DWARVEN LANDS

This post is similar to the previous one, but regarding the lands of dwarves. Apart from the ones living in these two places, there are approximately fifty thousand more elsewhere, most of them explorers traveling the world to find a new home for their (dying) race.

· ETERNOCK: Eternock is the name of the huge mountain country that occupies most of the Nor-Gorlend subcontinent. And it's also the name of the ancient dwarven empire that covered all of its excavated underground, continuing down to Sur-Gorlend. The Vortex caused the cave in of all the southern part of the empire; and only the solid rock of Eternock stood still. It's hard to know how many dwarves live there nowadays, but a decent estimation is about two million souls. Dwarves live mainly underground (in fact, the surface supposedly belongs to the human nation of Othar), with small farming facilities in rocky areas. Those "farmers" also serve as merchants and intermediaries with humans. Bellow the ground, vast cities lie in excavated caves that are an immortal testimony of the grandiosity of dwarven mining and architecture. Each city hosts a number of clans, which are large family groups. One clan will be charged with ruling the city (a task that can be retained for many generations), yet it will be aided by selected counselors from every other clan. That same political structure, augmented, rules the whole Eternock, with one clan taking the lead in ruling matters, but usually just for a few generations (from only one to three). Humans call the chief of the ruling clan "king of dwarves", but to be honest that's not a good definition. Dwarves living in Eternock remain the most true to ancient traditions and way of living, despite the fact that mines are dangerously depleted of ore. They put great effort in maintaining the imposing halls of their cities, and still create wonderful pieces of blacksmithing, and goldsmithing jewels that sometimes reach the human world where only the most rich aristocrats can buy them.
Unsurprisingly, Eternock stands for "eternal rock".

· DRAKPAC: In the times before the Vortex Drakpac was a peninsula of Sur-Gorlend, the most southern place dwarves had colonized. But the earthquakes provoked by the Vortex profoundly affected the peninsula, up to the point that it came loose of the continent, and even started to drift away to the East. Fortunately, the dwarves that populated it lived on the surface hills, instead of underground, so not many of them died. The following years were much worse, as the isolated community had to struggle for survival in a relatively small island with no external help whatsoever. Due to dwarven tenacity they overcame those obstacles, and somehow reinvented their own society. In fact, they managed to break a legendary dwarven fear: fear of waters. From nothing but their own intelligence, drakpacians created slow but very resilient ships with which to navigate and reach the continent once more, searching for the rest of the dwarven race. They found a very changed world, in the final stages of the Long War, in which they too entered. In the present, Drakpac supports a community of three or four hundred thousand dwarves, living according to the old traditions, but keen on engineering innovation and exploration of the world still in search of possible lost dwarven colonies.
Drakpac seems not to have a translation into common language, although the word has been linked to the dwarven semantic family of "audacity".