by Logan Jacobs
“Okay,” the invisible god agreed. “You guys can walk over with me, and I’ll go in and have them let down the drawbridge for you.”
So we walked over a mile downstream back to the temple. The ground was soggy beneath the horses’ hooves. I hoped that it would dry out soon and become structurally stable again. At least on the plus side, the Tarlinians didn’t seem to depend much on agriculture, they seemed to purchase their foodstuffs from villages like Galeurn.
When we reached the temple, the nine of us waited outside for a few minutes with the horses, who had weathered the whole ordeal with surprisingly good grace and were now sweaty and snorting, but calm. Any horses we came into contact with tended to admire and emulate both centaurs, so I suspected that in the heat of battle with the Thorvinians, Generosity, Virility, Fury, and Slayer had been somewhat inspired by watching Elodette stack bodies.
“What kinda people you think these guys must be, to worship someone like Tarlinis?” Lizzy asked scornfully.
“People who have never been presented with a superior option,” Florenia replied, “until now.”
“Tarlinis played his part in opening the dam,” I said. “Let’s not forget that.”
“He was merely the tool that you used to smite your enemies, nothing more,” the duke’s daughter responded.
Then, the drawbridge of the temple creaked down, and the gates swung open. The blue-robed crowd inside smiled and clapped politely when they saw us.
We spurred the horses to clip-clop across the drawbridge and into Tarlinis’ home.
An elderly man whose vestments marked him out as the high priest of the temple approached us and said, “Thank you for alerting Tarlinis to the danger that we were in, so that he could save us.”
“… What?” Lizzy asked.
“Yes, you see, we prayed to Tarlinis for aid as soon as we came under attack, but he just explained to us that he did not hear our prayers until you guys happened to be passing by and ran into him and notified him of the situation, so that he could immediately vanquish the Thorvinians,” the high priest said.
“Tarlinis didn’t vanquish the Thorvinians, I did,” Willobee said immediately.
“Qaar’endoth is the one who orchestrated the plan to open the dam, and fought off the Thorvinians that attacked our group while the plan was being executed,” Florenia stated. “Tarlinis was merely a participant, and a reluctant one at that.”
The blue-robed priests and vestals around us looked rather bewildered.
“Who is Qaar’endoth?” the high priest asked.
“Father Yunis, we should not entertain this heresy against Tarlinis by giving countenance to their wild tales,” a skinny priest with a very long forehead whispered loudly in his ear.
“Yes, it will displease me if you listen to them,” agreed a small, familiar voice. “It was very gracious of me to let them into my home. So they should be nice to me now.”
“We’ve been nothing but nice,” Lizzy snapped. “We told you how to save your own fucking people that you weren’t going to lift a finger for before we got here. And we gave you the bile to do it with.”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t care who gets the credit. You’re the one who actually went in the underwater chamber, we probably couldn’t have gotten in without you. So all’s well that ends well. If you all could just point us in the direction of the Cliffs of Nadirizi, we’ll be on our way.”
“What about all those Thorvinians that lie dead above the dam?” Father Yunis inquired. “When the water subsided, we went up to our highest tower and saw them through a spyglass. How were they destroyed?”
“I already told you, I slaughtered them, every last one,” whined Tarlinis.
“How can you question the word of Tarlinis?” the skinny priest hissed.
“That was the work of Lizzy, Elodette, and my selves,” I said. Glory hadn’t been my motive for trying to come and save the temple of Tarlinis, I just hadn’t been willing to let Thorvinius get away with inflicting the same horrors on another temple as he had done to mine, so I didn’t feel the need to boast about my accomplishments to these priests and vestals. But on the other hand, I wasn’t going to play along with Tarlinis’ blatant lies either. If his followers wanted to worship a cowardly god, that was their prerogative. But they deserved to know the truth about his behavior.
“Mortals could never have killed that many Thorvinians,” the skinny priest said. “They fight like inhuman beasts, each with the strength of ten.”
