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LJIdol 3 Strikes - Week 4 - "The axe forgets; the tree remembers"
Oh, it’s you children again. I assure you, this is perfectly innocent gardening, and I am not burying a body. I would hope you would give me more credit than to think that if I murdered someone I would be foolish enough to dispose of their body by burying it on my own property. It would be even nicer if didn't suspect me of murder in the first place, but alas.
All this talk of murder reminds me of a story.
No, this time it's not a faerie story, it's a myth. The difference? The faerie stories are highly educational, absolutely true, and hopefully serve as a constant reminder of how much danger you're in of being abducted by a malevolent entity from another world and transformed into a stoat or something. This myth is more metaphorical, far less educational, and not especially relevant to your daily lives - it's just about a lousy human trying to hoodwink some gods and get away with murder. Nevertheless, I ask you please to try to remain awake and attentive.
Long ago, there lived a wicked man who for the purposes of this story we shall call Gerald. It is exceedingly unlikely that his name actually was Gerald, but what with one thing or another this person's actual name has been forgotten, and yet we must call him something. I happen to know someone named Gerald who I do not remember fondly, and so I shall happily engage in this minor revenge of using his name for this otherwise nameless wicked man.
Gerald was a murderer. Not professionally or anything, but committing murder is the sort of thing that can come to define you even if you only do it once.
Who he killed and why are facts not especially relevant to the story, but we can be certain that it wasn't a good reason. After all, if he’d had a good reason for killing whoever it was, then it wouldn’t have been murder at all, but justice, which is the term we use for killing people when popular opinion says that the person deserved it.
Like many people who have done terrible things, Gerald suddenly became keenly interested in religious matters. Such individuals are unable to obtain forgiveness from their fellow humans, and so must try to obtain it from allegedly superior beings instead. Sometimes this is to assuage a personal sense of guilt and achieve some measure of inner peace, but mostly it’s to avoid some sort of unpleasant afterlife. In Gerald's case, it was emphatically the latter.
In Gerald’s culture, the souls of the deserving dead were said to pass on to a river which eventually carried them back into new lives, and the more time they spent in the river the greater the differences would be between their previous life and the next. Souls deemed unfit for this process were instead hurled into an icy pit to suffer in frozen stagnation for some large percentage of eternity. This process was managed by She Who Watches, He Who Listens, and It That Remembers.
Yes, as if dying were not already inconvenient enough on its own, these people then found their souls judged by a giant eagle and a giant bat who both had theoretically been surveilling them for their entire lives, but who in practice had a lot of people to monitor and thus would often check in with a giant tree that contained all of history to make sure they hadn't missed anything important before deciding whether a soul got tossed in the river or condemned to the pit.
Gerald had committed his murder at night, which meant that it was mostly He Who Listens that he needed to worry about. However, it had been a new moon, and this was a time when supposedly the bat was not out and about listening to your evil deeds. Even if this turned out to be true, however, Gerald still had to worry about the tree.
You will not be surprised to hear that It That Remembers was not generally accessible to living humans, but Gerald was able to learn the location from She Who Speaks, learn how he might damage the tree from He Who Betrays, forge the described magical axe amid the pyroclastic fury of It That Consumes - oh, come on, that's an easy one. Don't you children know what "pyroclastic" means?
Anyway, it was a veritable who's who and what's that of gods, spirits, and monsters Gerald interacted with until he finally found himself before It That Remembers. All the years it had taken him to reach this point he spent again and again once more searching for the correct branch where he could see his wicked deeds depicted on the leaves, and he found that he was now so feeble with age that he barely had the strength left to hack off said limb.
As the branch fell away and the moment was erased from history, it was also erased from Gerald's memory, and he found he had no idea what had prompted him to go on his epic quest in the first place, and he mourned the years he had lost doing so much for a reason he could no longer recall. Soon after, Gerald finally succumbed to old age, and his soul found itself before the edge of the river of souls guarded by She Who Watches and He Who Listens.
She Who Watches recounted to Gerald that She had seen him craft a magical axe in It That Consumes.
He Who Listens recounted to Gerald that He had heard him trick She Who Speaks into revealing the location of the tree.
It That Remembers recounted to Gerald that It remembered him cutting off one of its branches with a magical axe.
All three agreed that defiling the tree in this manner was an unspeakable crime, and so Gerald was hurled into the frozen pit for deviant souls anyway, even though he had wasted most of his life trying desperately to avoid that very fate.
In theory, myths are less about lessons and more about explaining some aspect of nature or society, and I think we can all agree that what this myth explains is why deciduous trees shed their leaves - to protect their secrets. Also, I think it explains why, for the most part, gods and spirits don't talk to humans anymore.
