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Lines of Blood: A History of the Gnomes
Bloodline Winedotter
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Candlelight dinner,
Knapkin folded like a swan:
Please don’t let me fail!
--Arvyad’gno prayer
 For
850 years following the Great Schism, there were no bloodlines
among the gnomes, but merely gnomes who lived in human cities
and gnomes who remained in the forest. All of that changed
in the year 725, when Lyosi Wyandotte led a group of Withycombe
gnomes into Ta’Nalfein. This first fracture of the burghal
gnome community led to the resuscitation of the bloodline
denomination as a means of distinguishing the original Withycombe
group from the upstart Wyandotte faction.
Lyosi Wyandotte was anything but an upstart. In fact, she
was a gnome of such careful thought and deliberate behavior
that her friends thought her a little slow. Her enemies might
have put it differently, but Wyandotte was so kind and agreeable
that few gnomes felt anything but a warm, parental consideration
for her. She was raised in a small village surrounded by vineyards
and olive groves in the countryside outside Tamzyrr. Her host
family was made up of good, hardworking county people: the
kind that never achieves greatness, but instead enjoys a lifetime
of quiet satisfaction. Lyosi Wyandotte snuck into their cottage
at night to iron the curtains, wash the odd dish, and sweep
the floor, asking only a small biscuit and cup of milk in
return. She took great satisfaction from knowing that her
hosts, however humble, were more comfortable because of her
efforts. No one ever suspected that Lyosi Wyandotte wanted
more from life than this.
In her heart, however, Lyosi Wyandotte was a great romantic.
She had a vision of what life should be, and when she looked
around her she saw little that met her idealistic expectations.
She felt with a deep passion that gnomish culture had gone
astray since the time of Sjandor Withycombe. She felt her
people were foolish for sweating away their time and energy
in steamy workshops, when the true calling of burghal gnomes
was service to their hosts, service for its own sake and not
merely as a justification for pilferage. She longed for a
time when gnomes would take more pride in such work and award
more respect to those who performed it. Nevertheless, year
after year the word came forth from Tamzyrr that the head
gnome had been chosen for crafting some useless machine. Not
incidentally, year after year the head gnome was a man. While
women were not forbidden a place in the workshops, they were
subtly pressured to adopt less prestigious positions within
gnomish society, thus rendering themselves unfit for consideration
as compound leaders, much less as the head burghal gnome.
Lyosi Wyandotte secretly bristled at this perceived injustice.
If her friends thought she was empty-headed, it was because
she spent so much time dreaming dreams of how society would
be different were it led by women in domestic service rather
than grimy workshop masters.
She might have continued this life of silent dissatisfaction
were it not for the visit of a group of Nalfein traders interested
in buying grapes direct from the harvest. Wyandotte was instantly
smitten with the elves’ courtly manners. On a whim,
she granted herself leave of absence from her human hosts
and stole aboard one of the Nalfein wagons. After a long and
difficult journey, she finally spied the walls of the city
in the distance. She felt a great joy rush into her heart
at the grandeur of the sight. As she snuck about the city,
everything that she saw confirmed her first impression: here
was a people infinitely more worthy of fine service than humans.
No gnome, she felt, could fail to respect those who served
such lordly hosts.
She raced back to Selanthia with all deliberate speed, telling
every gnome she met about the majesty of elves. Many of the
gnomes she met thought she was exaggerating, or that she was
a bit of a mad enthusiast, but others listened with interest.
When she returned to her home, she found it difficult to serve
her human hosts, whose lives seemed puny and mean in comparison
to the grand families she visited in Ta’Nalfein. First
among relatives and friends, and then throughout the county,
Wyandotte began to circulate the idea of establishing a burghal
colony among the elves. Most dismissed her notion without
a second thought, but others gave her idea careful consideration.
Many gnomes in service, and a disproportionate number of women,
signed a scroll indicating their desire to join Wyandotte’s
venture. Another group that joined the roll were journeymen
winemakers, who saw relocation as a quicker route to mastery
and ownership of wineries; the opportunity to glean secrets
of the art from an ancient winemaking culture also played
no insignificant part in their decision to join Wyandotte’s
quest.
