Darmon the Blackrock

There is an old Deep Gnome saying: "You can take the Svirfneblin out of the stone, but you can't take the stone out of the Svirfneblin." Many of them believe they're born of the stone itself. Under their dark grey skin, their muscles seem to be made of rock. They’re a hard people. A people who toil away, never complaining. They also have no concept of time. Having never seen day or night, their culture doesn’t think of the passage of time. They have no calendars, and no written word. So being an only child is kinda boring. Deep Gnomes usually have less than 4 kids throughout their 250 years of life, and they space them apart well, so each can be doted on by their mothers up into their 20s.

It was more like his 30s for young Daramon Stonecarver, son of (as one might guess) a stone carver. He lived in Ornswell, an Underdark settlement of 900 Deep Gnomes (Svirfneblin) under the Silver Marches in Faerun. His mother wouldn’t let him leave their hovel, and go out on his own. So he stayed at home and spent his days imagining things. Which is why for the first while, he couldn’t believe his eyes when he noticed a light peering in from between the stalactites. It would be illuminated half the time and not illuminated the other half. Daramon began to mark the passage of these lights, in effect marking the days on one of the first ever Svirfneblin calendars.

After around 4000 days, Daramon had developed a clever way to notate the passage of days, a habit he kept up religiously. Sometime around then the men of Ornswell captured a Drow who got close to the entrance. They brought it back, and asked the women what to do with it. They said that he couldn’t be allowed to go free, in case he told the other Drow of their location. But he was actually a pretty ok guy, so they let him live there, in chains. His name was Vzzult Menqwire, and he was Daramon’s first teacher. From him, Daramon learned of writing and magic. Perhaps this emboldened him, cause once he felt ready, he climbed up to the roof of the cave, to find it opened up to a whole different world that Daramon could never have imagined. From that day forward, he called himself Darmon.

The surface was alluring. It took a while to get his bearings, but he quickly realized that gold and jewels could get you anything, and there was loads in the Underdark. He went back often to collect these, paying his way through school at the Wizard Academy in Silverymoon. He was a keen student, master of Evocation. And now he called himself Darmon the Blackrock.

He travelled for a while. Gold and gems were no longer the goal, but arcane knowledge. He went to Neverwinter, and into the Desserin Valley. Then one day, he heard about a village in the Silver Marches that fell into the Underdark. The Dwarven village was known as Mossley, and it was not far from where he first came to the surface 10s of thousands of days before. When he went to investigate he found that his childhood home of Ornswell had been buried. But he discovered that he wasn't the only one to have lost his home, as he met Torrga, a folk hero of the village of Mossley.

Having both lost their homes, they travelled together. They joined up with a sailing company in Neverwinter, under Captain Scol Murdeck. One day, the Captain offered the crew the opportunity to set sail to a distant land to the West. This is how Darmon and Torrga came to Askaria.