The gentle trickle of water running over stone meant many things to the Dawi. Often, it was a cause of great consternation as some impudent river or underground stream began to wear its way through walls and ceilings, demanding access to places it had no right in traveling, and needing to be thoroughly chastised and beat back into shape, often literally. For some, it was a sign of fortune lying ahead in some new cavern hidden in the under earth, hidden just out of sight by the pooling darkness. To others still, it was a warning to move quietly and cautiously, for strange things lurked in the underground pools and streams that had never seen the light of lanterns, and not yet learned to fear the tread of dwarven boots, and the bite of sharply honed steel.
For some however, such as Kloddin Stoneknuckle, aging miner and foreman of entirely too many projects that couldn't be entrusted to younger members of the guild by his own reckoning, it carried a much different meaning, one of peace and contemplation.
The water beneath his nose flowed clear and crisp across the rock face, curving first one way and then the next, artfully twisting around a series of tiny, nigh-imperceptible divots in the surface in an intricate series of loops and spirals that one day, several decades from now, would gradually grow to form a series of miniature stalagmites.
Taking a brief moment to adjust the crystalline magnifying lenses over his large, lamp-like eyes, Kloddin delicately dipped the very tip of a miniscule steel needle into the surface of the water, taking great care not to allow it to touch the stone it ran across, no more than a hair's breadth in thickness.
The slightest scratch in the surface of the stonework could alter the water's course after all, and that would not do just yet.
He withdrew the needle and swiped the tip across his tongue, testing the taste of the water with an expert's centuries of great experience. The mineral content was slightly off. The outermost layers of the upper system had finally worn away after all this time, as was expected. He would need to begin diverting the pathway past his carefully plotted section of back up salt deposits, as he had anticipated when he first started his model all those years ago.
He nodded to himself as his suspicions were reaffirmed, and stood from his hunched position over the great span of stonework, moving with a swiftness that defied his age, long delicate fingers plucking a miniscule chisel from his tool belt, and he set to work upstream.
Any beardling could carve an engraving or canal into stone, but it took true mastery to achieve something like Kloddin's model riverway, delicately flaking away miniscule chips of the underlying surface so that, over the course of decades, the course of the water carved entirely new pathways through the surface, wearing away at the carefully prepared slab to create patterns of beautiful divots and streams, formed entirely without the anything more than the gentlest direction of dwarven hands to create the most pleasing combination of sights and sounds.
It was a hobby he had inherited from his father, Klorri Stoneknuckle, after entirely too many attempts to sneak into the elder's workstation in his youth to view the beautiful intercrossing system of triple-layered tunnels and canals that his father had coaxed into formation along the step-like length of his model riverway.
It wasn't a tradition unique to his clan, certainly, but one he had learned at his father's side nonetheless. And learned the proper way of doing it as well! Not like those blasted fools over at clan Duringen, who coaxed moss to grow along the sides of their own model riverways. Moss, honestly, what madness was that? Ruined a perfectly good work of art that practice did, distracted from the beauty found in simplicity and effort, the simple purity of work done well, cleverly, and patiently.
Bah! Moss. Next they'd be adding tiny models of those strange elven "boat" contraptions. The foolishness of beardlings knew no boundaries.
AN: Just an idea I had for another dwarven hobby, the equivalent of a model trainset for a people who have centuries worth of patience to spend, Model Riverways, stone slabs of varying sizes, coaxed and carved with the most miniscule of adjustments possible to cause delicate streams or droplets of water to do as water does, and erode new paths across the block in artful designs.
? Or at least back to this quest 
