of Clan Tremor thirty years ago left a wound in Deepfolk society that has not closed. There are currently eight active clans.
Builders, engineers, architects. The most open of the clans to surface contact — they need constant resources for their ambitious projects and are willing to negotiate for them. Chief Barash, who completed the Gashdagan, leads them. Their motto, expressed in various forms: "Build bigger. Dig deeper. Reach further."
Weaponsmiths, military technology, fortification. The most feared clan. Their arsenal includes cannons large enough to threaten floating cities, steam-powered siege engines, and combat exoskeletons. Whether their rumoured doomsday devices are real or elaborate deterrence is unclear. Other clans respect them and prefer not to find out. Surface peoples are nervous. Highfolk consider them the single greatest military threat the Deepfolk represent.
The question surface scholars occasionally raise — and Deepfolk never answer — is: what is all of it for?
Deepfolk clans do not wage war on each other. Disputes are settled through ritual combat between chiefs, not armies. Humans, individually stronger than average but tactically disadvantaged underground, have never mounted a credible assault on the deep territories. Highfolk occasionally raid surface-adjacent tunnels, but nothing in their history suggests the coordinated mass assault that Clan Bastion's arsenal seems calibrated to repel.
Three answers circulate, none confirmed:
The old attack. Something happened, long ago — before reliable surface records, possibly before the Empire. A combined assault on the deep territories, by Highfolk, by human kingdoms, or by some coalition of both, that came close enough to catastrophe that Clan Bastion was rebuilt from the ruins of it as an answer. The Deepfolk do not discuss this history. Clan Sagacious's records for the relevant period are, according to the one Sagacious scholar who has spoken obliquely on the subject, present but restricted. Clan Bastion's position: the attack happened, the lesson was learned, the lesson stands.
The coming war. The Order of Confessors claims access to old texts — acquired through means they decline to specify, from a Clan Sagacious archive or from somewhere older — that contain predictions of a future conflict on a scale the world has not seen. The enemy in these texts is not named clearly. Scholars who have seen summaries disagree on whether it describes a united Highfolk military campaign, an uprising from an unknown direction, or something else entirely. Clan Bastion does not confirm awareness of any such texts. They also do not deny it. The Confessors, who are careful about what they put in writing, note only that the scale of Bastion's preparations becomes considerably more legible if one assumes they are building toward something specific.
What is below. The Deepfolk are not the only things in the deep places. They will not say more than this, and on most occasions will not say even this. The deep territories shade into the Nether Realm — unmapped, largely unvisited even by Deepfolk, described in the fragments of Clan Abyss lore that have reached surface ears as the place below the place below. What lives there, if anything does, is unknown. Whether Clan Bastion's arsenal faces outward — toward the surface, toward Highfolk cities — or inward, toward depths that the rest of the world does not know to worry about, is a question nobody has asked the Deepfolk directly and expected an honest answer.
The most disquieting possibility, raised occasionally by scholars who prefer to keep themselves awake at night: all three answers are true, and Clan Bastion has been preparing, simultaneously, for the past, the future, and the thing below — and still considers this preparation prudent.
Deep miners, extreme explorers, keepers of esoteric knowledge. They mine at depths that other clans consider impossible and return with minerals found nowhere else. They have a mystical cast unusual among the pragmatic Deepfolk, an obsession with depth as a spiritual principle — "the deeper, the truer" — and a habit of knowing things they decline to explain. Humans know almost nothing about them. Highfolk doubt they exist. Some Deepfolk whisper that Clan Abyss has gone too deep and found things that should not have been found. Clan Abyss neither confirms nor denies this.
Logistics, underground transport, river navigation. They traverse the vast underground rivers and lakes that connect the Deepfolk territories, moving cargo and people through the deep. Without them, inter-clan trade would collapse. They know it. They charge accordingly.
Volcanic energy, lava harnessing, power supply. They live adjacent to — or, in some cases, inside — active volcanic zones, harnessing geothermal energy for the machines and forges of other clans. They supply power the way Clan Torrent supplies movement: essential, expensive, monopolistic.
Priests of the Forge-God. The most secretive clan. Sharing Deepfolk religious doctrine with outsiders is a strict cultural taboo, and Clan Fervor takes this further than anyone — they share almost nothing about themselves with other clans, let alone with surface peoples. Their spiritual authority is absolute. Their involvement in the Gashdagan's deeper purpose is suspected and unconfirmed.
