{
  "aliases": [
    "the First Cut",
    "the Old Hold"
  ],
  "content": {
    "culture": "Formal, archival, and slow. Kurnumgrath keeps the oldest craft-rites and the strictest apprenticeships, and produces a disproportionate share of the Council\u0027s geomantic seers. Its people have a reputation across Namuzdus for being insufferable about seniority and, when it matters, for being right about it.",
    "description": "Kurnumgrath is the first place the Kaetijul cut into the Namuzdus range after the Naming, and it shows: the galleries are the deepest, the stonework the most laboured, and the ore long since taken. What remains is a holdfast that is magnificent, half-empty, and acutely conscious of both facts. Its lower works are maintained as much for their own sake as for use, which the other holdfasts consider either reverence or vanity depending on the decade.",
    "economy": "Exhausted veins, worked-out galleries, and an economy that has shifted to stone-cutting, restoration work, the training of runesmiths, and the accommodation of pilgrims and archivists. Kurnumgrath is subsidised by the Council in all but name, a dependency it resents and its rivals mention.",
    "politics": "The seat of the isolationist faction. The argument runs that Namuzdus sold its independence for Izheim\u0027s custom, that the Deepmetal will not last, and that a people who once needed no one now cannot feed themselves without a road. The Echoed Crown Prophecy \u2014 the mountain awakens when blood meets stone \u2014 is read here more literally than anywhere else, and Kurnumgrath\u0027s seers are the ones who first pronounced on it.",
    "relation_to_namuzdus": "One of the three founding holdfasts of the Triple Spire pact, Fifth Age 721 (MV 10327). Holds opening precedence in the Stonecrown Council.",
    "significance": "Kurnumgrath holds the ceremonial precedence in Council business \u2014 its speaker opens each session \u2014 and the custody of the founding record of the Triple Spire pact. Neither is a formal veto. Both are used as one."
  },
  "id": "settlements.kurnumgrath",
  "meta": {
    "note": "Named in history.events.the_gathering_at_three_spires; no entity existed.",
    "status": "proposed"
  },
  "name": "Kurnumgrath",
  "native": "",
  "relations": {
    "geographic_location": [
      "Namuzdus",
      "Silgolt"
    ],
    "related_organizations": [
      "Stonecrown Council",
      "Namuzdus Dominion"
    ],
    "related_species": [
      "Kaetijul"
    ]
  },
  "sources": {},
  "subtype": "holdfast",
  "summary": "The oldest of the three founding holdfasts of Namuzdus and the poorest of them, worked out of ore generations ago and living now on precedence, memory, and the moral authority of having been first. Kurnumgrath supplies the Stonecrown Council with its legitimacy and its conservatism in roughly equal measure, and it is the home of the isolationist faction that lost the Stonecrown Schism and has been quietly winning the argument back ever since the Echoed Crown Prophecy.",
  "tags": [
    "namuzdus",
    "kaetijul",
    "holdfast",
    "silgolt",
    "isolationism"
  ],
  "timeline": {},
  "type": "settlement"
}

{
  "aliases": [
    "the Vein-Hold",
    "the Paying Hold"
  ],
  "content": {
    "culture": "Practical, acquisitive, and comparatively open \u2014 D\u00f4lmuz\u00fbn takes apprentices from outside Namuzdus, which Kurnumgrath considers close to sacrilege. Status attaches to output and to the quality of a vein-read. The holdfast\u0027s craft-work is excellent and unromantic.",
    "description": "D\u00f4lmuz\u00fbn is the working heart of Namuzdus \u2014 a holdfast built around the Kori-resonant alloy veins rather than around a hall, and expanded so often and so pragmatically that its plan is notoriously incoherent. It is loud, hot, crowded, and by some distance the wealthiest place in the mountain, and its galleries run further out toward the passes each generation.",
    "economy": "Deepmetal extraction above all, with the associated crafts: assaying, resonance-testing, the grading of stock, and the preparation of raw alloy for carriage. The holdfast maintains the export register and the standing contracts with Izheim, and the traffic that leaves through Varkgrum and down the Tuzraag relays is scheduled here.",
    "politics": "The seat of the trade faction and the architect of the Stonecrown Schism\u0027s resolution in favour of the gnome alliance. Its standing argument is unsentimental: the mountain has never fed itself, it did not feed itself before the Accord either, and independence that depends on nobody wanting what you have is not independence but obscurity. D\u00f4lmuz\u00fbn regards the isolationist revival as a luxury belief held by a holdfast that no longer has to make payroll.",
    "relation_to_namuzdus": "One of the three founding holdfasts of the Triple Spire pact, Fifth Age 721 (MV 10327). Holds the largest single bloc of Council seats by master-crafter count.",
    "significance": "The source of the Deepmetal on which the Dominion\u0027s economy, its alliance with Izheim, and both of its wars with Revakgol have turned. What D\u00f4lmuz\u00fbn decides to dig, the Council eventually ratifies."
