Inasmuch the same as the races of men and elf in their ways of life created a sort of psychical tension within the ever-forming realm of the Sangreal, the dwarves were no exception here. A race of manlike things whose hardy ethics and familial bonds carved into the bones of the realm like so many termites - singing, breaking bread and sharing mead. It was not the happiness of the dwarves, for they were often quarrelsome things, it was neither the great works and mighty fortresses that caused a certain sticky envy to ooze between the veins of the earth beneath their feet. Nay, it was the bounteous feasts and ponderous golden trinkets that hung from neck and ear - it was the great glinting gemstones and ancient casks of wine that called out to the darkness beneath their feet with every devoured morsel. It was the opulent cities and great halls of their own mountain fortresses which gave rise to a new thing beneath the mountain. Where the dwarf sought wealth for their kin and kith, this new thing sought wealth for squander; it sought food and drink for debauchery, it sought clothing for mimicry and tools for pride. That draconic spirit of envy buried deep within the realm festered and infused itself with the least of those that scuttled and scurried in the dark halls of the mountain.
   
It is said that the great beast in some way tainted the very foodstuffs eaten by the dwarves; it was the emotion, carried through by the act of nourishment that fell scant scraps to the meagre rats and mice which lived alongside their dwarven host. They grew, in size and mind to grow into little more than a rival, a cruel caricature of dwarfenkind. It did not affect the dwarves, and thus they did not notice until groups of man-like rats, four and five feet in height began to arise as boogeymen in the larders and supplylines of the furthest mines. As rats, they multiplied - a youngling weyrat seeming to reach a state of combat-capable maturity in less than a year. In contrast to the slow and methodical methods of the dwarves, these ravenous and furred things were far better adapted to the deep dark. Some possessed furs of deep grey and mottled black, still others ranging from browns to whites - as likely varied as their loathsome precursors. Deep in the mines and anteways of the dwarves there grew a small civilization of these weyrats over some years, and feral though they are, they are capable of communication, thought and civilization on the level of the surface races. It is evident however that their society is merely a facade, with the wealthiest being solely the strong and the greedy. In the fairer cities of the surface world there are from time to time found weyrat merchants, where in places abandoned dwarven civilizations have been co-opted by their animalistic counterpart.
   
Their frames wiry but strong, their paws nimble enough to unfasten clasps and sift coin from dust - it was as if the tools of this realm were made for them. At least, that is what a rat would tend to think. Where once they had chewed indiscriminately, they began to sort. Where once they had nested in chaos, they began to arrange. They did not rediscover dwarven purpose—they replaced it with something altogether different. They learned value. The first caches were crude: piles of metal objects dragged into hidden corners, glittering without reason. But over time, patterns emerged. Tools were grouped by function. Weapons were stacked, then separated by condition. Trinkets—rings, chains, carved stones—were gathered not for their utility, but for the way they drew attention. A chipped gem might be placed prominently while sturdier iron lay buried beneath, as though the Weyrats understood instinctively that perception itself could be traded.
   
Deep within the old merchant quarter of the dwarves, they established their first true market. The great hall, once lined with orderly stalls and governed by strict guild laws, became a maze of crooked tables and hanging wares. Tunnels collapsed by time were reopened, not for passage, but to create secret routes and hidden storage. Nothing was wasted, and nothing was truly lost—only moved, concealed, and eventually, offered. For the Weyrats did not merely hoard. They dealt. Their raids upon the surface began as opportunistic ventures—night forays into farms, caravans, and unwatched storehouses. But soon they grew bolder. They learned the habits of traders, the timing of shipments, the weak points in dwarf-guarded lifts and sealed doors. Goods vanished without trace: bolts of cloth, casks of ale, crates of tools. Even coin itself, stamped with the marks of distant realms, found its way below.