Food production. They produce what the underground world eats: fish from subterranean lakes, cultivated fungi, bioluminescent cave crops, and — uniquely — silicon-based food, which looks to surface eyes like powdered stone or crushed gems, served hot, and which Deepfolk of all clans consume without apparent difficulty. What it tastes like is not documented. Scholars have been unable to obtain a sample.
Scholars, historians, advisors. The Deepfolk's institutional memory. They maintain records, preserve history, study and theorise, and are — relatively speaking — the most open to outside knowledge. Thalis of Aeloria has found them the only Deepfolk clan willing to have an intellectual exchange, provided the exchange does not touch biology, reproduction, religion, or anything Clan Abyss does.
Gashdagan — in Hurud, the Deepfolk tongue, meaning approximately The Great Made Thing — is the supreme achievement of Deepfolk civilisation. Completed by Clan Monolith within living memory, under the direction of Chief Barash, after a construction period of one hundred and fifty years. All eight active clans — including the famously proud Clan Abyss, which agrees with almost nothing on principle — consider it the greatest thing any living race has ever built. Completing it is what made Barash chief of Clan Monolith.
What it actually is, no Deepfolk will say.
It is enormous. It is underground. It required the use of a Bloodstone to extend Barash's life beyond natural limits so he could see it finished — the first time in living memory a clan allowed a chief to keep his stone afterward, as a reward for work that apparently warranted unprecedented gratitude. Since its completion, contemplating the grandeur of the Gashdagan has become a recognised Deepfolk practice: a meditative stillness that Deepfolk enter without apparent warning and hold for hours, from which they emerge unchanged and offering no further explanation.
Beyond this, the surface world knows nothing. Maren De Valoren, with the best intelligence apparatus in the Empire and a personal conversation with Barash, received: "It is Clan Monolith's masterwork. The greatest construction any Deepfolk clan — any living thing in existence — has ever undertaken." Followed by complete silence.
Clan Fervor's involvement in its planning stages has never been explained. Their spiritual authority is absolute. What it implies about the Gashdagan's purpose has not been established.
Deepfolk theology is among the most closely guarded aspects of their culture. What is known to surface scholars has been assembled from fragments, inference, and occasional unguarded moments in long negotiations. Clan Fervor has confirmed nothing.
The Forge-God is not a deity in any sense the Imperial Creed or the First to Fly would recognise. It is, as best as Thalis has been able to establish, a divine mechanism — a sentient, primordial machine that existed before the world. It woke in the empty darkness. It lit itself with primordial fire. It forged the mountains from its own substance and everything within them from what remained. It created the Deepfolk last and specifically: to continue its work. Then it descended to the centre of the earth, where it is, by implication, still working.
The theological implications are precise. Creation is not speech, not thought, not will — it is craft. The act of making something is the closest a living being can come to divinity. Work is holy because work is what the Forge-God does. A Deepfolk at their forge or their tools or their desk is participating in the original act of creation. A Deepfolk who does not work is — the theology does not quite say damned, but the implication is there.
Whether the Forge-God is still active, still conscious, still making things in the earth's core — no Clan Fervor priest has confirmed or denied this to a surface scholar. The possibility is presumably not doubted among the Deepfolk themselves.
Deepfolk technology operates on a principle that is the inverse of Highfolk magic: where Highfolk require individual magical talent — an innate ability refined through years of training — Deepfolk bind magical force into physical devices that anyone can operate. The knowledge is technical and teachable. The machines are reliable, repairable, and understandable. They do not get tired or emotional.
The base is steam power. Magical enhancement amplifies, focuses, and directs it. The result is a technomagical integration that produces construction drills hardened beyond any surface material, refineries that extract pure metal from raw ore with magical precision, elevators that move goods and people through miles of vertical depth, ventilation systems that keep air breathable in caverns that would otherwise suffocate, and communication devices that transmit voice through stone across distances that would require a rider on the surface.
The military applications — Clan Bastion's domain — include artillery scaled for use against floating cities, various categories of siege engine, and the combat exoskeletons used in ritual clan chief duels: ten to twelve feet of steam and magic, clan-specific in design, equipped with pile drivers and steam cannons and blades, and maintained as treasures across generations of chiefs.
The weakness of all this is dependence on the device. If the machine breaks, the capability stops. Improvisation is difficult — a device does what it was built to do and nothing else. Redesign requires time, skilled craftspeople, and rare materials. In a pitched surface battle, a Deepfolk force without their equipment would be individually formidable but not the terrifying military prospect they represent with it.