“Qaar’endoth is not a mortal,” Florenia replied.
“I don’t think I want you in my house anymore,” shrilled Tarlinis.
“What do you mean, Qaar’endoth is not a mortal?” the high priest asked.
“I mean that he is a god,” the duke’s daughter stated. “Bear witness to the destruction that he wrought upon the ranks of the Thorvinian attackers, and behold his four perfect bodies, which he has no need to conceal from sight, and you will surely recognize the truth of this.”
“You four are… one?” Father Yunis asked as he searched out each of my identical faces among our group.
“No, he told me that everyone at his temple just looks like that!” Tarlinis interjected.
“I said every member of my order, and I am the last surviving member of my order,” I said as I quietly handed off my weapons to Lizzy, Elodette, and Florenia and then reassimilated three of my selves so that only one of me stood facing Father Yunis and looking him directly in the eye.
The surrounding priests and vestals gasped.
“I have an idea,” Father Yunis said. His hair was white, but his eyebrows and beard remained a dark gray, which gave his blue eyes an intense look. “You, Qaar’endoth, claim to have killed those Thorvinians by the dam. But so does Tarlinis. So, by what weapons were they slain? Which of you can tell me?”
“Swords,” I began.
“Arrows,” Tarlinis said quickly. Elodette’s bow and quiver were pretty hard to miss.
“Daggers and an axe,” Lizzy said.
“Hooves,” Elodette said. She lifted one of hers and showed us all that it was still crusted in brain matter. I wondered if she had a habit of tracking that kind of thing onto castle floors and made a mental note to discuss it with her later.
“Hooves?” Father Yunis repeated as he stared at the gory evidence.
Elodette stared back with her icy gray gaze without blinking.
“Er, Tarlinis?” Father Yunis asked. “Do you ever… er… ride a horse?”
“No,” Tarlinis said huffily, “But I can create whatever types of wounds I want on the bodies of my enemies when I smite them down with my god powers, including ones that resemble the imprints of giant hooves. Are you doubting me?”
“Of course not, lord,” Father Yunis said. “… But, lets all just go examine the corpses of the Thorvinians. So that we may admire your divine handiwork, Tarlinis. And resolve any private questions about this matter that may trouble any member of the order.”
“I am your god, if you have any questions, then you should just ask me,” Tarlinis said petulantly.
Father Yunis said, “We would just like to… er… witness the miracle of your accomplishment for ourselves, lord.”
“Well, I could just describe to you what happened,” Tarlinis said.
“So could we,” Elodette said dryly.
Father Yunis gestured, and one of the vestals beckoned to her brothers and sisters of the order, and the entire blue-robed crowd started trickling hesitantly out of the temple across the drawbridge. Some of them hung back reluctantly and were clearly afraid of offending Tarlinis, but Father Yunis said sternly, “Do you decline to witness the divine handiwork of our lord?” and they exchanged glances and eventually trailed after the rest of the order members, even the skinny priest with the long forehead who seemed to be one of the invisible god’s most stubborn cronies.
My five companions and three of me rode along with the Tarlinian priests and vestals, while my fourth self walked. The
men and women seemed shaken by the Thorvinian threat they had just faced, but unharmed, since their castle had never been breached. They kept stealing glances at all of us, especially at Lizzy, Elodette, and me, since we were the ones that were scratched up and blood-spattered from recent combat. They didn’t make any comments on that, which may have had something to do that none of us could ever tell whether Tarlinis was within earshot, but I guessed they must be drawing their own inferences.
Then when we had walked about halfway from the temple to the dam, a young vestal worked her way over to one of my selves and asked me quietly, “… Sir? Are you… really a god?”
I smiled at her and said, “Yes. I am Qaar’endoth the Unvanquished, fourth son of the Fairlands, defender of the righteous and destroyer of the malevolent, twenty-three times incarnated, sire to untold thousands, first earth-walker since the age of Luma.” Fuck it, Tarlinis was a wimpy, lying asshole, and if I could present his people with the image of what a god should look more like, then I was going to do it.