Now, I have things to do, and all of you should really be getting home before the sun sets and it becomes too dark to see. It's a new moon tonight.
All this talk of murder reminds me of a story.
No, this time it's not a faerie story, it's a myth. The difference? The faerie stories are highly educational, absolutely true, and hopefully serve as a constant reminder of how much danger you're in of being abducted by a malevolent entity from another world and transformed into a stoat or something. This myth is more metaphorical, far less educational, and not especially relevant to your daily lives - it's just about a lousy human trying to hoodwink some gods and get away with murder. Nevertheless, I ask you please to try to remain awake and attentive.
Long ago, there lived a wicked man who for the purposes of this story we shall call Gerald. It is exceedingly unlikely that his name actually was Gerald, but what with one thing or another this person's actual name has been forgotten, and yet we must call him something. I happen to know someone named Gerald who I do not remember fondly, and so I shall happily engage in this minor revenge of using his name for this otherwise nameless wicked man.
Gerald was a murderer. Not professionally or anything, but committing murder is the sort of thing that can come to define you even if you only do it once.
Who he killed and why are facts not especially relevant to the story, but we can be certain that it wasn't a good reason. After all, if he’d had a good reason for killing whoever it was, then it wouldn’t have been murder at all, but justice, which is the term we use for killing people when popular opinion says that the person deserved it.
Like many people who have done terrible things, Gerald suddenly became keenly interested in religious matters. Such individuals are unable to obtain forgiveness from their fellow humans, and so must try to obtain it from allegedly superior beings instead. Sometimes this is to assuage a personal sense of guilt and achieve some measure of inner peace, but mostly it’s to avoid some sort of unpleasant afterlife. In Gerald's case, it was emphatically the latter.
In Gerald’s culture, the souls of the deserving dead were said to pass on to a river which eventually carried them back into new lives, and the more time they spent in the river the greater the differences would be between their previous life and the next. Souls deemed unfit for this process were instead hurled into an icy pit to suffer in frozen stagnation for some large percentage of eternity. This process was managed by She Who Watches, He Who Listens, and It That Remembers.
Yes, as if dying were not already inconvenient enough on its own, these people then found their souls judged by a giant eagle and a giant bat who both had theoretically been surveilling them for their entire lives, but who in practice had a lot of people to monitor and thus would often check in with a giant tree that contained all of history to make sure they hadn't missed anything important before deciding whether a soul got tossed in the river or condemned to the pit.
Gerald had committed his murder at night, which meant that it was mostly He Who Listens that he needed to worry about. However, it had been a new moon, and this was a time when supposedly the bat was not out and about listening to your evil deeds. Even if this turned out to be true, however, Gerald still had to worry about the tree.
You will not be surprised to hear that It That Remembers was not generally accessible to living humans, but Gerald was able to learn the location from She Who Speaks, learn how he might damage the tree from He Who Betrays, forge the described magical axe amid the pyroclastic fury of It That Consumes - oh, come on, that's an easy one. Don't you children know what "pyroclastic" means?
Anyway, it was a veritable who's who and what's that of gods, spirits, and monsters Gerald interacted with until he finally found himself before It That Remembers. All the years it had taken him to reach this point he spent again and again once more searching for the correct branch where he could see his wicked deeds depicted on the leaves, and he found that he was now so feeble with age that he barely had the strength left to hack off said limb.
As the branch fell away and the moment was erased from history, it was also erased from Gerald's memory, and he found he had no idea what had prompted him to go on his epic quest in the first place, and he mourned the years he had lost doing so much for a reason he could no longer recall. Soon after, Gerald finally succumbed to old age, and his soul found itself before the edge of the river of souls guarded by She Who Watches and He Who Listens.
She Who Watches recounted to Gerald that She had seen him craft a magical axe in It That Consumes.
He Who Listens recounted to Gerald that He had heard him trick She Who Speaks into revealing the location of the tree.
It That Remembers recounted to Gerald that It remembered him cutting off one of its branches with a magical axe.
All three agreed that defiling the tree in this manner was an unspeakable crime, and so Gerald was hurled into the frozen pit for deviant souls anyway, even though he had wasted most of his life trying desperately to avoid that very fate.
In theory, myths are less about lessons and more about explaining some aspect of nature or society, and I think we can all agree that what this myth explains is why deciduous trees shed their leaves - to protect their secrets. Also, I think it explains why, for the most part, gods and spirits don't talk to humans anymore.
Now, I have things to do, and all of you should really be getting home before the sun sets and it becomes too dark to see. It's a new moon tonight.