GRP Chapter 2

The ease of his walk and the upright bearing carried, objectively speaking, the qualities one expected of a hero. A lone human approaching a god along a golden road was the shape of a hero-story heard since childhood, regardless of its probability. Could he really be that hero? Tears rose in the old woman's eyes.

The man reached the altar. The giant—mountain-sized, looking down from the height of the world—observed the small human standing before him.

A moment of quiet.

The giant moved. One enormous hand collected the man with no great effort.

He slipped into the giant's mouth the way a small snack would, and the massive throat worked once.

Gullp—and that was all.

He had been, quite literally, a single bite.

'Madman...'

All that business of playing the hero, and now…. The old woman's eyes went flat and cold. Dying like that seemed likely to make even the journey to the god's embrace complicated.

Led by the high priest, the faithful raised their hands and sang. The song was of the Five Giant Gods—their birth, their great accomplishments, and how the youngest among them had killed his four elder siblings and absorbed their divinity, and how this had made him the most complete god of all. It was presented as glory.

Acolytes filed back into the prison to retrieve the next offering, nooses ready, their eyes gone glassy from the hallucinatory herbs burning outside, mouths slack and drooling. Whatever conscience they might otherwise have possessed had been thoroughly suppressed; they grinned at weeping children.

The old woman stepped forward and put herself between the children and the door. She made her peace with death.

At which point the giant opened his mouth and produced a low, rolling thunder-sound.

"The god speaks!"

"The great god speaks!"

Everyone fell prostrate immediately, foreheads to the ground—the high priest, the fanatics outside, the acolytes who had entered the prison.

"Khk."

A peculiar sound from the giant.

Peculiar enough that the high priest, face still pressed to stone, could not quite manage not to steal a glance upward.

"Kh — khhkhk."

The giant lurched and seized the golden altar for balance. Its body heaved in the particular way of an animal about to be sick. Sloshing, churning. The enormous throat bulged and rippled in patterns—a wet, rhythmic gurgling that had no business coming from a god.

Then— BOOM.

Something detonated. The giant's head flew off in the same instant, propelled by some immense internal force, and was simply gone—no intermediate stage, only before and after.

Fshwaaak— blood erupted from the cross-section of the neck in a column, and the god's blood fell in heavy drops, thud-thud, thick as a driving downpour.

The faithful in their white and gold became a different color.

KWANG!

The head completed its arc through the air and landed.

Twelve of the faithful—those who had dedicated themselves to the god's service and would have died willingly in his name—were crushed beneath it where they knelt.

The headless body tipped forward and fell across the altar. The altar held. The blood ran.

It followed the golden path's long slope, thick and slow and very red.

Silence.

From the open neck, covered in the red of it from head to foot, a man walked out.

He found the holy water bowls set to either side of the altar and washed his face. He found this insufficient. He located the nearest ceremonial urn—the size of a man's torso—turned it upside down over his own head, and let the water carry away what had adhered to him during his time inside. Flesh. Blood. Other things.

He shook the water from his hair. He nudged the body aside with one foot—and it moved, the body of a god, at the nudge of one foot—and then sat himself down on the bloodstained altar. From that height he looked out at the gathered people below.

It was the moment when the offering on the altar transformed into an absolute god seated on a throne above the heavens.

And found it unremarkable.

The founding festival of the Great Temple was held. It was the largest state celebration the Thul'Mhoriae Alliance staged, and the holy city filled accordingly—the leaders of all thirty-five great and small factions that composed the Alliance, visitors from every region of the continent, foreign dignitaries, and even the spirits of a nearby forest, drawn by the sound of festival music into the crowds, where they moved and blended as though they had always belonged there.

Beyond the white gabled rooftop of the Great Temple, a tree the size of a mountain rose to receive the visitors. The sacred tree given by the Great Mother Goddess of the Beginning. The symbol of the Thul'Mhoriae Alliance.

Under the Mother Tree's vast canopy, people in white robes enjoyed the grandly arranged festival. Children waved toy wooden swords and sang. The song was of the deeds of the continent's mightiest hero, Anir of frozen Olgidphaenn— Garthe.

Bards positioned reliably at every alley corner performed their own versions of Garthe's legend, displaying their skill to the best advantage. They had learned that this material drew the largest crowd.