“Wow,” she said. “I didn’t know that you could see gods. Tarlinis never lets us see him.”
“What does Tarlinis do for you, exactly?” I asked. “As a god, I mean. How does he treat you, his followers?”
“Er,” the vestal said. “I mean he doesn’t, really, ah, do very much, I mean, interfere very much in our lives. But sometimes he talks to us, so we know he’s there. Only we never really know whether he’s there or not unless he talks. So, we just always behave as if he is there. I mean I don’t think he’s ever really harmed one of us, not directly anyway… but sometimes he tells Father Yunis that one of us has fallen out of favor with him for being disrespectful or something… and then, well, that person becomes ostracized, sometimes expelled from the order depending on the seriousness of the offense. And sometimes they catch a cold? So, I don’t know… I mean, Tarlinis is great!”
“So, he doesn’t do much,” I said flatly.
“Er, if you don’t mind my asking, sir… how do you treat your followers?” the vestal asked shyly.
“I, uh… well I don’t really have an organized temple full of followers the way it is here,” I said. “My original order is… gone. I do have a village that worships me, but I can’t be there with them right now, so I left the two most capable and principled villagers in charge there to run things as the high priest and priestess, and I’ll go back and check on them as soon as I finish the quest that I’m on right now. And I guess my companions that you see with me now are sort of my followers, in a way? But I don’t treat them as subordinates, they’re my friends.”
“Well, that sounds like a nice way to do things,” the vestal said wistfully. “More like being a mortal leader than a spirit just sort of hovering over our shoulders. Do you take care of your friends? I mean, protect them and make sure they’re happy and all?”
“I try my best,” I said.
“Of course he does,” said Ilandere, who was listening in on the conversation. “Always.”
“That’s wonderful,” the vestal said. “I mean, of course, Tarlinis is wonderful too. In a different way.”
Another of my selves was accompanying Father Yunis. As the large group of my friends, my selves, and nearly a hundred priests and vestals approached the site of the dam where the Thorvinian corpses lay, I started describing to him the details of what he could expect to find there.
“There was a fighter with an exoskeleton a lot like a scorpion’s, and a giant stinger,” I said. “The stinger got slashed off, and he got stabbed in the face. But he got one of my bodies first, so my corpse is right there in front of him. I can replenish my bodies when I lose them, so I always have four at a time. And, ah, there was a giant fucke-- I mean, fighter, that looked like a severely inbred woolly mammoth, and he impaled one of his own guys on his tusks. There are about four or five stab wounds in his left flank near the shoulder.”
“There’s a serpent-y guy with four stumps where his heads used to be,” Lizzy announced proudly. The she-wolf rattled off several more of her kills, and then Elodette started chiming in too.
Father Yunis listened intently and said nothing until we had finished cataloguing the enemies that we could remember. The vague shapes of the Thorvinian corpses were within everyone’s view by then, although not to the level of detail that the she-wolf, the centaur, and I had described.
Then the high priest called out, “Tarlinis? Do you have anything to add to that, lord?”
At first there was no response. Then the shrill disembodied voice declared, “These impostors were watching me the entire time I fended off all those monsters. Now they’re just repeating the tales of everything they saw me do.”
“‘Saw’ you do?” Lizzy repeated. “And how’s we s’posed to have seen you do shit, when you won’t never show your ugly mug?”
I cast her a warning look. Unjustified as it might have been, some of these people might have genuinely revered Tarlinis for all we knew.
“Well, not literally seen me, but you saw what happened to the Thorvinians!” Tarlinis sputtered. “When they tried to fight me and attack my followers.”
“What bow, exactly, do you claim to have used to shoot those arrows that we can now see sticking out of the bodies?” Elodette inquired icily as she held hers up. “An invisible one, I suppose?”
“… Yes,” Tarlinis said.
