The Hestrube are living stone given dwarven form, dwelling in the deepest strata beneath the Widebarrow Mountains. Their bodies are composed of living granite that can shift between solid and fluid states at will, the mark of an ancient elemental working that remade flesh as stone at depths the Dernish surface-dwarves never reach. They feed on minerals and move through solid rock as easily as others move through air.
The making
The Hestrube call it the Graving, and they hold it as the oldest fact about themselves. Their founding colony was sealed into the deep strata beneath the Widebarrow by a collapse that left no way back up to the light. Starving, they pressed deeper still, until they came up against the boundary of the Stone Elemental Plane, where the living rock of that place lies closest to the living rock of this one. They did not draw its power into themselves. The boundary took them. Pinned against it with no way out and nothing left to spend, the colony was cut over to the Plane's own substance the way a mason graves a line into a block. What had been dwarf was read as stone and made to match. The cut went deep enough to hold in their children, and in every Hestrube born after. A Hestrube now feeds on stone, moves through stone, and cannot live long away from it, which is no hardship to them. They are what the deep made when it refused to let them leave.
Hestrube colonies sit below Dern, in formations thousands of feet deeper than the lowest Dernish mine shaft. The Dernish know they are there. The deep-facing tunnel watches have reported sounds of movement in sealed rock and heat signatures from passages that should be cold. But the two peoples have no formal contact and no territorial dispute. The Dernish fight the Lyzine in the mid-levels; the Hestrube occupy depths no Lyzine have reached. The boundary is unspoken.
Hestrube society operates more like geological formations than traditional communities. Colonies remain motionless for decades, then migrate through hundreds of miles of stone in a sudden weeks-long movement that leaves no trace on the surface. When roused to action they are efficient and decisive, but rousing them requires something significant: a change in the deep heat, a shift in the stone's composition, a threat to the colony's path.
Aspects
- Patient as stone, hard as granite
- The deep earth provides all