Spun off from the lovely Diseases and Decay thread.
6 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:7 hours ago, scott-martin said:One of two things I love about this is the ways it reopens questions of who exactly is trapped under the Block.
One interpretation would be that Wakboth is trapped under the Block. But because he was killed, he went to the Underworld next, because that's what you do
In the before times, we saw it like this:
- Kajabor is Chaos-as-the-Void, that into which everything vanishes, even gods and information
- Wakboth kills Kajabor
- Dead Kajabor wrestles Arachne Solara in Hell
- Arachne wins and synthesizes Time from Cosmos and Chaos
But in retrospect, we should have been more cautious, for as early as Cults of Terror we were warned not to take things at face value.
At one point the armies of Kajabor and Wakboth began to devour each other, but philosophers dispute which one was killed, for no one alive or sane could know such things.
Prevalent belief says that Kajabor was killed by Wakboth, leaving the world defiler to face the Storm Bull and the god of entropy to face the forces of the dead. This theory has much strength, since the mundane world (reconstructed later) was usually held to be the origin of immorality, while the combination of entropy and existence seem to synthesize into the God Time, who later rules the cosmos …
A massive block of Truestone, a piece of Law cast adrift when the Spike exploded, crashed to earth and struck the Devil, grinding him and spreading him and his strength about. Afterwards other forces and beings further lessened it and destroyed its unity in the world forever. — CoT, p. 15
So when Wakboth began to show up in the net getting up to unspeakable hi-jinks with our beloved Spider, it wasn’t exactly a retcon. And Kajabor as the father of Time is only “right” in the sense a psychoanalytic dream interpretation is “right”: the patient accepts it; evidence doesn’t get a look-in.
To find out what happened, I took my uncle out for an evening of absinthe chugging and tale telling. He is neither quite alive nor even slightly sane, so he was bound to have the real low-down. (He provided Rita Hayworth’s singing voice in Gilda.)
KAJABOR’S TALE, V. 1
The explosion of the Spike was our Big Bang: from then, we were on the clock. The clock is running down, and the Mostali are deluded in thinking they can fix it. It ain’t really broke. It just is what it is … till it isn’t. They will get their precious stasis — they just gotta wait.
“Err … that’s a bit terse and abstract, ZeeZee.”
KAJABOR’S TALE, V. 2
The — I am trying to keep a straight face, really — mighty chaos fighter Storm Bull was facing off against Kajabor when shrapnel from the exploding Spike took out the Voidster — ker-splat! — smearing Old Chaosface thinly across all creation. Urox was a helpless bystander — or by this stage, just a bypanter and bybleeder. Instead of having one consolidated easy-to-manage giant non-hole in creation, we now had nano-non-particles of nothing embedded in everything. However fine you chopped the world, there it wasn’t: Chaos. Since then, the world’s been going to the Hyenas. What’s under the Block? Nothing, kiddo, nothing. And that, my little enlo, is how time began.
“Yeah, I think we can sell that one. Thanks, ZeeZee.”
WAKBOTH’S TALE
I mean who was Wakboth, anyway? Just a kid, right? In the wrong place at the wrong time.
So the gods — Orlanth, Yelm, and all those tossers — stuff our baby goat in a sack and take him off to the Spider as a snack-cum-sacrifice-cum-fee. They have a PR problem, and they figure she’s the one to spin them a suitable tale. She makes a show of playing with the food, then bundles it up in silk and maybe gives it a good suck. (It is dark down there, hard to see.) The gods have had a pointless war and pretty much trashed the planet; now they want to make up publicly, but no one wants to own up to being the bad guy.
“Look,” says Arachne, obviously bored, “I have waved my magic wand and put all your sins in the goat — anything really bad, just say the goat did it — and if anyone asks why everything is falling apart, say … the Spider ate the goat and shat out time: it’s a compromise. Some crap like that. You’ll busk the details.”
“But, Arachne, filling the goat with evil — that’s just symbolic, right?”
“Yeah, sure, whatever. You are as depraved now as you ever were, aren’t you, you old scrote?” Did she have her back pair of legs crossed? The Spider is a trickster, after all.
Everyone marches topside, and soft-hearted Arachne releases the goatling enjoining it to gambol forth and make mischief. She chuckles to herself thinking of what the cult scribes will write about this in years to come — for of course, she knows.
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This is the kind of farrago one types after drinking strong cocoa too close to bedtime.
Don’t agree — impossible, anyway — or disagree, but write your own True Tales of the Devils and post them here, for it is only by repeatedly abusing Godtime that we can reshape reality.