Selcouth, God of Wanderers

The Salvator of Thask

Another tear falls, and another. Another and another, anotheranotheranother—and the Godhead is laughing, uproariously shedding tears not of sadness but of joy. His cheeks are wet. His mouth (what I can see of it) curved upwards into a smile.

And already I'm making my way carefully down the stairs winding around Him. I can't see the ground yet, just the thick white clouds, through which I descend still hearing the Godhead's great guffaws, but less so and less so, ever quieter, until the clouds have thinned and the world comes into clear relief, and what a few hours ago was brown and barren has become—magically? divinely?—green and lush and alive, and things are moving down there, not just figures but also plants, flowers, crops: growing, blooming, bearing literal and proverbial fruit. Even the air smells and tastes different.

When I am nearly descended, I make out Tabatha of Rask, around whom Thask's farmers are whooping and hollering, celebrating, jumping up and down with their pitchforks, and Tabatha points at me and, stepping onto the fertile ground, I feel I am a hero.

"The master storyteller returns!" she cries.

The farmers stop their celebrating and stare at me with reverence.

"Where even Harpsichordion failed, Grom has triumphed," she says, and for the first time in my life I feel dignified, worthy. "I knew it as soon as I laid eyes on you, lying there naked and unconscious in the barn."

I was naked?

"You undressed me?" I ask.

"Yes, but that's far from the point I'm trying to make, which is that Fate brought you to us—and you brought us salvation." She spreads her arms wide, encompassing the entirety of Thask, where everywhere crops are still growing, stems elongating, vines climbing, fruits swelling and ripening. "You, Grom, are the Salvator of Thask™."

That is true. I did do a pretty heroic deed. There could be a ballad composed about me, perhaps even a play someday. Maybe an opera. A grand painting depicting me on the platform, saying saviour words into the Godhead's ear. In the future, the painting might hang in a museum. The opera would make me rich. The ballad could be performed a hundred years from now by a bard in a tavern in some distant land, where someone asks, "Bard, play us something we haven't heard before," and the bard, after giving it serious thought, picks up his lute, strums it gently and begins...

[I actually wrote an eighty-line poem in AABB rhyme scheme as the lyrics to my imagined ballad about myself—then, mercifully for you, my dear reader, unremembered it out of shame.]

Then again, I realize it's not about money or fame for me. I don't need to be praised. It's about discovering the potential that I feel has always been in me, wanting badly to get out, like a bluebird in my freakin' heart. It's about testing myself, about discovering who I am and what I can accomplish. It's about exploring the world and seeing the sights and helping people nobody else wants to help.

(But I wouldn't say No to money, fame and all that it brings.)

(Not at first, anyway.)

(Youth always precedes wisdom.)

"Are you done?" asks Tabatha of Thask.

Oh. "Yes," I say.

"So with that little introspection out of the way, tell us what we all want to hear. Tell us the tale that made the Godhead weep when nothing else could. Tell us the Tragedy of Randy and Gertrude."

And Tabatha and the farmers of Thask close in on me—or so it seems—with great expectation, and that's when my heroism starts caving in on me. Because was I brave? I literally risked nothing. Tabatha herself told me that if I failed I would face no consequences, and did I really tell a tale so powerful that I made a deity cry? No, I did a terrible job and the Godhead took a little pity on me, and I made him accidentally tear up, not with a story but with the story-of-my-life (up until that point,) which, it turned out, was a decent comedy.