  },
  "id": "settlements.dolmuzun",
  "meta": {
    "note": "Named in history.events.the_gathering_at_three_spires; carries the Deepmetal economy established in the_deepmetal_accord.",
    "status": "proposed"
  },
  "name": "D\u00f4lmuz\u00fbn",
  "native": "",
  "relations": {
    "geographic_location": [
      "Namuzdus",
      "Silgolt"
    ],
    "related_organizations": [
      "Stonecrown Council",
      "Namuzdus Dominion",
      "Republic of Izheim"
    ],
    "related_species": [
      "Kaetijul"
    ]
  },
  "sources": {},
  "subtype": "holdfast",
  "summary": "The richest of the three founding holdfasts of Namuzdus and the one that pays for the state: D\u00f4lmuz\u00fbn sits on the Deepmetal veins whose discovery made the Deepmetal Accord possible and whose export makes the Dominion solvent. It carried the internationalist side of the Stonecrown Schism and won it, administers the Echoforge Compact with Izheim, and has never entirely stopped being told by Kurnumgrath that wealth is not seniority.",
  "tags": [
    "namuzdus",
    "kaetijul",
    "holdfast",
    "deepmetal",
    "silgolt",
    "echoforge"
  ],
  "timeline": {},
  "type": "settlement"
}

{
  "aliases": [
    "the Gate",
    "the Low Hold"
  ],
  "content": {
    "culture": "The most cosmopolitan place in Namuzdus and the least typical. Multilingual, commercially minded, and comfortable with outsiders in a way that reads to Kurnumgrath as dilution. There is a substantial resident foreign population \u2014 Tuzraagi carters, S\u00fazyngoli factors, Izheim agents, and a long-settled Kaekreaedhel community that arrived during the diaspora and stayed.",
    "description": "Varkgrum straddles the boundary between holdfast and town. Its upper works are conventional Kaetijul construction; its lower approaches are a sprawl of yards, warehouses, stables, and lodging that no other holdfast would tolerate and that Varkgrum\u0027s people regard as the point. It is where Deepmetal is weighed, sealed, and handed to the carriers, and where anyone entering Namuzdus with business is stopped, housed, and assessed.",
    "economy": "Customs, carriage, warehousing, and provisioning; the assay-seal that certifies Deepmetal for export; smithing and finishing work aimed at outside buyers rather than at the mountain; and the accommodation trade, which is substantial and which the other holdfasts affect to find distasteful.",
    "politics": "Formally uncommitted and practically decisive. Varkgrum\u0027s Council delegation has swung between the Kurnumgrath and D\u00f4lmuz\u00fbn positions more than once and holds the balance in most contested votes \u2014 a position it has cultivated deliberately. Its own interest is simple and rarely disguised: the gate is worthless if nothing moves through it, which puts Varkgrum against full isolation while leaving it happy to see the isolationists strong enough to keep D\u00f4lmuz\u00fbn\u0027s terms honest.",
    "relation_to_namuzdus": "One of the three founding holdfasts of the Triple Spire pact, Fifth Age 721 (MV 10327). Holds the Dominion\u0027s customs and assay authority.",
    "significance": "The Dominion\u0027s gate and its face. Every treaty Namuzdus has signed was negotiated here or by people from here, and every foreign delegation to the Stonecrown Council is received here first."
  },
  "id": "settlements.varkgrum",
  "meta": {
    "note": "Named in history.events.the_gathering_at_three_spires; written as the swing holdfast in the Stonecrown Schism. Uses Medesjul, not the dead name Yukejulhel.",
    "status": "proposed"
  },
  "name": "Varkgrum",
  "native": "",
  "relations": {
    "geographic_location": [
      "Namuzdus",
      "Silgolt"
    ],
    "related_organizations": [
      "Stonecrown Council",
      "Namuzdus Dominion",
      "Republic of Izheim"
    ],
    "related_species": [
      "Kaetijul",
      "Kaekreaedhel",
      "Medesjul",
      "Jaajul"
    ]
  },
  "sources": {},
  "subtype": "holdfast",
  "summary": "The outward-facing holdfast of Namuzdus, cut at the passes where the mountain meets the roads, and the only one of the three founding holdfasts where outsiders live in any number. Varkgrum handles everything the Dominion does not do underground \u2014 carriage, customs, embassies, negotiation with Tuzraag\u0027s relays \u2014 and is distrusted by Kurnumgrath for its foreignness and by D\u00f4lmuz\u00fbn for its prices. It decided the Stonecrown Schism, and both of the others know it.",
  "tags": [
    "namuzdus",
    "kaetijul",
    "holdfast",
    "silgolt",
    "trade",
    "diplomacy"
  ],
  "timeline": {},
  "type": "settlement"
}