Armed with her scroll filled with names, Lyosi Wyandotte
traveled to Tamzyrr, traveling the same underground road that
brought Sjandor Withycombe into the city. Sensible of the
historic moment, she reached the compound of the head burghal
gnome and requested an audience. The head burghal gnome does
not have much to do on any given day, and she was immediately
shown inside. Sitting behind an enormous steel desk covered
with award-winning gadgets was Tymos Aluvy, an elderly jeweler
with a silvery grey beard that reached to his knees. He smiled
at her and asked her name.
“Lyosi Wyandotte, sir.”
“Only daughter of that vineyard gnome, who invented
a machine for extracting oil from grape seeds a few years
back?”
Sighing inwardly, she nodded.
“What can I do for you, then, little daughter?”
Aluvy looked across at her with his best fatherly smile.
“I bear a petition, sir, of several hundred names.
I plan to establish a colony in the elven city of Ta’Nalfein,
and I have come to seek your blessing.”
Tymos Aluvy’s eyes opened in unmasked disbelief. “You
don’t say? You couldn’t possibly have said. No,
I simply don’t believe you!”
Little did Wyandotte know that she was subverting tradition,
cutting through the decades of red tape normally required
for such petitions, not to mention the fact that she was implicitly
questioning the judgment of Sjandor Wityhycombe himself, who
deliberately chose to live among humans instead of elves.
Lyosi Wyandotte simply stared at the babbling Aluvy, and then
walked over to his desk. With the air of someone explaining
a simple concept to an addlepated listener, she unrolled her
scroll. “I do say just that, sir. Look…here are
the names!”
“I do not want to see the names, and I know just what
you mean, you impudent thing,” he snarled. “Just
what do you propose doing among the elves that you couldn’t
do here at home?”
Slowly, hesitantly, she spun out her dream. She described
a society where the home was more important than the workshop,
where domestic service was the most respected form of employment.
She described a matriarchal family structure, where power
passed from mother to daughter but with no prejudice toward
fathers and sons. She suggested that the head gnome might
often (perhaps more often than not) be a woman. She also mentioned
the winemakers who had joined her group, and she speculated
on a trade that might someday benefit both colony and metropolis:
fine elven wine in exchange for gnomish manufactured goods.
She spoke for almost twenty minutes, all the while ignoring
the signs of mounting anger and exasperation in the expression
of the head gnome. Finally the old man exploded into incoherent
screams: “Wine?!” “Daughters?!” “Indeed!!”
Recovering only a little of his composure, he continued to
shout. “And I suppose you, a housemaid, will lead this
foolish venture? It cannot be! It will not be!” In a
sing-song voice, he called out, “Winedaughters! Winedaughters!”
and then cackled with derision and scorn.
Lyosi Wyandotte sank deeper within herself at every word,
her face stinging from the venom of his tone. She started
to shrink back from the desk as her dream begin to fade, but
then she suddenly found her resolve. She straightened her
spine to full height and looked Aluvy straight in the eye.
“We are leaving with or without your permission, old
man,” she said. “I came here as a courtesy to
the head of my race, but you have proven yourself unworthy
of my respect. I disavow relationship to you, now and forever,
for me and for all those who follow me.” She then turned
on her heel and walked out. Within a month, all of her followers
were on their way to Ta’Nalfein, leaving a stunned and
disbelieving nation behind.
The burghal gnome culture that evolved in Ta’Nalfein,
and later spread throughout the elven nations, came to be
called “Bloodline Winedotter” from a conflation
of Lyosi Wyandotte’s name with the appellation Tymos
Aluvy bestowed upon them in his rage. (Some fastidious Winedotters
still insist on being called Wyandotters, but they are considered
humorless cranks, even by their friends and family.) The culture
evolved along the lines of Lyosi Wyandotte’s dream,
in no small part because she worked tirelessly to see it come
to pass. She served as an informal leader of the group, guiding
its development without ever holding formal office. In her
later years, she found herself being called “Grandmother”
by the entire bloodline, despite having had no husband or
children of her own.
Initially, the burghal gnomes found it more difficult to
infiltrate the cities of the elves than those of the lackadaisical
humans. The elves were much more likely to observe the slightest
movement of their things, or to hear controlled breathing
in the dark. The Winedotter gnomes selected individual families
of elves to adopt on the basis of wealth and power. They infiltrated
the grand mansions of royalty and merchant princes, as well
as the most successful vintners of the age. Instead of creating
an elaborate network of underground tunnels, they built multi-layered
sub-basements beneath the “big houses,” and it
was not unusual for Winedotter gnomes to go months and even
years without leaving the safety of their compounds.
