(Editor's note: Besglarko Anglepoise was the only Mostali I ever met He seemed an old man then though I suppose he had lived several hundred years when he first arrived at the Nochet temple Nine tenths of what the temple library has to say on the subject of dwarves can be laid at Besglarko's door The document below is part of the transcript of a lecture on Mostali civilisation he gave in Sea Season of the fourth year after the Silver Harvest; just three weeks before he was found beaten to death in a room which was locked from the inside His tragic and unexplained death was an incalculable loss to learning )
"We now come on to the central feature of the damage to the World Machine - Growth Growth manifests itself throughout the World so universally that it is sometimes difficult for even the Diamond Dwarves to agree on what is a feature of the World Machine and what is a manifestation of Growth The presence of the hated Aldryami is of course a clear indicator of severe Growth and usually requires as immediate excision as would Chaos where it threatens Humans, I am afraid, <muffled sniggers> also come into the category of obvious growth though they are less of a priority for destruction (perhaps because of the insignificant rates of growth achieved by human agriculture compared to past Elven forestation rates)
Perhaps the most insidious manifestation of Growth within the World Machine is one which is directly responsible for my presence here today and one which is known only to a handful of senior True Mostali; one which, indeed, would cause the most immense disruption to the Schedule were it to become known to the mass of common, drone-stupid worker dwarves Growth has so insinuated itself into the fabric of the World Machine that even the Crucibles of the Dwarves are not free from its taint
The Clay Mostali themselves are a manifestation of Growth at the very heart of the Machine We can see this in the proliferation of heresies within Dwarfdom and in the, much suppressed and channelled but real, individuality displayed by all Dwarves when not actually engaged in their work tasks As far as we can tell this behaviour was never found among the original Mostali who even today, evidence suggests, display a rigidity of attitude and behaviour which is as Machine-like as anything the World has to offer Could this perhaps be why so few of them remain? Could it be that embracing Growth is necessary if the Mostali are to have any chance of comprehending and reacting to Growth itself? And is not therefore the whole Schedule of the Mostali a doomed enterprise? One thing is sure Time will tell "
Richard Crawley
another spinner of strange and gauzy threads
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