Skip to main content

What the Reed-woman Told Me (Excerpt)

I met this woman in Elz Ast at the dockyards, where she was explaining to wide-eyed soldiers how to survive in a land like Eol, as they prepared to sail up the White Sea for some expedition or another. Probably not a Kalikos one, I think. 

She told me later, "What do I know about Eol? But those boys and girls feel safer, don't they?" I admired her ability to reconcile truth and lies, though not so bluntly, and she said, "Ah, I've been doing it for long enough." At that point I began taking notes. This is part of what I wrote down. 

Within the cities, they say that Aether Primolt had four sons. That Dayzatar was a being of pure thought, that Lodril was a being of pure emotion, and that Yelm had to mediate between them, and so he ruled over both. And Arraz was his servant in this.

They say that Lodril never forgot Yelm ruled over him, and that he had to sometimes fight his sons to get them to remember this. They say that Dayzatar never forgot Yelm's presence, alone among material things, and appointed his spawn Polaris and Ourania to fill in when Yelm had an unavoidable appointment in Hell. 

In the dry lands, they will tell you Yelm was afraid. That when Lodril descended to bring fire to the Earth, which was cold from the Dark which gnawed at her from below, he called out to his brothers to follow him. That Dayzatar would only look at him with one eye, and that Yelm only descended halfway. But Yelm warms the world regardless, in his own way, and Dayzatar's Eye still provides us with guidance. 

They say that whenever there was a problem brewing for Yelm, Lodril would go and fix it first, and then abide by Yelm's judgement after. They say that anyone could go to Lodril and hear his advice and it would always be good. They say that Yelm would only marry a woman who could reject the world like he did, but Lodril loved Oria for what she is and not what she could do. I have never heard them say anything of Arraz one way or another.

We are the river people. What do we care with the lofty gods and the tall gods with the big long spears? When Oslira came roaring up from the south, most people fled. But some of us leapt into her mouth and were preserved. And then when she had calmed down, we emerged and were met by long-legged Biselenslib, poling a boat up Oslira's length. She showed us the parts of Oslira's flesh we could live off of, the reeds and berries and groundnuts, and finally the rice. But without her feathered neck and strong beak, we could no more eat the rice than we could the poison ivy. Some people tried to be birds by dressing as them, and they went away east. 

When she saw this, Biselenslib called out for her husband, burning red Shargash, and he descended from the skies and beat the rice with his club, and we were all very frightened until we saw that he was doing it gently, tapping the rice off. But then Oslira rose and said she would not suffer Shargash to touch her again without consummation, and Biselenslib argued with her, and at last they agreed to share Shargash between them, and where the three consummated together, Shargash dropped one armring, which is now the city of Alkoth. But the other armring he gave to us, the people of two of his wives. I have a piece of it here, on a string around my neck, and any Shargashi who sees it will know I am a greenwife or a redwife or possibly both. 

We have had other sunderings- people going off to follow billygoats, people abandoning Oslira for her children to the southwest, people joining the strange people to the northwest. But we remember where we came from, and what's really important in life, and no city along our Oslira could live without us. That is enough.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Regiments, Battalia, and Corps: Dissecting the Lunar Army

The Lunar Army had, for the majority of its existence, precisely two advantages over its opposition. Firstly, it had the Lunar Way and the ability to combine magicians of assorted types into consolidated magical units, which enabled the Lunar Army to consistently pull magical surprises out of its back pocket, even when (as was often the case) the raw power of its opposition was somewhat greater. Examples of this are well-known in the specialist literature. The ability of the magicians during the Second Invasion of Prax to use their Lodril priests to suppress the summoned Oakfed Lowfire stands in for the type.  Secondly, however, the Lunar Army spread this consolidation somewhat into the conventional units, allowing them to create heterogeneous tactical and operational forces, where existing armies fought with homogeneous subunits that operated separately from one another. This consolidation proceeded only fitfully and in very limited quantities. It was as often a hindrance as a benefit

Sedenya, Yahweh, Inanna, and the Gautama Buddha; A Comparison, Part I: Yahweh

This blog has, up until now, had a fairly standard format- diegetic documents with varying degrees of editorial commentary that exists in a liminal state between the diegesis and external reality. But while this is fun, enjoyable, and playful, it’s also a bit limiting. As such, going forward I plan to mix in essays and other such non-diegetic documents, where I put forward ideas without wrapping them in various imagined containers and using complicated webs of references. This first one is about comparing Glorantha’s Red Goddess with three religious entities from the real world. In the process of writing, it has grown enough to demand being split into multiple parts, which should follow shortly after one another in sequence.    So. Before I begin, I’m going to put some reminders and indications of content for the benefit of the reader. First of all, none of this is an attempt to arrive at the “truth of Sedenya” or proselytize the previously determined truth to you, the audience, becaus

1629 ST, 4th Year of the 8th Wane, Fragments, Miscellaneous.

 "To the best of my recollection, it said, 'The great sin of the goddess was that she did not hate, and took that seriously. Even Erissa the merciful has her Natyrsa side, who if not an eager slayer of the vomitus of unreality, at the least would not lift a finger to aid any creature of the outer void or their corrupted servants. When she was confronted with the squalling hideous thing, the overt abomination, the oozing, gushing impurity of her flayed wings, she did not stamp on it and crush it and finish the unfinished task of Arkat, she did not take the damned thing and annihilate it, she looked the chiropteran vileness in two of her eyes and said, "You're hurt and bleeding, like me. What do you say we stick together?"'  'Nor was this even the prelude to an absorption of the shredded, ragged wings of her youth! Nay, she was honest and kept her word and the Bat remained herself, a thing apart from her origin point, given an appalling further leash on lif