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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeNotCharles" data-source="post: 5406471" data-attributes="member: 79945">As Mikara gets distracted, 7 Rabbit turns back to his companions.  "People here have..."  He pauses and winces as Sound of Stone begins bellowing.  When the second song finishes, he continues with a pained expression. "People here have some crazy ideas about the stars.  In fact, the stars are great beings, of power to rival the gods, but indifferent to us.  They merely drift through the sky pursuing their own unknowable interests.  That very unfathom - un -" His grasp of the common tongue fails him for a second and he lapses back into Megari, the Dwarven tongue of the Valley of Bone for a few words.  "Ahem.  What I mean to say is, the fact that we cannot understand them is actually the key to understanding them.  The gods have goals, they take actions to reach those goals, they interact with mortals and sometimes deceive them.  When a vision or omen is received from one of the gods, we can never be certain it is a true vision or a lie, calculated to serve their own ends.  And even when a god reveals the future truly, we can never be sure it won't be changed in response to a plea from the god's worshippers. But the stars neither act nor react.  By watching the heavens we can observe them interact with each other, but never with us.  But although they never take a hand directly, they have great power and merely by existing and gazing on the earth, they influence our fates much as the gods do, merely in more subtle and less deliberate ways.  So, although it is slower and more indirect than studying the words of the gods, studying the movements of the stars gives clues to the forces which affect us and our fates.  And much like the gods, the stars have knowledge of the future, and their movements seem to be calculated to avoid or hasten certain events.  Thus, over generations, by observing the stars closely we can compile exact charts of their movements and compare these charts to historical events.  Once we have learned enough we can recognize patterns in the stars that have happened before, and guess at what future events these patterns will signify." He lapses into silent thought, his brow troubled.</blockquote>

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