Brogar Deepdelver is a mine master and explorer of the Blackspine, famous among the Stonebound for going where the maps stop. Deep below the oldest workings he found a forbidden depth closed by an ancient carved seal, and he broke it. Beneath lay warm stone that seemed almost alive. Bells began to ring with no hand on them, miners began to dream of a heartbeat under the world, and the opening became known as the Warm Shaft.
Appearance
Brogar is a thick-set, barrel-chested man in his vigorous middle years, built low and wide for narrow tunnels. His dark copper-brown skin shows the smooth, shiny marks of old burns on his palms and forearms. His black hair is cropped close and graying at the temples, and his short beard is singed ragged on one side. His hazel eyes are bright and restless, the eyes of someone who always wants to see one more chamber; only when he is still, which is rarely, does he look tired. He dresses as a working delver, not a guild master: a heavy reinforced leather coat, a brass lantern strapped to his chest, coils of knotted return line over one shoulder, and at his belt chalk, a short pick and a small tuned warning bell. His ancestor-stone is a rough piece of black ore he chipped out himself.
What he believes
Brogar loves the deep world and believes his people have a right to understand it rather than fear it. To him, turning back from a discovery because someone else is afraid of it is a kind of cowardice dressed up as wisdom. Every chamber he maps is proof that the dark can be learned. What he has never had to face, until now, is the possibility that some things in the dark were sealed away on purpose.
His place in the story
Soon after the seal broke, the mountain began to pulse with a heat the Stonebound tie to Vuldra, the Heart Under Stone. Nobody can prove that Brogar caused it, and nobody can prove he did not, so he lives with the question every day. His friend Orun Bellstone warned him not to open the shaft, and their friendship is wounded but not broken: each has become the other's argument, discovery against restraint. The Deep Anvil Compact must now decide whether to close the deepest mines, and it does not trust Brogar to decide alone. Dorrik Ironmemory searches the archives for any record of who set the old seal, and why, while Keld Marrbreaker looks down the same shaft and sees nothing but rich veins. The Warm Shaft is marked as a place of danger now. Brogar still stands at its rim more often than anyone.