“Then how come the arrows are visible now?” Elodette persisted.
“… Because I made them visible,” Tarlinis hissed.
By now we had reached the battlefield. The priests and vestals spread out and stared at the carnage. They looked pretty unnerved, although whether that was by the level of gore or by the mutant qualities of the Thorvinians I didn’t know.
“Look how huge that fucker is, the one with the tusks,” one priest muttered to another.
“Can you imagine if he got inside our walls?” the other priest replied. “The kind of damage he could do?”
“I didn’t think this dam still worked,” a vestal was saying to another vestal. “I thought it had been out of use for centuries. Well, in use for centuries. I didn’t think it could still be opened.”
“Neither did I,” the other vestal agreed.
“Tarlinis told us that himself,” a third vestal chimed in. “I remember him saying that it couldn’t be used.”
“So how was it opened?” the first vestal asked. “Does that mean Tarlinis was… wrong?”
Neither of the other two had an answer for her.
But the main issue that was engaging all these witnesses’ attention was the details that they had heard us report to Father Yunis about how the battle had played out and in what manner many of the most recognizable Thorvinians had been slain. It was impossible for them to miss the fact that not only did our report line up perfectly with the physical evidence, the physical evidence lined up perfectly with the weapons that Lizzy, Elodette, and I visibly carried, and the various types of blood, some of it not human-colored, that streaked our skin and hair.
There was no easy explanation for that that allowed them to continue to believe that their god was everything he said he was, and someone they could trust implicitly.
“So you said you are, in fact, a god yourself?” Father Yunis asked me eventually.
“Yes,” I said. “I am the god Qaar’endoth. But I also go by my human name, Vander.”
“Well then,” he said. “I would like to put a matter of some importance to a vote.”
As he spoke, he raised his voice slightly, but not by all that much, yet somehow, all the hundred or so priests and vestals seemed to tune into his words.
Father Yunis looked around at them solemnly and then said, “Who here would like to follow a new god? Who here would like to follow a more powerful god? A god that does not fear to show his face, or all four of them, and who with the help of his current followers can achieve such deeds as defeating monsters in combat and opening dams that no one has been able to open for centuries in order to was
h away entire armies?”
The entire order gaped at him in abject shock.
The first person to raise her hand was the shy vestal who had started a conversation with me during the walk over to the dam. “I would, Father,” she said.
Several other priests and vestals raised their hands as well, looked around at each other, and nodded with approval. Grins started to break out.
A few of the priests and vestals knelt to whichever of my selves was nearest.
“Qaar’endoth, you are my god now,” one priest said to me. “Thank you for saving us from the Thorvinians. I have known and served Tarlinis all my life, and I know he probably wouldn’t have done shit about it on his own.”
“Fuck Tarlinis!” a different priest shouted out from somewhere in the crowd.
“That’s sacrilege!” shouted another priest. “You are expelled from this order!”
“No I’m not, I fucking quit!” the priest yelled back.
A whole chorus of other voices started screaming back and forth at each other.
“What has Tarlinis ever done for us?”
“He has made us a more moral people! He has given us standards to live by!”
“He’s kept us living in fear by lurking around invisible all the time like a fucking creep!”
“You cannot see him because you are not worthy to see him!”
“Can you see him?”
“Of course I can see him!”
“That’s fucking bull shit!”
At that point, someone threw a punch. Several vestals screamed, and other order members hurried to restrain both parties, the puncher and the punchee, before things could escalate further.
“Hey, stop that!” I yelled. “Save the violence for the Thorvinians, okay? Not each other. You don’t have to follow me if you don’t want to. No one does. If you want to keep worshipping Tarlinis, that’s up to you. I won’t stop you.”
A vestal asked, “You mean… you’d give us free will?”
“Of course I would,” I said. “Why would I want to take that away from you? I’m not a tyrant. I’ll try to help you if you need help, but otherwise, you can just keep doing your thing and I’ll do mine.”