Around 2876 SD, five centuries before the present, the dwarves of Vogenfeld and the young Tarkhon empire met at the Pass of Oaths, the high road through the Wurmspine that Atlangsow's gates overlook, and bound each other to a bargain neither has formally broken since.
Tarkhon needed the north held. The empire was barely a century past its founding on the strait, and it was growing the way it preferred, by treaty and purchase rather than by war. The passes above Nektuna were the one practical road an army could take between the orc tribes of Hedroscobb and the imperial heartland, and the Uline dwarves already held them. It was cheaper to pay dwarves who knew the tunnels than to garrison the mountains with imperial soldiers who did not.
The dwarves wanted what dwarves want from a bargain: terms in stone. Speaking for the Council of Thanes, the thane Vørgar set the price. Vogenfeld would guard the northern frontier and answer for every pass through it; Tarkhon would render tribute each year and keep the dwarves' service in open honor. The agreement was not signed on parchment, where a later clerk might quietly revise it. It was cut into the rock of the pass itself, and beside it the dwarves began the first of the monuments, the walls of carved names that now run the length of the road, one name for every dwarf the frontier has killed.
The Pass of Oaths in late summer, the only season a wagon can cross it. On the north face, the oath itself, cut a hand deep into the living rock in dwarven runes taller than a man, the grooves still sharp after five hundred frosts. On the south wall, the names: panel after panel of them, the most recent carved this spring and not yet weathered grey. A work crew chips at the lowest panels, recutting letters the ice has softened. By winter they will reach the oath at the head of the pass and begin the whole length again.
For most of its life the pact held as written, and the empire's northern border has stayed quiet enough that few in Tarkhetan now remember why. As Tarkhon's attention turned south and its throne thinned into the human dynasties, the tribute shrank year by year and arrived with less courtesy each time. The dwarves went on holding the passes and recutting the names regardless. The question of how long Vogenfeld will keep faith with an empire that has stopped keeping faith back belongs to Vogenfeld's own entry; the pact only set the terms that the empire has spent five centuries letting rot.