Marbles: The Hawk Who Refused to Die a Virgin

Chapter 1: The Screeching Reaper

It must be harvest time, because Opal Stone was currently being used as raptor bait.

"He's going to go blind doing that all day," said Brutus, the huntmaster for today's harvest patrol.

"He's a chronic raptor baiter," said Silas, picking his teeth with a grimy fingernail.

"Opal, we're joking about the link between pleasuring oneself habitually, which you undoubtedly do, and losing one's sight. This is a human superstition with no grounding in scientific thought," said Brutus. "But, by happy coincidence, you will be alive when you lose your eyes. Hawks tend to tear those out first."

The sun seemed to pulse. It was not just unseasonably warm, it was unconscionably hot. Except for Opal, who was tied to a stake standing in a walking path between wheat fields, the rest  of the hunting party was lying flat in the two bordering fields, covered and camouflaged by chaff. They were all gnomes, they were all a little too drunk on small beer, and they were all completely miserable.

"Yo," said Opal, the sweat from his blond forelocks draining into his eyes, turning the whites veiny, and bright red, like a scrotum draped over a glow bulb. "Pour me some more beer guys. It's like, so fucking hot standing here."

Opal was there to keep raptors from attacking the god-wranglers--teams of gnomes who guided the Owl God around from field to field. The Owl God was a ten meter tall statue of a barn owl. You know the owl with the white, heart shaped face? And it wasn't the entire owl, just its head.

The creamy smooth feathers of the Owl God's face were pure pearl--polished, iridescent nacreous flakes, carved too finely for modern gnomic artificers to imitate even on a small scale, much less on something like this titanic statue.

Its eyes were obsidian, rolling around continuously at great speed, but utterly smooth and silent, so that you couldn't easily tell that they were moving that fast. The Owl God's head researcher had tried to touch the right eye and had been pulled in, his right arm ripped from his body, briefly turning that eye into a wet maelstrom of spinning crimson. That researcher had made  a name for himself when, after being tourniquetted and given a fortifying snifter of elderberry wine, he had counted how many times his own mashed hand appeared within a minute to deduce they otherwise featureless eye's rate of revolution.

The outline of the Owl God's head was brown quartz--a common stone, unprized, and almost dingy. It did, however, smell like tobacco, and infusing stones with scent had become a uniquely gnomic obsession since Opal's warren had been granted inquiry rights to the mad statue. For the last thirty years, every god statue on earth had gone off the rails mentally. They had gone from being the staid and majestic pillars of kingdoms, touchstones with features worn smooth by generations of supplicants, to gibbering, perpetually tantrumming juggernauts laying waste to the countryside.

Just totally ratfuck insane. And the Owl God was no different. And this thing loved to scream.

Every ten minutes precisely, the Owl God would screech from its open beak. These intense bursts of piercing sound had decimated the population of the capital city humans had built around the Owl God. Imagine a car alarm going off, but the alarm is loud enough to shatter a porcelain teacup, and the alarm goes on forever, and you and your parents and your parents' parents etc. had all been baptized under the watchful headlights of that car.

The humans in the city had worshipped the Owl God for three centuries, which is a long ass time in human terms, and they couldn't bear to bury it, or mummify it in cloth to deaden the sound. You were, of course, forbidden to obscure a god's gaze. And to try and shut its mouth? Yikes. To physically interfere with the statue was an act of blasphemy that surely would be repaid a hundredfold, in this life or the next. And to cover your ears? To refuse to listen to your furious god? Well, that's certainly going to jeopardize your soul. And when you die the Owl God will rip it out of your body and gobble it down whole.