Many copies of this book are left around Sanctuary. Left on tables in the inns, on shelves in the library, and convenient places around town.
The Corruption of Hammer and Steel The Lesson of Dunwarren
Give me good filthy hands, grimed with moss and mud. Give me a life of healthsome struggling muck and burbling stream, flowering growth and straining flesh. Give me seeds fighting for space in the depths of the earth, natural creatures clashing with tooth and claw. Give me the messy wild, the brutal living growth that is what is. Give me the natural.
Take away the polished gem, the smoothed marbled table, the soft prison of silks. Take away your civilization. Take away your grotesque infants trapped in the bodies of adults. Take away your servants and chains.
Civilization is a corruption. It is a disorder. Take away your elves with skins like charred hides, living hateful lives of deceit and self-loathing. Take away your dwarves grey and sullen, choking on the fumes of their forges and straining muscles to unnatural labor. And take away your gnomes, cursed beyond all measure of understanding.
Life is made of red flesh, hardened bone, or plantish pulp. It is not rigid steel, twisted and devoid of life. Life is created in the joining of male and female, not solitary tinkering in poisonous chambers.
Their tampering, their toys, their little steel men was an offense. It strained the balance, and the balance must be kept. Swing too far in one way and it will swing back the other. The gnomish tinkerings opened up too many secrets, brought too much disordered unnaturalness to our world. The balance corrected itself.
A Curse of Druids cannot be resisted. Little tin-men can not fix it. Secret walls and magics cannot lift it.
The Balance will be kept.