Portrait stalls scattered throughout the festival grounds had illustrations of various heroes stacked in piles for sale alongside copies of their exploits. The item selling most consistently was Garthe's portrait.

The peculiar detail was that every stall showed a different face.

The hair was black—there was agreement on that. After that, everything diverged. Short curls or long straight hair or a neatly even cut. A young man's face or a middle-aged man's or a face going grey at the temples. Some portraits depicted a woman. The unavoidable result of a hero who appeared publicly so rarely, and who even on those occasions never removed his helmet.

A play was being staged in the central square, dramatizing his confrontation with the Giant God of Ryvalle. The square was packed, standing room only, every age from child to elder watching with wide eyes. The story had been, until very recently, the Alliance's single largest ongoing problem.

Ryvalle was one of a handful of regions where the residue of the Void ran deep, and it had suffered accordingly—monsters and rampaging gods in significant quantities. The five giant gods of Ryvalle had succeeded in driving out the monsters and corrupted beings and purifying the land. Their fame spread to islands separated from the continent by open water, and many peoples sought the giants' protection willingly. It might have remained a beautiful story. A century ago, it did not. The youngest giant murdered the four elders and absorbed their divinity. Now mightier than any conventional force could oppose—even other gods—the giant killed the protective spirits of neighboring lands and the people living under them. And yet the number of the giant's faithful grew rather than shrank, because the giant could turn stone into gold, and humans looking at that particular color found their moral reasoning adjusting accordingly. As the movement grew large enough to conduct actual campaigns of destruction, the Alliance found itself unable to stand apart from the consequences.

Thirty-four of the Alliance's thirty-five faction leaders convened in grand council and placed the giant's subjugation on the agenda. Every one of them was a hero with dozens or hundreds of defeated monsters to their name. The mood in the chamber was bleak. Their opponent had absorbed the divinity of four siblings and was no longer something a conventional hero could face in the field; other gods could not match him either. The tens of thousands of devoted fanatics were a complication that could not be dismissed.

This was not a problem that one or two heroes could resolve. The shape of it was a war—the Alliance against Ryvalle. The entire Alliance braced.

Then news arrived. The giant had been defeated. Garthe—Anir of Olgidphaenn, the only faction leader who had not attended the council—had taken care of it. Alone. His reputation, already considerable, added another layer.

The play was a dramatized version of the events, woven from whatever accounts traveling bards had gathered, and had little enough fact in it and rather more embellishment—but as festival entertainment, it served perfectly.

"Giant God of Ryvalle, hear me! I, Garthe, Anir of frozen Olgidphaenn, guardian of the sacred tree granted by the Great Mother Goddess and protector of humankind, shall bring your evil to its end!"

A man in a black wig faced a puppet twice his size, and they performed an elaborate sword-dance representing the battle between them. The offerings in their prison cell sang — "O — merely to see it fills the heart with dread. Hero, I beg you, punish this terrible giant—" — and as the song ended, the puppet toppled backward with a crash.

"Those imprisoned as offerings I have freed, but the lives already lost to the giant's cruelty tear at me like a wound. Still—peace shall descend upon Ryvalle now. Great Mother Goddess—be this offering acceptable unto Thee."

The protagonist, who had somewhere acquired red paint on his face, spoke these words quietly. A beautiful woman came running out of the prison.

"Can you truly be—the one who subjugated Paradise of Olgidphaenn, and the black dragon of the Empire of Lutha, and the nine-headed monstrous bird of the Paldoa Mountains— Garthe, Anir of frozen Olgidphaenn?"

"That is who I am."

"How can I ever repay a grace so profound?"

The protagonist produced a regretful smile and shook his head.

"It was no more than what had to be done."

"Oh— as noble as your legend promised!"

"This one shall take his leave."

The woman caught his sleeve.

"Where? Without tending to yourself? Wounded as you are—fighting the giant."

The protagonist turned his gaze skyward—as if seeking the face of the Great Mother Goddess somewhere above—and smiled.

"If there is somewhere that needs me, I must go, wherever that may be."

The woman wept. The freed offerings danced and sang.

O great guardian of the sacred tree, who came from the frozen land—deliver us, and this fallen world, from ruin!

The hero turned, raised his sword high, and descended from the stage. His cape caught the wind behind him. It could have been a painting. The crowd erupted in cheers and applause.