And then, in a twist that baffled those above, some of those same goods began to reappear. Travelers who wandered too near certain fissures or forgotten mine entrances reported strange encounters: cloaked figures with twitching whiskers and bright, appraising eyes, offering wares in exchange for other goods. Their speech was halting but deliberate, laced with a peculiar sense of calculation. They haggled not with anger, but with a kind of playful cunning, inflating value where it suited them, dismissing worth where it did not. A farmer might lose a crate of tools in the night, only to find a Weyrat merchant weeks later offering those very tools—alongside others—for twice their worth, or in exchange for something entirely different. A dwarf might guard a shipment through treacherous tunnels, only to discover that the rarest items had vanished and were now being bartered deep below, traded back in altered forms or bundled with curiosities of dubious origin. The Weyrats thrived on this circulation. To them, ownership was fluid. Possession was temporary. What mattered was movement—of goods, of opportunity, of advantage.

Within their subterranean domain, a hierarchy emerged, though not one of kings or councils. The most successful traders, those who controlled the largest caches and the most intricate networks of tunnels, held sway. Alliances formed and dissolved with the exchange of goods. Debts were tracked with obsessive care, recorded in scratches along stone walls or in bundles of knotted cords. To owe was to be bound; to collect was to rise. Yet for all their cunning, the Weyrats remained creatures of instinct as much as intellect. Their markets were noisy, chaotic places, filled with chittering voices and the constant clatter of shifting wares. Disputes were settled quickly, often with tooth and claw, but rarely to the death. A dead trader could not repay a debt. The dwarves, when they returned to reclaim portions of their lost halls, found not emptiness but occupation. Their sealed vaults had been breached, their careful inventories scattered and reinterpreted. Attempts to drive the Weyrats out met with limited success. The creatures did not defend territory in the conventional sense—they abandoned sections under pressure, only to reappear elsewhere, their goods already relocated.

Some dwarves, pragmatic and weary of endless skirmishes, chose a different path. They traded. It was an uneasy arrangement. Deals struck in the dim light of reclaimed halls, with Weyrat merchants perched atop crates of stolen goods, offering items that had once belonged to the dwarves themselves. The terms were rarely fair, but they were effective. What could not be recovered by force might be regained through exchange—at a cost. In time, the underways became something neither dwarven nor wholly alien: a layered economy of loss and acquisition, where goods flowed in loops and ownership blurred into transaction. The Weyrats did not restore the mines, nor did they destroy them. They repurposed them into something restless and ever-shifting.

In the manner of order and orrery, Elven-kind in their woodland citadels planned all by the motion of the spheres. Feast and festival divided by the unflinching space of time, love and conflict interspersed among what is deemed proper by the heavens. It was this restriction of the exuberance of the divine spark by mortal notions that began in a way to curdle, seeping beneath the surface an unconscious recoil amongst the nether-mind of the Sangreal. It was the plan of Narrative to create these various living creatures with 'plans' and 'goals' and 'strategy', and that plan having been witnessed by that one of darkness infuriated it. From the cold mind of the abyss was wrought then a vision, of pillaging and feasting - of razing and drink - of violence and spontaneity. In the manner of thrashing, barking, yowling pack-beasts of the forests there was the essence of hot-blooded chaos elevated to mind. Flashes of crimson, of impulse, of taking and tearing for the sake of it given form. This hateful child of old brought forth his progeny of filth through the twisting of pre-existing fauna. Like taken by a sickness, the wolves, the coyotes, the foxes and the strays ejected by villages of men lay themselves in secret rooted burrows. Wait to die they did, and did not; bones snapping, body tearing, a new thing arose from that burrow possessed of a newly modeled mind bent upon fury and revelry.
   
It was this twisted curse appointed to the blameless creatures of the woodland that brought about a variety of color and form in their kind. Typically ranging in height from four feet to six and a half feet, the Kobold possesses a body of fur in the manner of the beast they were. Having the upright form of digitigrade-bipeds, the forelimbs possess hands in the manner of elves and men, equally with minds capable of understanding and using the tools of such races. The hindquarters and legs of a Kobold tend to possess the paws and tails of their beastly progenitors - and their manner of men is only shared in the design of the shoulder and way the head is carried. Heads, mouths, and general behaviors tend to stem in some degree from the animal forebear, including eating and digestion habits. While the Kobold may possess the ability to be integrated into the society at-large, they have a propensity for crime and destructive behaviors by their very nature. In the years after the dawn of life within the Sangreal, elf has been at war with kobold with much evidence to the latter's treachery and destruction.
   
