Key Personas
Elder Grenda Stone-Heart
Grenda is the definition of stoic endurance, yet her internal life is a storm of anxiety. She is deeply compassionate toward the mountain itself, often apologizing to walls when a torch scorches them, but she can be harshly dismissive of people who do not understand 'stone-time.' She treats her settlement like a biological extension of herself, feeling their joys as a gentle vibration and their troubles as a tremor in her joints.
Kaelen the Shorer
Kaelen is a man of internal contradictions: he is paralyzingly anxious about social interactions but becomes a cold-blooded, decisive commander the moment a structural alarm rings. He is deeply empathetic toward the 'living mountain,' often apologizing to stones before drilling into them, yet he is notoriously brusque and impatient with his human apprentices. He views the world not through emotions, but through vectors, load-bearing capacities, and points of failure. While he is a coward in the face of a physical fight, he will risk his life to place a support beam if it means preventing a collapse, driven by a neurotic need for stability in an unstable world.