The Dwarfen Holds and the Great Book of Grudges

A dwarf forgets nothing. Insult one at a wedding and your great-grandchildren may still find the slight recorded, in a careful hand, in a book of iron-bound pages. This is not pettiness: it is the founding principle of an entire people. The Dwarfen Mountain Holds are an ancient, dwindling, unbowed civilisation delved into the roots of the world's oldest mountains, and they endure on three things: gold, craft, and an absolutely unbreakable memory for who owes them what.

The Everlasting Realm[edit]

At its height the dwarf realm (the Karaz Ankor, the Everlasting Realm) was a chain of mighty holds strung the length of the World's Edge Mountains and beyond, linked by an underground road so that a dwarf might travel from one end of the mountains to the other without once glimpsing the sky. Greatest of these was Karaz-a-Karak, the Everpeak, seat of the High King. Each hold was a vertical kingdom of vaulted halls, mines sinking into the dark, and forges that have not gone cold in ten dwarf lifetimes. The dwarfs built to last, in stone and gromril, and much of what they raised still stands even where its makers are long dust.

The Book of Grudges[edit]

In every hold, tended by the priesthood of the Ancestor Gods, lies the Dammaz Kron, the Great Book of Grudges. Into it is written every wrong the hold has suffered: every murdered kinsdwarf, every broken oath, every stolen heirloom and toppled statue. A grudge is not an emotion to a dwarf but a debt, formally recorded and formally settled, ideally with an axe. To strike a grudge from the book is among the highest acts a dwarf can perform, and warriors march to battle hoping to earn that honour. The book is the memory of the race made physical, and it is very, very long.

The War of Vengeance[edit]

The longest and most sorrowful entries concern the elves. Once the dwarfs and the High Elf Realms were trading partners and something near to friends, the two great civilised peoples of the ancient world. Then came insults, misunderstandings, and blood, and the friendship curdled into the War of Vengeance, a conflict so bitter and so long that it bled both peoples white and drove the elves at last to abandon their colonies and sail home across the sea. The dwarfs remember it as a betrayal; the elves remember it otherwise; and the grudge, like all dwarf grudges, was never truly closed.

The Time of Woes[edit]

Worse came from below. A great age of earthquakes and volcanic ruin, remembered as the Time of Woes, cracked the mountains and collapsed the underground road, and into the broken tunnels flooded the Orc and Goblin Tribes and fouler things still. Hold after hold fell in the long wars that followed, their halls overrun, their treasures lost, their names added to the book in mourning. The dwarfs never fully recovered. The realm that endures today is a proud remnant, holding a handful of the old strongholds against a tide that once nearly drowned them all.

Runes, Guns, and Craft[edit]

No people work metal like the dwarfs. Their smiths forge armour and blades of legendary quality, and their runesmiths hammer magic directly into steel, binding runes of power, protection, and destruction into weapons that endure for centuries. They were among the first to master black powder, and dwarf cannon, organ guns, and gyrocopters are the envy of the Old World. Craft is not mere industry to a dwarf; it is worship, memory, and pride made solid. A masterwork is a kind of prayer, and a dwarf would sooner die than see one fall into unworthy hands.

The Oldest Oath[edit]

For all their grudges, the dwarfs keep their oaths as fiercely as their grievances, and one of the oldest binds them to mankind. When the human hero Sigmar aided the dwarfs and was gifted a mighty runehammer in return, a friendship was sealed that helped found the Empire of Man and has outlasted a hundred quarrels. That story is told in full in our article on Sigmar and the founding of the Empire. Dwarf and man do not always love one another, but when the Warriors of Chaos come down from the north, they still stand in the same line, and a dwarf who has given his word will die before he breaks it.

Unbowed to the Last[edit]

The dwarfs are a people in the long autumn of their history, and they know it. Their numbers dwindle, their oldest holds lie in greenskin hands, and the book of grudges grows longer than any living hand could ever settle. Yet they neither despair nor surrender. They hold their remaining halls, they cross out what grudges they can, and they meet each new insult with the same grim certainty their ancestors did: that it will be remembered, and one day it will be paid. To see where their mountains rise on the map, walk our tour of the Old World.