Domains: Clan-lineage, ancestor-memory, the hearth-fire of the clan-hall.
Era of ascension: Great Expansion. Cohort: current. Grømnuul rose during the long reassembly of dwarven clan-religion after the Long Winter, as halls began the practice — first piecemeal, then everywhere — of keeping a written roll of the dead and reciting it aloud at the long-table fire on the night the year turned.
Worshipped by: The First Brotherhood; the Drasnian, Uline, Dern, Hestrube, Sennites, Carillon, Gruynmar, and Grendel clans by name, and every clan-hall on Alaria that still keeps a roll of the dead. The Cendelle and the small ghost-clans recite to him even now, from refugee tables that hold only a name or two. (The worships edge is authored downstream on the worshipper, not here.)
He is the long-table fire, the one at the center of the clan-hall around which the ancestor-names are spoken on the year-turning night. Not the cook-fire. Not the smelter. The fire that no one cooks at because the meal it is keeping warm is the genealogy. A Drasnian elder can stand at that fire and recite seventy generations of ancestors in the right order; the recitation takes about three hours, and the fire is fed once at the end. Grømnuul is the listener.
He is not Solek. Solek was the fire you kept to keep the family alive — single-household, domestic, intimate, and so tied to a hearth and a household that when the Laughing Plague emptied the households he died with them. Grømnuul lives at a different scale. The clan-hall outlasts any single household; one Drasnian dies, the recitation goes on, the name is added to the roll, and the fire is fed. The institution carries the prayer the way a household never could. The Grendel — nomads with no fixed hall — carry the prayer in their caravan-song lineages instead, and Grømnuul accepts the road-fire as a long-table by the courtesy of motion. The Cendelle keep the recitation though the names they speak are from a city the Celesté drowned eighty years ago, and he keeps listening anyway.
Some elders say the practice is what makes a dwarf a dwarf. Some say it is what makes a dwarf bearable to other dwarves. Both are accurate, and the elders who say both are usually the same elders.