““Rich, you said?” The Trell struggled to drag the conversation away from what he knew to be a looming precipice. “More like mired in minutiae. Probably explains why it’s dust and ashes. Arguing over seeds in the wind while barbarians batter down the gates. Indolence takes many forms, but it comes to every civilization that has outlived its will. You know this as well as I. In this case it was an indolence characterized by a pursuit of knowledge, a frenzied search for answers to everything, no matter the value of such answers. A civilization can as easily drown in what it knows as in what it doesn’t know. Consider,” he continued, “Gothos’ Folly. Gothos’s curse was in being too aware – of everything. Every permutation, every potential. Enough to poison every scan he cast on the world. It availed him naught, and worse, he was aware of even that.””
