Dereth: Crucible of Life

An essay by Lady Aiyou-Shih Tan of the Dereth Exploration Society. An excerpt of the text from the Collectors' Hunt reads:

 Of Dereth's accumulated menagerie of creatures, few have proven to be of any use as livestock to human settlers. Attempts to put captured drudges and banderlings to labor have met with almost no success. The prisoners proved unable to comprehend any instructions. Most experiments with reedshark watchdogs resulted in total disaster. The Lugian people seem to have mastered the taming of these beasts, but it remains beyond our ken. (I have heard rumors that a powerful Aluvian life mage has achieved the same success as the Lugians, but I cannot personally confirm this). While some Holtsburgian farmers have yoked auroch bulls, they admit the beasts are of far better value when slaughtered and ground into mince. There appears to be precious little use for Derethian fauna except in death; expert craftsmen can rework bits of their corpses into useable items. Consider the armoredillo's useful plates, or the furry hide of the mattekar. And while drudges and their kin have proven of no use for labor, their heads, at least, have recently made fine harvest festival masks. It is a terrible truth that we of the Exploration Society, and our colleagues in the Environmental Defense League, have been unable to find a practical reason to encourage the sparing of our wild companions. And yet there is the enigma of the gromnie.