> > The evidence is the "Argrath and the Devil" in KoS p233
> > in which the Gods are eaten by the Devil and a passage
> > in a different font announces that the world is now free
> > from the Gods.
>Anything else? Just that one line?
No. Thinking too much about it, it looks tacked on and seems to be true about the Cosmic Compromise (from the Orlanthi PoV) as it does for a world without gods. So it could be a paragraph from Harmast's Saga in which Harmast speaks of the secret of what he has done and an editor has added it to provide a neat end to the fragment that he has. Stranger things have happened in classical and religious texts.
> > It actually is in Cults of Terror p13 (and Cults Compendium p12)
> > where she is described as having "great properties to aid birth
> > and growth". It's just not in the text of the Malia cult itself.
>OK, though that doesn't necessarily mean "healing entity," to me.
I agree. I simply view Malia at this time as aiding creation like aiding digestion, fermenting wine and beer, aging cheeses and the like. Only when Things Go Bad does her destructive side become significant.
To me, Malia is as impersonal like Aether, Aldrya and Sramak. She is like a vat of acid - incapable of caring about you but should you stick your arm in one, you are going to get seriously burned.
The disease masters - the humans and broos that interact with Malia - do not do so out of piety towards her but because they are motivated by illwill to their fellow kin (in the case of humans) or to the cosmos in general (in the case of broos). They chose disease because it is a weapon of the weak in a world without justice. Muriah started on her path because she was the lowest of the low who had been wronged by a twobit village that simply wasn't worth the clacks to slaughter it. Human disease masters elsewhere are losers in general - the bitter and twisted spinster who has stones thrown at her by kids, the unwashed jerk whom everybody can smell from a mile off.
--Peter Metcalfe
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