The Winedotter gnomes identify more closely with their hosts
than any other burghal bloodline. They take pride in the accomplishments
of “our people,” as the host family is called,
and they derive their status within Winedotter society from
the status of their elven hosts. In the first generation that
the gnomes were present in Ta’Nalfein, the desire to
please sometimes grew into a competition to do more for the
hosts, and eventually some over-eager gnomes stepped over
the line where the elves could no longer pretend not to notice
their presence. A meeting was held in the private chambers
of the Nalfein king, to which Lyosi Wyandotte was invited
by subtle hints delivered in stage whispers at night in all
the most important houses of Ta’Nalfein.
At the meeting, some elves argued that the gnomes should
be made welcome and others that they should be expelled or
even killed for their temerity. From a place of hiding behind
rich velvet curtains, Wyandotte listened as the king closed
the debate by declaring the gnomes welcome in his realm and
in his household. Following his lead, the great families of
the Nalfein came to regard their adoption by gnomes as a very
great honor and a sign of social status. While some families
of elves declined the honor, either from parsimony or a desire
not to lose their privacy, most welcomed the kind attentions
of the gnomes.
Despite the hosts’ knowledge of their presence, Winedotter
gnomes maintain the burghal traditions of stealth, doing all
of their work anonymously, unseen and unheard, in the night.
Occasionally an elf will communicate subtly with the gnomes,
leaving a note folded in the pocket of a shirt that needs
mending, or tucked into the toe of some shoes that need polishing.
Propriety demands that the elves not acknowledge the gnomes
directly, instead expressing a vague and passive desire that
such and such piece of work might be done. Most Winedotter
gnomes actually take these notes as a grave affront, an implied
criticism of their failure to anticipate the need, but they
would never allow the elves to know as much. The notes are
always found undisturbed exactly where they were left, though
the work they request has always been completed.
Despite their focus on domestic service, Winedotter gnomes
have not turned their backs entirely on their Withycombe origins.
They do maintain small home workshops in which they tinker,
purely as hobbyists, with mechanical designs. Winedotter gnomes
focus exclusively on objects of beauty, however, believing
that practical devices are an excuse not to take personal
responsibility for careful work. A music-loving people, the
Winedotter bloodline produces relatively few musicians, and
as a result many of their finest products are mechanical music
boxes. They have also refined the mechanical clocks of the
Withycombes to include music, and their glockenspiels (large
and small) are sources of wonder and delight.
The area in which the Winedotter gnomes focus most of their
tinkering energy is winemaking. What began as the professional
interest of a small group of gnomes has become, over time,
a central component of the culture. Wine is omnipresent in
the cultural life of the bloodline, and the Winedotter compounds
resemble wine cellars because of the racks of bottles and
aging casks that fill every available space. Winedotter gnomes
do not make wines in large batches for everyday use, preferring
to pilfer that from their elven hosts. The signature labels
of the Winedotter vintners are likely to be unique blends
or wines with unexpected infusions of flavor made in small
batches for the connoisseur trade.
Winedotter families are closer-knit and more loving than
those of the Withycombe bloodline. Nuclear families live in
brick-lined apartments conjoined into extended family compounds
that reach deep underground. Winedotter families observe a
strict matriarchal organization. Husbands move into the compound
of the wife’s family, and they take the wife’s
family name. In addition, the ultimate authority in any dispute
is the oldest living woman of the family. Winedotter children
remain in the household of their parents, though babysitting
duties are often shared by siblings and cousins when the parents
are off at work. Children learn the discipline of housework
and personal service from an early age. As young children,
they are assigned responsibilities in the family apartment,
and as they grow older they are tasked with looking after
infirm or ill relatives in the extended family. On occasion,
a Winedotter gnome will take a son or daughter to work with
them in the big house in recognition of some special achievement.
Otherwise, Winedotter gnomes are forbidden to leave the compound
until they come of age.
