Selcouth, God of Wanderers

Samuel Swan, Barrister & Solicitor

The Godhead's tears fall.

And fall.

His laughter—laughter at my expense—continues, reverberating down through his stoneheadedness into the ground, and outwardly in all directions.

The ground shakes even as the flourishing plants become hypergrowth.

Grasses rise above huts. Shrubs choke livestock. Tomatoes and other fruits enclose whatever has the misfortune of trying to occupy the same space they occupy: tools, animals, people. No one can hear you scream from within the confines of a giant overripe tomato!

It is both an earthquake and a superflorification.

And the tears keep falling, their moisture accumulating. Supersaturating the soil, failing to drain, the water level rising. Beginning to flood.

The Godhead's mirthful shaking dismantles the fences, weakens the wooden skeletons of the village's structures, around which plantlife wraps itself tentacularly as if possessed of a mind (or minds) of its (their) own, and the waters enter from the bottom up.

Thask's farmers scream. And Tabatha—Tabatha—

I awake sweating in an unfamiliar bed in a small musty room surrounded by foreign sounds and ceaseless noise. It is night but there is no darkness, for beyond the room's sole window people and flickering lights pass even at this hour, pass and knock, and pass and speak, and pass and...

It takes me several seconds to realize where I am. In the city, in an inn, in a room for which I most likely overpaid with some of the coins my mom gave me to get me started on my adventure. The realization brings with it comfort but also shivers. That image—that horribly vivid image—of Thask was only a nightmare.

I wipe the sweat off my face with the back of my hand and try to calm my pulse to a pace less-than drumroll. I am OK, I tell myself. Everything is OK. Now I remember what happened. I entered the city, with its extreme commotion, which so discombobulated me that I retreated into the first inn I passed and rented a room for the night. And I am in that room now, and it is still dark, but not dark enough for me, not country dark but city dim, and as I sit on the old creaky bed, waiting for the stained sheets to dry, I wonder whether it is in fact people making all that din I hear or if it is perhaps the city itself, whispering.

When I wake up again it's morning.

I don't remember falling asleep a second time, but I must have, and now I rush out of the room, into the inn's downstairs common area, where a few people have already made their way. Most, I imagine, are still slumbering. I imagine their faces and their bodies, their quests and their experiences. I have never been inside a place (the city or the inn) in which there are so many others. I am not used to being with people who are too many for me to ever know.

"Kid, you wanna eat something?" the innkeeper asks me.

"Sure," I say.

I go over to him and pick out a piece of bread with a thick slice of some kind of meat. I ask also for milk, which he pours with a slightly raised eyebrow. "You wouldn't prefer beer?"

"I'm too young to buy alcohol," I say.

"Suit yourself. But if you heard me ask your age, that makes exactly one of us."

I eat the bread and drink the milk. It's cold and tastes watered down. The bread tastes like it has chalk in it. The meat—better not think about the meat.

"I am in search of a lawyer specializing in game mechanics," I say. "Do you happen to know one?"

"Lawyers. Ha! Do I know one? Kid, there are more lawyers in this city than there are decent, law-abiding cits. They smell injury too. And need. You go out on the street and curse your luck, and you'll have a dozen of them on you like rats on a corpse."