The Brownie Culture: An In-Depth Study
The Brownie of Agon is a tribal culture, where various tribes may have completely contradictory goals and philosophies. The largest of tribes are the common Brownie whose sole ideology is to attack anything that is bigger than them. There are also tribes of Brownie that dedicate themselves to the protection of nature and the tending of the Oaklords. There is even a small tribe that apparently only shows itself once a year during the Feast of the Dawning Frost, travelling around with an errant Oaklord and stealing gifts from the well to do and spreading them around to the hungry and lowliest of Agon's peoples.
It is interesting to note that among all the various denizens and fauna of Agon, the brownie is at one and the same time the most prolific AND seemingly made up of a specific and finite population of individual brownies.
At first, this presents an impossible anomaly. How can both these situations exist for this species when they are completely contradictory to each other? Simply put, they cannot.
However, if one thinks outside the chaos chest, so to speak, a possibility presents itself. Though it is one that boggles the mind! We know that the population of individual brownies does not exceed a certain number due to the copious and almost frenzied chronicling of their day to day lives in individual diaries. Each brownie individual will journal the events of their life (or lives as it may be) in a detailed collection of stories that is annually deposited on the doorstep of our central libraries.
It is only recently, after a period of re-cataloging all the literature within our halls, that we discovered a rather strange phenomenon repeated consistently throughout all the entries. At almost regular intervals within their diaries, each Brownie will often describe the coming of a 'Light-Night' and the subsequent entry shall always talk about the arrival of the 'Re-light-Delight'.
I should, perhaps at this point, also mention that all Brownie speech and literature are strictly in the form of rhyming poetry. The latest entry, for example, is from a rather infamous Brownie who has been dubbed General Binkles by some notable Agonian citizens. He writes:
In the Heart of Eanna, today I'ma gonna
Play with some long-legs, then raid their food eggs!
See one there! Binkles will dare!
Fly, fly! my arrows hum! Straight for the Hoomans bum!
A screech from the heart and he jumps with a start!
Like a shadow, I dive under a cart, faster than a Gobbo's fart!
The account continues with General Binkles describing his taunting of the hapless human and then the details of his harassing and eventually conquering a local chicken. Then as he describes his exit of the city, Binkles recounts a “sneaky ambush” by some locals who after an apparently heroic battle of seemingly epic proportions, eventually overcome him. At this point, he describes the darkness that slowly comes over him and the coming of the Light-Night. The very next entry talks of the Relight-Delight, and an awakening in the hills outside of Red Moon over 45 leagues away. This phenomenon is common in all Brownie journals. Now whether this occurs through mystical (some sort of soul-transference upon a Brownie's death to another Brownie body?) or mundane (Brownie personas being passed down through the generations of Brownie-folk) remains a mystery, at least for the moment.
Arturo Vandelay
We are the architects of our own serenity now.