Guild Master Kadish was a D’ni man who lived in the time leading up to the Fall of D’ni in DE 9400 (AD 1744). He was a member of the Guild of Writers who was dismissed for unknown reasons, but during his time in the guild he proved to be a talented writer and amassed a fortune. After leaving the guild, he purchased the Great Tree Pub, an upper-class lounge located at the base of the residential district of J'Taeri on Ae’gura, a store front in Ae’gura’s canyon mall, which he renovated as a museum of outsider artwork, and an industrial building in the Ashem’en district where he set up a testing station for an experiment in feeding the lake algae. The pub and museum thrived under his management, and were very popular with the D’ni nobility and intelligentsia.

Kadish was fascinated by the Words of the Watcher, and wanted to be the Grower, a person the Watcher had said would be able to control space and time. Kadish went to extraordinary lengths to prove that he was the Grower. He wrote or purchased Ages for the sole purpose of creating effects to fulfill prophesized events. Some of the Age we know he owned were Ahnonay, the Ahnonay Cathedral, and Er’cana. The latter Age was a granary Age he purchased from the Guild of Caterers. In Ahnonay, he constructed a massive machine to create an illusion of traveling through time. These Ages were intended to fill one paragraph of Words, which said:

The grower will take time.
The grower will bring light.
The grower will have Ages.
Take time, and move it to and fro.
Bring light, and give it to the dark places.
Have Ages, and link to them without bindings.

Ahnonay was intended to show that he could “take time, and move it to and fro”. Er’cana was intended to restore the lake algae to full health, showing that he was the one to “bring light”.

Kadish placed linking books to the Ahnonay Cathedral and Er’cana in the Great Tree Pub, and renovated the pub itself, creating an intricate puzzle known as The Path of the Shell that blocked off access to the "Great Tree" sculpture the pub took its name from. Kadish boasted that he was the only person able to solve the puzzle, and said that the solution was obvious to anyone who had read the writings of The Watcher.

Kadish had written a private Age of called Tolesa around DE 9395 (AD 1739). Approximately five years later, he fled to it during the events of the Fall of D'ni. He died there, alone and without hope, but it could have been avoided. There was a linking book to his gallery in Ae’gura in the vault next to him. In a final letter found lying near his body he wrote: There is a linking book here, but I will not leave. I have decided this. I am here with all I could desire. No one can take it from me. I will die here with it all.

Yeesha wrote comments in the margin of the death note in which she expressed her disbelief that a man like Kadish would end that way. It seems that she got an idea and eventually wrote another instance of Tolesa. In that version of the Age, Kadish’s body and most of his treasure is gone, and she left other scraps of paper scattered around. On them, she wrote: "I have conquered the stream. These streams said to flow of their own will, now flow where I [direct(?)]",  “These are the powers of gods and I now have this power”, and "I’ve saved his life".

Those words have caused explorers to speculate endlessly about their meaning. Most believe that it means she went back in time to rescue Kadish, and there is even an idea that she took him from Tolesa back to the D’ni cavern during the time when she was learning the Art from her mentor, Calam. This theory proposes that Kadish was the man who murdered Calam. This is a theory which has no evidence to support it, and which has logical inconsistencies.

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