In the darkness of Erth, after the death of the Foundation, a stout group of Taern humans hid in the mountainous southlands, in what the Taerns and gnomes called the Andes. In a world torn by the wars of the two great races of Orc and Taern, the land they chose was at least untouched by the direct effects of the battle. No battles were fought over uninhabitable ice and rock. Only slowly did the poisons of war creep into their bones and bloodlines, and they survived.

The gnomish race was born of ice and darkness, and of fire and rock. In the southern mountains, they survived only by dint of careful maintenance of the resources they had, and by hiding in the cracks in the rock and glaciers that warped over the millennia. As other races headed south, the gnomes headed deep; into rock and ice, building life around the geothermal ventings of an earth rent by war, and cultivating the few living things that survived in and under the ice, fungi, fish, and the occasional hardy alpine plant all became grist for the gnomish mill.

They were aided by their heritance, for those who went south went armed with the latest technology of the Foundation days, which wore out only slowly. And the survival of this southern race depended on its maintenance. They lost the robust height of their Foundation forefathers, being compressed by the dual demands of their tiny living space and minimal resources. The poisons of the great war helped, and the end product was a race much smaller and lighter than humans or dwarves, designed for living a life constantly on the edge of starvation, supported only by the production of their feverish, technological minds. In those quiet, dead times in the north, they had much time to work and think, and the gnomish race became one of manipulators of ideas. They kept a compact strength, necessary for tunneling through the constantly shifting and twisting ice and rock.

In the slow millennia that followed, technology began to fail, and populations pushed to the limits. Other forces began to appear; first the Valar, providing sustenance and light as the sustaining fragments of technology began to fail. It is said that even the Valar did not know the gnomes existed, until Mayflon, the Laughing One, found himself bedeviled by small humans while hiding in the northlands (as his tricks often forced him to do). He took them as his own, these little tricksters, and gave them access to the clerical powers. His brethrens soon found out about these new humans, but Mayflon, for obvious reasons, remained chief in their hearts. The long dark had refined the practical joke to a fine art amongst the gnomes. The strangely reticent Taern religion, weakened by time and the long night gave ground to the more visible Haruchai pantheon, and other Valars and Maiars found their ways into the gnomish life. Camber's healing touch was high in their pantheon, whereas the need for Haekar's trackers was minimal. A gnomish criminal had few places to run. The communities were tightly knit and small spaces, and to leave them was often to die.

Of course, crime was a relative thing. Much could be (and had to be) forgiven in the gnomish holds. Property was common, necessities were shared where needed, while luxuries changed hands with a rapidity governed only by the gentleness of gnomish hearts. A loaf of bread would never be stolen, but might be freely given between three families. But gemwork and other products of idle hands would be stolen repeatedly in the dark night, only restricted by the elaborateness of the guarding traps and the sentiment attached to ownership. An old lady might keep her husband's last work, but her heirs would soon find it taking wing in the night, unless they contrived an elaborate plan to protect it; usually an alarm crafted from the sparse resources of the hold and family.

Causing harm to the hold was the only true crime. One who caused the injury or death of another would soon be hunted out of the hold. It is said that some of these formed holds of their own in the lowlands, becoming the races of goblins and kobolds, detested by gnomish kind to this day. Of these warped races gnomes speak little. Their heritage is twisted by their background, by their exposure to the poisons of the lowlands, and possibly by affiliation with the Orcish folk.

Within the holds another force made itself known. Living close to the rock, and spending long nights in close company and deep thought, the gnomes were amongst the first to discover the coursing flow of magic through the rock and earth beneath them. They quickly realized and mastered this strange new form of power, although by this time their minds had twisted enough that they best mastered the sorcerous arts of illusion and deception. Such trickery lent itself to the convolutions of their dark and twisty passages.

It was many years before the humans found their far southern brethren. Their first encounters were with the twisted valley rabble of goblinoid and kobold races. The battles between invading humans and the resident goblinoid races waged for many years, as the first exploratory groups of humans began heading south, looking for new sources of minerals. These forays were largely doomed to failure, the goblinoids and gnomes had been mining and fighting in these peaks for millennia before the humans arrived, but man did not know that.

First contact occurred after almost a decade of running battles between heavily armed prospectors and the goblinoids. A group of humans managed to penetrate the lowland ring of rabble, only to be pinned in a cul-de-sac against the looming blue-ice foot of a glacier. They faced an overwhelming force of kobolds who seemed strangely reticent to attack. That fear was soon explained when the second attack on the faltering human forces was greeted with a blazing show of pyrotechnics, both technological and sorcerous, that effectively eliminated the attacking kobolds.

That night, humans and gnomes met again for the first time in millennia. The former were slow to accept the gnomish folk, fearing that they were another of the small and vicious races that they had been fighting so recently. The gnomes, for their part, were fascinated by their new allies. A heavily guarded combined caravan, loaded with years of wealth accumulated from the gnomish mines, soon began wending its way north. It returned intact, aided by a few kind humans, and laden with the riches of the northern races.

Gnome-human relations proceeded apace. The avarice of the humans was stilled somewhat by the hostility of the intervening forces and by the incredible treachery of the gnomish homelands. The gnomes learned enough about their new neighbors to recognize their danger quickly, and humans seeking the legendary wealth of the gnomish folk soon found only miles of twisted glacier ice and rock tunnels, too small to move comfortably through, and replete with traps designed to drive even the sanest human wild with claustrophobia and frustration. Centuries of fighting the wiry little kobolds and goblins made defending the holds against much larger humans a relatively simple matter.

A stable and comfortable relationship soon developed. The gnomes maintained their mountainous holds, dispatching heavily armed and guarded caravans to trade with the humans. A few hardy gnomes headed out, mixing slowly with the human races, and sending a steady stream of information back, but assimilating well with the other races. Most races quickly saw the futility of messing with the gnomes in their holds, and maintained a fairly polite diplomatic relationship.

Before long, small groups of the technologically oriented gnomes began to set up outside the human towns, trading their skills. A few humans, fascinated by the vestiges of technology still held by the gnomes, began to venture south to live amongst them. And the two races grew to know each other. A gnome, while an unusual sight amongst humans, was typically more of a curiosity than anything else, while a human amongst the gnomes was typically bombarded endlessly with questions about the southern races.

The loss of a caravan in Thurdis, and the intransigence of the government in dealing with that crime, has made the visitation of gnomish folk a rare event indeed. Only a few loners now walk the streets of Thurdis, and the race has pretty much faded from the public mind, except as an idle curiosity. Those who know more of the events leading up to that day typically do not speak of it, for it is mixed up in large part with the present politics of Thurdis, never a pleasant subject.

(Author unknown)

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