What’s so special about humans, you ask? Why do we put up with them, much less follow them around and build our communities around theirs? Easy: it’s their magic with food. 

You Fe and your Worg cousins could not honestly deny the allure. You can pretend to keep your distance, but you’re never too far away from their wine, never too aloof for their roasted meats.

We Diggers don’t bother with such self-deception. Cold oats and nuts don’t compare, even remotely, to a slice of warm bread, some cheese, and a mug of ale. Life without their food would be flat; a barren existence at best. So, yes, we mingle our lives with theirs. We prefer to mine ores within easy trading distance, to burrow and carve our homes beneath their settlements, lending them stone for theirs, and we make tools and weapons to fit their strange, long hands. We’re glad to trade our magic for access to theirs: their incredible ability to transform raw ingredients into nutritious meals that they take so thoroughly for granted. 

Have you noticed that a given amount of food, perhaps what would have you hungry again in just a few hours, could sate your whole family for a day once the humans have worked their magic on it? 

Thinking about it, I’m sure your kind could not have discovered the true meaning of leisure until the humans first offered you smoked and preserved meats. Food that could keep for months instead of days, allowing you to turn your hunting from necessity into sport. 

Your ancestors could not have known the meaning of luxury until they experienced the flavors that humans could add to venison and fish and fowl with their spices, with the sauces that somehow only their magic can conjure out of fire and water and seemingly effortless will.

I do not know how their magic works, just as they cannot comprehend how my kind works metal so easily or how your kind can bend trees and plants to your will. I have attempted to turn grain into flour, and that into bread, and I was met with disappointing results: mashed kernels of wheat turned to tasteless paste in my hands instead of the sweet-smelling dough a human child can effortlessly knead. My pasty attempt at dough burned merrily when placed in one of their ovens, when just an hour before and an hour after, a young human pulled loaf upon loaf of bread from the same heated space. 

The humans in residence laughed and laughed at my attempts, but I took comfort knowing that only the strongest humans can shape iron, and only crudely. It takes them incredible effort to extract iron from ore, and their best can barely make simple steel – with days of effort and massive waste – and none have ever managed the finer alloys. Unlike my cousins, humans struggle to pull even homely gems from the earth without damage, and most cannot tell one kind of stone from another, nor shape it without breaking it. 

To put it into terms you Fe can appreciate: They have to kill a tree to make a table. They have to chop it down and cut it apart and stick it back together to coax a tree into the shapes they want. Oh, stop looking so disgusted. I spoke already of taking one’s magic for granted. If your kind didn’t keep their prideful distance, there would be more great forests left in the human territories for you and your cousins to roam. If your kind offered up your talents to help humans build their homes and their walls and all the things they cut down trees to make, their cities could be surrounded by forests instead of just fields. 

Those fields, though. Humans do have some talent with soil, I’ll admit; as they’ve surpassed all but the Ur at enticing edible plants to grow in abundance, with these dense and well-ordered fields. This is one realm where my people’s cooperation with humans has given benefit to everyone; with our stonework running longer, cleaner aqueducts and canals; our soil-cunning in improving their best fields; our metalwork crafting their best tools. 

Think about it: it’s that ability to turn out great quantities of foodstuff from mere acres that lets them cultivate and feed all the delicious animals that your kind buy from them. If it weren’t for their agriculture, there would be far fewer livestock, and probably a lot fewer Fe. Your kind would be scrabbling for squirrels, competing for every mouthful not already claimed by the Worg, and my kin would be living on mushrooms and hoarded seeds.

Oh, I suppose you’re right. The Fe could benefit from the Ur, instead, if you could somehow convince some of them to shape the land on your behalf. With their magic, there would be more great forests, and they would be more abundant, and your prey more plentiful. And, yes, there would be plenty of nuts and fruit and fungi for my kind to gather.

But could you live like that? Without the flavors and aromas of human-made food? Without spices and sauces? Without the leisure to pursue your own arts, leisure that comes with the luxury of a full larder? I know for certain that I could not. 

I don’t really understand how the Onk and the Gob manage life without the humans, why they don’t even bother trying to trade. I’ve only heard rumors, and it’s not like I would want to talk to one. But they’re out there, apparently eating grass and garbage and rotten meat and loving every bite.