Humans they call Aghtan — "head-people," those who live on their ceiling. The attitude is indifferent pragmatism: useful trading partners, occasionally clever, mostly ignorant of anything more than a few metres below the surface. Not enemies. Not friends. Neighbours. The mutual trade is extensive and genuine. Deepfolk don't understand human obsession with noble bloodlines — "Why does birth determine who rules? Prove your skill" — but they understand the trade ledger perfectly well.
Highfolk they call Khrosh — meaning approximately "unattractively skinny person," which in Deepfolk is a dirty word. It is the only word they have for Highfolk. The contempt is thorough: the arrogance, the obsession with beauty and hierarchy, the physical delicacy, the assumption that living high makes one superior. Highfolk return this with Grubmen — "worms in dirt" — which is the one insult that reliably makes Deepfolk lose their composure. Trade between the two races flows almost entirely through human intermediaries. Direct contact is minimal and mutually unwelcome.
Tross is the notable exception — the one Highfolk city that has formed a genuine alliance with certain Deepfolk clans, primarily Monolith. The exchange of technology for magical expertise, and the shared interest in destabilising the Celestial supremacy that both find objectionable for different reasons, has produced something that functions, if not as friendship, then as productive mutual respect. Traditional Highfolk cities regard this as one of Tross's many heresies.
This section contains information that Deepfolk will not discuss with outsiders. It has been assembled from surface records, inference, and secondhand accounts.
Thirty years ago, Clan Tremor ceased to exist.
Tremor was a smaller clan, specialising in the movement of the earth — tectonic study, quake prediction, the prevention of cave-ins, the construction of protective structures in geologically unstable zones. They were not the most powerful clan, but they were genuinely essential. No one disputes that, now.
What they did is called, in the few Deepfolk contexts where it is mentioned at all, the unspeakable. The name is literal: Deepfolk do not speak about it. The crime was severe enough that the other eight clans invoked Nullification — a punishment with no precedent in recorded Deepfolk history.
Nullification is not exile. Exile removes an individual from the social body. Nullification removes an entire clan. The eight remaining clans declared, collectively and formally: you do not exist anymore. Every record of Clan Tremor was struck. Every name. Every achievement. Every mention in the histories maintained by Clan Sagacious. The clan's members were not killed — killing is the supreme taboo — but they were declared already dead. No trade. No communication. No recognition. No food from Clan Sustenance. No transport from Clan Torrent. No medical aid. No acknowledgment of existence from any quarter.
Given Deepfolk social cohesion — given that identity for a Deepfolk is entirely communal, that to be unknown to your people is to be nothing — this was a death sentence of a particular kind. Most members of Clan Tremor killed themselves within months. Many "united with the earth." A few survive: broken, half-witted from the disconnection, wandering the surface or the unmapped tunnels like ghosts. Some have drifted as far as human cities, where they are objects of bewilderment and pity — huge and powerful and completely lost. They call themselves, with a dark humour that may be the only thing still holding them together, Clan Nihil. The clan of nothing.
The clanhold of Clan Tremor was stripped of its most valuable contents by other clans. What remained was too heavy, too worthless, or too disturbing to carry. The chasm above the empty clanhold has become, improbably, home to a small human settlement: adventurers, scavengers, and people whose other options have run out, who descend into the ruins for Deepfolk artefacts that sell for considerable sums on the surface. The ruins are dangerous — deranged survivors still linger in the deep sections, and the underground fauna has moved in — but the rewards justify the risk for those inclined to such calculations.
The theological problem left by Clan Tremor's destruction has not been resolved. Deepfolk cosmology holds that there must be nine clans. There are eight. Clan Fervor has not publicly addressed what this means. The wound remains open.
What the unspeakable act actually was has never been confirmed. The most credible theory, assembled from the timing and what little can be inferred about the political situation at the time, is that Clan Tremor refused to participate in the construction of the Gashdagan — refused at a critical moment, for reasons unknown, in a way that amounted to sabotage. Whether this is accurate, and what their reasons might have been, is unknown. Clan Sagacious's records for that period contain a gap.
This article is about a People — The Underground Race
| World Overview | World Index |
| The Three Races | The Three Races · Highfolk · Human / Empire |
| Home | Gashdagan |
| Key Characters | Barash |
| Religion | The Forge-God |