The Brottor are the humble stewards of the sun-drenched foothills, hill dwarves who have traded the suffocating soot of deep forges for the scent of peat and wild heather. While their mountain-dwelling kin seek glory in adamant and gold, the Brottor find wealth in the endurance of the earth itself. They are a quiet folk, their hands calloused by the plow and their spirits tempered by the changing seasons, yet they remain as unyielding as the granite beneath their boots. Scattered across the highlands in sod-roofed dwellings, these dwarves live in harmony with the shifting tides of the surface world. They possess an uncanny intuition for the coming of storms or the creeping rot of the land, often acting as silent guardians for more populous realms that barely notice their presence. To an outsider, a Brottor may seem merely a simple laborer, but they carry oral histories of a thousand years, whispered to the roots of the world. Recently, Brottor communities have begun falling silent overnight. Travelers find hearths still warm and livestock untended, with nothing left but a lingering scent of sulfur and strange, runic markings etched into the doorposts. A lone survivor, clutching a shard of blackened flint, speaks of a hunger beneath the loam that has finally risen to reclaim the hills.