The First Brotherhood is the oath the first dwarves swore to one another, and the institution that oath hardened into. It is older than the gods now worshipped under its name. When the world was a far more dangerous place, no dwarf could afford to be only a dwarf of his own clan; even those who left a clan-hall to found a settlement of their own stayed sworn to the Brotherhood, bound to the survival of dwarves everywhere and to the keeping of the dwarven way. The bond held through the Long Winter and the long reassembly after it, clan-hall by clan-hall, and it is the reason there is a single word that means all dwarves at once.
What it is now is thinner than what it was. The Brotherhood today runs closer to a world union of dwarves than a war-oath: in favor of dwarves in general, collecting membership dues from clan-halls across Alaria, and not always spending them with anyone's interests but its own at heart. The oath is still recited. Fewer and fewer of the people reciting it act as though it binds them to anything costly. And the leadership has narrowed to a point that the rest of the dwarven world has noticed, because only citizens of three city-states — Üod, Blvnird, and Melaia, sister-cities in the Eronia Range — may hold a leading seat in the Brotherhood's councils. Every other dwarf on Alaria can pay into the union. None of them can ever lead it.
The two fires
The Brotherhood keeps two patrons, and between them they are the religious shape of the thing the oath was meant to be. Krondeum owns the finished work: the shaped article carried to the clan-hall fire, the next hand to hold it named aloud, the naming counting as the prayer. Grømnuul owns the long-table fire at the center of the hall, where the roll of the dead is recited on the night the year turns. One god for what a dwarf makes, one for the line a dwarf comes from. Their domains were drawn never to touch, which is exactly why they hold together — two daemons whose worship does not compete can stand in one pantheon without starving each other, and a smith who skips neither rite keeps both fed.
The arrangement runs deeper than the Brotherhood's own two gods. The same non-overlap lets a clan keep a patron of its own alongside the pan-dwarf pair without anyone treading on anyone: the Uline pray to Krunites at the first strike of a new vein, then to Krondeum when the bar is hammered, two ends of one chain and two separate gods, the worship sequential and never crossing. That is the working model the whole institution rests on. It is also the seam along which the institution could come apart, because both of the Brotherhood's patrons live on the same thing, and it is not the three cities that mostly supply it.
A daemon is only as alive as it is remembered, and it is remembered by being prayed to. Krondeum and Grømnuul are fed by every clan-hall on Alaria that still presents a finished thing and still recites its dead — and most of those halls belong to the diaspora, the scattered and dispersed clans, the Drasnian above all, who outnumber the three cities many times over. The leadership sits with the three cities. The prayer that keeps the gods of pan-dwarf unity alive comes overwhelmingly from the dwarves those cities will not let lead.
The dues and the prayers
The grievance is old and has stayed verbal. It is turning into something with teeth.
The three cities hold that the oath is the oath, that someone has to keep the institution, and that the dues fund the rites and the embassies and the long memory that no single scattered clan could maintain alone. Loosen the rule that keeps leadership in Üod, Blvnird, and Melaia and you do not get a fairer Brotherhood; you get a hundred clans pulling a hundred ways and no Brotherhood at all. They have governed the union for a very long time, and they are not persuaded that a thing this old survives being opened up.
The diaspora clans, the ones who pay and cannot lead, have begun to answer with the one threat the cities cannot dismiss. They can stop paying, which is merely expensive. Worse, they can stop praying through the Brotherhood at all — let the pan-dwarf rites lapse and keep their devotion at home, each hall to its own clan-patron, the way the Uline already keep Krunites. A clan that prays only to its own god has not committed a crime. It has quietly withdrawn a tithe of life from Krondeum and Grømnuul, and a god from whom enough worshippers withdraw is a god sliding toward the floor below which being forgotten ends it. A broad enough schism would not just defund the union. It would starve the two gods whose pan-dwarf worship is the cities' whole claim to speak for all dwarves. That is the bind the three cities are in and will not say aloud: open the leadership and dilute the monopoly that is their only real power, or hold the monopoly and risk presiding over the slow death of their own patrons. No one has forced it yet. The dues are still mostly being paid. The rolls are still mostly being recited. But the diaspora has worked out where the cities are soft, and the cities know that it has.