(A Life in Silence ) Hob Both stile and gate, horse-way and foot-path Poor Tom hath been scared out of his good wits Bless thee, good man’s son, from the foul fiend! Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once—of lust, as Obidicut; Hobbididence, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder; Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing, who since possesses chambermaids and waiting-women So, bless thee, master! —William Shakespeare, King Lear (IV i.) The mogwoi are not as other fey They share similarities, but their thought processes are more alien They were shaped in a different time Their points of reference, their basic assumptions, are all a little different Their interactions with reality are a little different Their goals and motivations are a little different And Hob is their king h As it is told, the mogwoi sovereigns were birthed right alongside the Material Plane They were the mere castings of unused fragments of the very stuff of reality, coalescing and gaining sentience over time They predate all other life in the Material Plane, leading many to consider them the progenitors of all fey and even natural creatures But there is no direct evidence for this, and their often alien natures would suggest otherwise Within the mogwoi, Hob appears to command some measure of status He is recognized as the eldest of all mogwoi Given Hob and his progeny’s natures, the available lore is scarce, though stranger, darker, wilder tales about them emerge—primarily from Flibbertigibbet and his progeny, so given the source, who can judge what’s mere farce—than are told of any other mogwoi lord OF GREAT WORKS There is no record of Hob’s activity after his disappearance from the other mogwoi and before his arrival at the secluded valley that he would make his own Driven by unknown cosmic equations and occult guidance, once there, he proceeded to create three hundred little sculptures from swamp mud and painstakingly brought each one to life as the matabiri Finished, Hob sat in his swamp, silent, for nearly a