Entry 15 - Lore
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I’m digging straight down with my stone shovel.

(If you are reading this for an audience please pause for laughter.)

On an unrelated note, I unfortunately cannot fit sixty-four cubic meters of dirt and grass in one of my pockets. So I’ve been dumping it to the side and now I’ve got a mound. Put an idol on top and wait for the grass to grow, and I’ll feel like I’m back visiting the eastern river towns again. Now those were true sights for naïve eyes.

After so much time in the plains, the small paths between the houses felt claustrophobic, funneling the crowds one way or the other. You couldn’t even look up without seeing the community’s towering hill of dirt, and the shining statue on top. Both daunting and magnificent, the magnum opus of a people.

Too bad the humans leveled most of them to build their houses. Oh well.


I left that off bad. In truth I’ve been removing a couple dozen shovelfuls of soil and coming back up to rest. I haven’t done this much physical labor in a long time, and I’m remembering why. Something about putting your energy, your focus, into moving. There’s nothing keeping your thoughts contained. So when I’m stabbing at the dirt and adding another clump to my mound, my mind wanders wherever it wants. Until it’s just a stream of pessimistic rambling.

Might as well write it down.


You want Testu lore? I’m a dwelf, from Cirso. Or as the humans call it, Mandilus 48d. For those of you who recognize those names: No, I never met Akom, I never knew his tribe. All I know is that it was far to the south of mine, our paths never crossed.

His was a cave tribe, mine was a plains tribe. Again, human terms, probably from old anthropologist who spent his childhood browsing the Bionicles wiki. Whatever, it’s an oversimplification, but you could call it accurate.

I’m getting too bitter. Back to digging.


I don’t really remember when the humans first appeared. It didn’t seem important at the time. I do remember that they kept coming. They traded with us, talked to us, made us move, did it some more. We fought back, won a battle or two, lost the war. Some humans were nice to me, some weren’t.

I left at some point, before things got really bad. It wasn’t hard, they never thought a tribal who grew up with stone spears and clay figurines could figure out how to navigate a spacecraft. Joke’s on them.

The stories did reach me later, one way or another. How the tribals were herded into the cities, how their combined-arms attempt at liberation didn’t work out and they could only point fingers at each other. They gave them weapons, and they used them on each other instead of their jailors. Finally the company presented it all in a neat little package to the rest of the cosmos. This depiction of primitive little savages blowing each other up, too dumb to even use the key to their cell. That’s why they needed human ‘guidance’. An enlightenment that happened to make them a lot of money.

Do you know what the worst part is?

I found a universe once, where we happened to advance first. Where the dwelven stellar dominion discovered the pristine nature and tribal humans of Earth.

We did the same to them.

I’m done writing today.

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