Mentin

Mentin noticed something every dwarf had seen and none had named: dwarves follow their fathers' trades, generation after generation, almost without exception. He argued that Askenon should stop pretending otherwise and make it law.

His case was not about order. It was about anxiety. A young dwarf who knows from birth what he will be is spared the question entirely, and Mentin had spent his life among a people still shrinking from the loss of Askenar, watching what one more open question did to them. The rest of the argument followed from that: a society moves faster when nobody hesitates, and no trade goes unfilled however unpopular it is, because nobody chooses it.

He was proved right and he would not have recognised what came of it. The castes he proposed fought the nobles within a century, won, and held Askenon rigid for more than a thousand years. Dwarves refined each inherited discipline with astonishing care, but discoveries rarely crossed caste boundaries and almost none transformed society. Every dwarf alive is born into one, cannot leave it, and loses his name if he betrays it.

Dwarves of Law still quote him. Merchants, who inherited the caste nobody wanted, do not.