At the age of 17, Winedotter gnomes become eligible for
the arvyad’gno. In the Winedotter version of the burghal
ceremony, invited guests from the extended family gather in
their formal wear for an elaborate meal of seven courses;
the adolescent undergoing the rite serves the guests with
dignity and grace, observing all of the proprieties of Nalfein
manners. The most difficult moment for the petitioner comes
during the exquisitely formal interlude of wine tasting known
as the Seven Sips, in which the challenge lies in circling
the table with each vintage in a timely manner, so that the
next round is poured before the last has been finished, while
giving each guest an opportunity to accept or refuse each
libation. The candidate’s success or failure is judged
by the diners, who never let the wine dull their scrutiny.
Upon successful completion of the arvyad’gno, the Winedotter
gnome is admitted to the “Upstairs Staff”: they
are provided formal wear (cut in the latest elven fashion
and embroidered with the coat of arms of their host family)
and assigned nightly duties in the elven mansion. Gnomes who
fail the arvyad’gno are assigned tasks within the family
compound, and they become eligible to re-take the challenge
on their next birthday. (It is never difficult to find judges
for the events.) Regardless of their success, the penitents
receive the bloodmark of their clan: three vertical lines
(signifying an arbor) topped with a leafy grapevine.
Winedotter marriages are always exogamous, and they serve
as welcome opportunities for an entire family to leave their
compound and visit another. The marriage vows consist of formal
speeches of a length guaranteed to bore anyone but the partners
themselves, though the assembled families maintain the strictest
expressions of rapt attention. The key component of the vows
is a promise to serve the partner with all the attention normally
bestowed only on the elven hosts. The vows are followed by
toasts, speeches, and yet more toasts. Weddings function as
important showcases for specialty wines, and the key symbol
of Winedotter marriage is the label printed specifically for
the wedding. The best vintners from each family create a unique
blend for the wedding, and this wine is served at the ceremony
and at every anniversary the couple shares. On the death of
either spouse, the remaining bottles are poured into the ground
in recognition of the lost union.
Winedotter funerals are formal, stuffy affairs. Bodies are
borne in great state to the deepest levels of the compound,
where crypts are masked by tall racks of wine. Gnomes in formal
livery and white gloves stand at attention as the loved one
is laid to rest, music boxes playing funereal marches all
the while. The next of kin makes a speech praising the virtues
of the gnome and listing the highlights of their life: their
dreams, their loves, their legacy.
Gnomes of Bloodline Winedotter have a religious life of
deep devotion. They adopt the patron arkati of their hosts
as patrons of their own, but their personal gods tend to fall
into two categories: women and servants. Eorgina, strangely
enough, has very few adherents among these gnomes; while the
idea of a dark queen appeals to some of their cultural values,
the type of service she demands is anathema to the Winedotter
pride. Tilamaire also has many followers among these music-loving
gnomes. The high holy day of the Winedotters coincides with
Founder’s Day, which (following the Withycombe tradition)
is held on Eoantos 1. Hosted by the family that serves the
royal house of each city, the celebration is marked by toasts
to the gods, to the Founder Lyosi Wyandotte, and to the elders
of each compound. (By the end of the evening, toasts are made
to the children who pour the wine, to the glassware, and to
anything that stops spinning long enough to be recognized.)
Instead of a head gnome (the Winedotters do without centralized
bloodline government), a Chief Taster is selected as the gnome
who brings the finest wine to the festival. The Chief Taster’s
job is to visit each vintner in the city on a circuit, testing
the products at each stop. The Chief Taster spends a rather
dissolute year, with the result that rarely is a gnome chosen
twice in a row. In fact, Chief Tasters are usually more than
grateful to see their terms come to an end.
The Winedotter gnomes also have a unique tradition of mysticism
tied to the stars. Studying the elven star maps, drawing the
familiar constellations and others known only to initiates,
these mystics believe that spiritual well-being and fate are
powerfully influenced by the varicolored light of distant
stars. By casting starstones of various size, color, and shape
onto the ground, these gnomish mystics can read the past and
the future of their subjects with uncanny accuracy.
Winedotter compounds exist in each of the great elven cities
with the exception of New Ta’Faendryl, where their presence
is banned by royal decree. No self-respecting Winedotter gnome
would attach to a Dhe’nar, as the very concept of slavery
is a heinous affront to the ethos of bloodline Winedotter.
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