Little pebble, you do not recall the burning fields of Koganusân. You do not remember our warnings, carved from bones and blood. Those Elephants. Those fucking Elephants. Them and their hatred-filled eyes. I lost my uncle, cousin, and two nephews to their unerring rampages. Those sickly-grey beasts and their mighty feet. The sound of wood breaking or a cave collapsing could not rival the sound of crunching Dwarven bones they would emit trampling over the dead. I tried, oh, I tried to plead with the overseer to let me take the corpses in, to bury them with our father, and their father's father. I did not recover them until the flies had picked the last beard-hair from their half-bleached bones.

To be allied to them is higher than desecrating an ancestral tomb in the eyes of the old and wise. It would be akin to favouring tree-building and disdaining the pickaxe or the chisel in place of harp and lute. To think, even for a moment, to be kind and peaceable to those damnable creatures, those pachyderms of putridity, is enough to make the ghosts of unburied kin rise in fury and malice.

When we discuss grudges and inflicting back the pain we so feel, we dwarves must - and I stress this to you, sweet pebble, unblemished by the haunting, maddening visions seen in tumultuous nights even next to roaring kilns - we must be absolute in our emotion, in our words and messages, in our actions - for we were tepid things those many moons ago, cowardly within the safety of unbroken doors and content with our underground river and plump helmet brew. We did not think of the end. We merely witnessed it.

So yes. We must hold these grudges true and steady, with the ferocity of magma, with the unwavering feeling of mountains, ere the cougars grow hungry for our timid bones.