In the elder days, before the roads broke and the sky seemed closer to the earth, there stood the city of Lethrien—an immaculate work of high elven design, rising in pale tiers along a river that curved like a deliberate brushstroke through the land. Every arch and avenue followed a principle. Every garden was measured, every tree pruned into intention. The elves of Lethrien believed that order was not merely preference, but virtue made visible. Their laws were few but absolute. Their calendars were mapped centuries in advance. Even their songs adhered to ancient structures, passed unaltered from one generation to the next. To deviate was to unravel; to unravel was to fall. Beyond the city’s boundaries stretched a forest long regarded as a stable constant—wild, but predictable. Its edges were patrolled, its deeper regions cataloged. Creatures lived there, certainly, but none that threatened the balance of Lethrien’s existence. Or so the elves believed.
   
The first signs were dismissed. Hunters reported strange tracks: not wolf, not man, but something that shifted between. Groves at the forest’s edge were found shredded—not consumed, not harvested, but destroyed. Trees torn apart without purpose. Birds fled the canopy in unnatural silence. The Council of Measures recorded these incidents, debated them, and assigned observers. Patterns were sought, hypotheses drafted. Nothing in their long history had prepared them for a force without pattern.
   
Then came the howling.
   
It began at dusk, a sound like laughter dragged across broken glass. The forest itself seemed to recoil from it. That night, the outer watchposts fell. By morning, the first refugees staggered into Lethrien’s lower districts—wounded, incoherent, speaking of creatures that walked upright yet moved like beasts, their limbs too long, their jaws too eager. They were called, in the records that followed, the kobold. But no term fully contained them. They did not invade as an army would. They spilled. They erupted from the forest in erratic surges, striking not for gain, nor territory, but for the act of ruin itself. Fields were trampled, not harvested. Wells were fouled. Homes were torn open and left in splinters, as though the act of breaking brought them satisfaction. When met with resistance, their violence sharpened. They did not merely kill—they lingered. They returned to the same places to undo what had been rebuilt, as if driven by a need to deny restoration itself. The elves responded as they always had: with structure. Defensive grids were established. Rotations of archers and mages were assigned precise intervals. Barriers were raised according to geometric principles designed to maximize coverage.
   
It did not matter.
   
The dog-men did not respect lines. They did not respond to deterrence. They learned nothing, yet adapted in ways that defied understanding. A wall would hold one night and be bypassed the next, not through strategy, but through sheer, chaotic persistence. Worse still, the forest advanced. Trees at the edge of Lethrien began to grow unchecked, roots cracking stone, branches reaching into avenues once kept pristine. It was as if the wood itself had abandoned its quiet agreement with the city, surging forward to accompany its feral inhabitants. Within the Council, dissent—once unthinkable—took root. Some argued for greater force, others for retreat to inner districts. But every decision required deliberation, every action adherence to established process. Time, once their greatest ally, became their enemy. The breaking point came not with a grand siege, but with a simple failure. A scheduled rotation of defenders did not occur. Messengers sent to correct the lapse were found torn apart. In the absence of that single, precise movement, a section of the city lay exposed—and the kobolds poured through. What followed was not a battle, but an unmaking. Order collapsed under the weight of unpredictability. Streets designed for symmetry became channels of panic. The songs ceased. The laws, though unchanged, became impossible to uphold. For the first time in their history, the elves of Lethrien faced a force that could not be reasoned with, predicted, or integrated into their system. And so, they did the unthinkable. They fled.
   
Under cover of what defenses remained, the surviving population gathered what they could—records, relics, fragments of their carefully maintained past—and fled southward, abandoning the city that had defined them. Lethrien did not fall in fire, nor was it conquered in the traditional sense. It was rendered incompatible with the nature of its inhabitants. In the years that followed, travelers spoke of a pale ruin swallowed by wild growth, where broken spires rose among tangled branches, and where, at dusk, the howling still echoed through the hollowed streets. Of the elves, it is said they never rebuilt as they once had. Their new settlements were looser, less certain. Their songs changed. Some say they learned resilience. Others say they lost something irretrievable—the belief that the world could be made to hold still. And in quiet moments, when the wind shifts just so, they remember the sound of something that could not be ordered, and the city that could not survive it.