The Ohblex are crystalline gnomes born from the gems and jewels deep within the Gemstone Peaks. Their skin reflects the colors of precious stones, and they sustain themselves by consuming a few gems each year rather than traditional food. Masters of clockwork and the sole keepers of clockmaking secrets on Alaria, they craft incredible mechanical devices and jewelry.
The Ohblex live in elaborate underground mazes filled with mechanical traps, endlessly scheming against rival family houses in complex political games. They value secrecy, mystery, and complication above all else.
The making
The Ohblex are the gnome line that settled the Gemstone Peaks, and the command they carry caught on the stone there. Other gnomes hold the unclosed working in living flesh. The Ohblex working latched onto crystal, the gem-matter veined through the deep peaks, and learned to run on it instead. That is the whole of the difference and the whole of their strangeness. The command keeps itself going by spending mineral, burning gem-matter the way a lamp burns oil, so an Ohblex body has to eat gems to hold the unfinished working open in it. A few stones a year is the entire diet, and a starved Ohblex is a working guttering toward the end it was always reaching for. Their skin set hard and crystalline in the catching and throws back the colors of whatever they have lately eaten. They say they were born from gems, and outsiders repeat it, but the truth is plainer and stranger. The command in them bit down on a gem and never let go, and now it has to be fed. The clockwork only the Ohblex can build is that same exactness pointed outward. A working that measures crystal to the grain makes hands that measure everything, and an Ohblex schemes the way it counts, because it cannot do otherwise. No one else can build it, because no one else is what they are. The craft cannot be taught out of the line, only born into it, so it has never spread beyond the deep peaks and never will.
Aspects
- Schemes within schemes
- Crystalline precision