So I just came back to the game after a long time absent. I founded my fortress, "Endshoots" in a savage forest. There are lots of fruit trees at the site, so when my first wave of migrants came, I assigned lots of them to be plant gatherers. It is the first fall now--I was checking what sort of fruit my gatherer-dwarves had in their inventories when I discovered that one of their number, Ustuth Lashëdumat, carries a book around with her.
From the first screen I could only see the title, "The Mystery of the Struggle." Upon examining it in detail, it is a twenty-page essay, written by Ustuth herself, about the time a kobold beat her up in the year 109.
"The writing has a touch of melancholy. Overall, the prose is amateurish at best." The wiki says that books can only be bound in stone, wood, metal, or glass, but Ustuth's is bound in sapphire.
I then examine Ustuth herself. Her traits are not unusual. Her values are those typical of a dwarf, except that she "personally does not care about family one way or another and doesn't see cooperation as valuable." One thing unusual is that nothing distracts her. Other dwarves in Endshoots get "unfocused" or "distracted" if they aren't given decent meals, or if they've been kept away from their friends, or if they are unable to worship their deity. Ustuth becomes "unfettered" after staying occupied or practicing a skill, but is unfazed by bad circumstances.
Onwards to her relationships. A couple of her cousins also live in Endshoots, but her mother, father, and siblings all live elsewhere. She worships two deities, the god of wealth and fortresses, and the goddess of the earth, neither an unusual patron for a dwarf. But--quite strange--she has a "master" listed. And--even stranger--he has a human name, Nepe Mumadap.
I return to Ustuth's own description. Her age leaps out at me, as it didn''t before. She is sixteen, born in 109--the same year she "fought", according to her book, the kobold.
I think to myself that the dwarf must have been terrorized by a kobold as an infant, kept the memories held tight in her mind throughout her childhood, and then written a book about it as a teenager--and bound it, somehow, in sapphire. Then, before the age of sixteen, she must have sought out Nepe Mumadap, who is, perhaps, a necromancer, and--
But then I look again. She was born, according to her profile, on 23 Moonstone 109--that is, early winter. The incident with the kobold occurred, according to "The Mystery of the Struggle", during Granite 109--that is, early spring, the very beginning of the year, before Moonstone!
I unpause the game. Ms. Lashëdumat carries her haul of plumbs to the grand fruit stockpiles within the fortress. She sets back out, perhaps to gather cherries, still with her anachronistic, sapphire-bound book in hand. I, meanwhile, appeal to the forums for help.
Ustuth has a master--does that mean that she is a necromancer? Or that she will become one? If she does, is she a danger to the fortress? Or an asset? How is her book bound in sapphire? How can she have been beaten up by a kobold before she was born? Why does she have a book in the first place?