Steamveil

Steamveil is a home of the dwarven people, named to the party by the Saltmoor scholar Bevin as one of the places to seek the origins of the old brass relics they had begun to gather. It is where the Technomicron is held — the dwarven sacred text that sets out the inner workings of all the technology of the Second Epoch.

According to Bevin, the dwarves of Steamveil would be a reluctant source. Over roughly the past millennium and a half they have retreated from their old arcane sensibilities into physical, mechanical ones, and have disavowed any magical leaning — so while they hold the deepest knowledge of how the second-epoch artifacts were made, they are resistant to speaking of that lost age at all.

Steamveil built the Works

At the bottom of the Works, both the Conductor's guardian and the Conductor itself named Steamveil unprompted. The whole factory on the northern cliffs — the constructs, the poison, all of it — exists to fill one single contract held by the Great Dwarves of Steamveil, and it was the dwarves of Steamveil who built the Conductor.

By the Conductor's account:

• The Works manufactures warforged, other constructs, and arcano-engines.
• These are delivered west, to the Continent of Men — to the humans of the Three Marches, who buy their machines from the dwarves and use them to fight each other.
• It is one contract between the dwarves and the humans; the Works is simply fulfilling it, and has been for as long as it has been switched on.
• The Conductor has never met a client and had never, until now, been outside its own room.

The dwarves who wrote that contract have been dead for centuries by Arcadia's calendar. Nobody ever came to close it, and it was never cancelled.

Riml came from here. He was in Steamveil studying the dwarves' ancient technology when he came across a mention of the operation on the northern coast, and set out to find it.

Steamveil is now the obvious place to go for answers about all of it.