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Chapter 23: Storytime, Part Two

“I found your net, my disgrace. You may keep the ashes of your efforts,” he handed the vial and, leaving behind the shocked Saho, he went for a leisurely walk in the forest.

Saho took the vial and pressed it against his chest. He went inside the cave in hope of it all being a sick joke of his father, but the net was nowhere to be found. So he took the stone chisel he used to write men to life over the walls of the cave and set off to climb the mountain. For three days and nights he struggled against savage winds and bone freezing, bitter cold, just to reach, among the snow of the peak, a patch of exposed, pitch black volcanic glass. Obsidian, pawn. With whatever was left of his strength, he steadied the chisel and, by hitting it with the oblong stone he used in lieu of a hammer (for a gharial, Gadorprims knows a lot about human tools. Amazing. Dumbfounding.) Saho extracted pieces of glass, until one of them roughly resembled the blade of a short sword. With care a patience he whetted the edge, using the hammer-stone to break off little flakes of glass, until it became sharp enough to cut through the skin of his fingers with no effort. He then used his remaining braid to secure the blade to the vial that contained the ashes of his net, manufacturing a frail sword with an impossible edge. With his task done, wanting to give up to weariness and cold, hunger and the lack of sleep, he approached one of the highest ledges of the mountain, one that loomed high above the entrance of the cave. There, like frozen in time, he waited: he waited for his father to come out of the cave and sit to admire nature like he often did. He waited for Salomenon to sit under the ledge, thousands of meters below from where he was.

Then, Saho took a leap of faith, casting himself head first from the ledge. Sword grasped firmly as he fell, he placed the blade in front of his nose, praying that his father didn’t look up soon enough to realize he still had time to move, to dodge. A few seconds later, the sword struck true, just as Salomenon raised his gaze and opened his mouth. Split his skull, right between the eyes, cushioning the fall of Saho and leaving the sword buried deep inside the brains of the god of knowledge. Exhausted and lying on the floor, with no strength left to even look away, Saho beheld how his father, the primordial God who had raised and taught him all which he knew, began to shatter, not unlike the volcanic glass when chiseled. He bled light, pawn, Salomenon bled light as he came undone. And when the god exhaled his last breath, the underpinnings of the world became evident to the mortals. The magic, the stats and their numbers, it all came out of hiding. Knowledge lost the privilege of being ontologically forbidden.

It is said that for days Saho laughed and laughed, so much and so loud and it reached so far and so wide that the hyenas began to imitate him and the local birds to try to.

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After days of guffawing, a group of men and women, no more brave than you are, gathered enough valor to investigate the sound they thought demonic, just to find their dear god bloodied next to the mound of ashes that, they were blissfully unaware, was once his father.

They acted quickly, drawing Saho to their encampment as he looked at them with a thankful stare, saying nothing, because the laughter had erased all the words from his mind. Once there, men and women who enjoyed the gifts of life and free will nursed the god back to health, using both old methods and newfound magic born from the shattering of Salomenon (Note: shattering gods seems to be a net positive so far).

His believers, out of their want to please the deity, asked him what he wanted not a mere hour after he recovered the ability to talk. “A ladder made out of rope,” he said, “a strong, unyielding ladder of rope.” They doubted if they had understood him for a second, but seeing the confidence in the god’s eyes, they swiftly began to work on the petition.

And so only a mere week passed before he was off, on his way back to the cave, after thanking the men and women that took care of him and reassuring them that, in times of need, he would come to their aid: all they needed to do was to call his name.

He sprinted back to the cave. Jumped over fallen logs plagued by mushrooms and small water pools that housed graceful amphibians. Swatted ferns and vines to the side as he raced for the cave, for the mother that waited in the dark hole. Your god, Pawn, was a decided one, and I find that admirable.

When he arrived at the cave, he rushed to the pit, cast the ladder into it, and left a heavy rock pressing over the top end of the ladder, rock that he sat over. Morganuca took her time, distrusting of the world, soothed into a lull of existence by decades down the hole. But, that’s the thing about animals: one cannot forget or erase instinct. With her claws reduced to mere nubs by so much scratching the walls, with her hair having made a whole mattress in the bottom of the hole, with her eyes blinded by the minimal amount of light the torches produced, Morganuca came back out of the hole, and snarled at his son. What followed was an embrace, her heavy paws against his back, his hands sinking into her mistreated fur, they cried, together in that embrace, they cried, and a tear from Saho and a tear from Morganuca found each other too, mixing, spilling over the floor of the cave, in the same place where, when the mother and the son let each other go and decided to get out of that dark and sad place, they found a baby girl. She didn’t cry, she only snored, and she was neither human nor beast. Presenting characteristics of both kinds of beings, a new goddess had been born. Enter Tacchimel, goddess of beastkin (I always suspected the stupidity of catgirls was the result of severe inbreeding).