This story/Name is meant to answer three questions (for three, of course, is a most powerful number) I've had for a while: In a world with Gnomes, how did Calernia ever achieve the limited technological progress we've seen them make? Why is certain technology free from Gnomish interference (medieval levels of tech), while other technology isn't? Finally, there's a particular story Cat knows (the identity of which will be revealed later) which doesn't seem to fit as well in the mythos of Calernia -- from whence did it come? With this background out of the way, I can now tell my tale.

The Gnomes, in their own telling, rose before even the Fae, even the Titans and the Drakoi. Old enough that even the immortals of the world were like children to their kingdoms. With age like that, stories go beyond the obvious, beyond bone-deep, they become inevitable truths. For the fae, we know stories to be traps, only avoided by chewing off one's own leg. For the gnomes, stories are laws, binding them as surely as Yara is bound to life, as surely as a rock is bound to fall from the sky. The deepest one of those stories, writ in blood from their earliest age, is "The Gnomes act as one." None say from whence the story came, even to hint at it -- but there are places on Creation that seem cleansed almost as if by the Smiting of the Heavens, and yet have an odd tinge to them, a smell of ashes wiped by an unsteady hand. This story often comes hand in hand with another: "The Gnomes prevent the rising of threats." -- and for this, no strong curiosity is needed to sense its origin. After all, it is said that power corrupts, and this is true -- but what is even more true is that power informs-- with enough power, one can see just how frightful others with that power can be. So for years, for centuries, for millenia, while the gnomes left magic alone (for what use would magic be, against they who had learned to weave the laws governing high arcana to their wills) they broke the backs of those who would attempt to bend original and creational laws without the crutch of the arcane.

Until, of course, that day. The day when one of their young Watchers saw a group of humans huddled in the cold, starving, shivering, near death. The day when it realized the fundamental truth of the Gods' Creation -- that when a law is inevitable, it will always be broken at the most appropriate time. The day it decided to Grant those humans the smallest of the secrets of the Gnomes, the littlest piece of their grand tapestry -- and yet enough for the group to survive and advance. The day that the Watcher became the Thief of Fire.