a mountain wolf preys upon the lambs of the valleys. It was the Season of Great Sorcerers. The order of the world was disrupted, and winter and spring and summer and fall upended one into another. Drought and flood, ice and fires threatened the lives of men, and of all the marvelous plants and artful creatures that matter, infected by love, had offered on the altar of the World-Soul.
“Then one day a powerful demon lord, wise and wicked by the consumption of many souls of men, came upon a man living alone in a tiny hermitage in a wood. Like a cat who thinks to toy with her prey, he accepted the beggar’s hospitality and waited his chance to leap from the worn-out body he presently possessed to the fresh new one. For the man, though clad in rags, was beautiful: his glance was like a sword thrust and his breath, perfume.
“But the demon lord was confounded when he accepted a little earthen bowl of wine, and drank it in one gulp, and prepared to pounce; for the saint had divided his own soul, and poured it out into the wine, and given it to the demon of his own free will. And so for the first time, a demon gained a soul, and all the beautiful and bitter gifts of a soul.
“The demon lord fell to the floor of the woodland cell and howled with all the astonished woe of a child being born, for he was born in that moment, into the world of both matter and spirit. And taking the hermit’s body that was his free gift, and not stolen nor begrudged, he fled through the woods in terror back to his terrible sorcerer’s palace, and hid.
“For many months he cowered there, trapped in the horror of his self, but slowly the great-souled saint began to teach him the beauties of virtue. The saint was a devotee of the Mother, and called down Her grace to heal the demon of his sin, for with the gift of free will had come the possibility of sin, and the burning shame of it, which tormented the demon as nothing had ever done before. And between the lash of his sin and the lessons of the saint, the demon’s soul began to grow in probity and power. As a great sorcerer-paladin, with the Mother’s favor fluttering upon his mailed sleeve, he began to move in the world of matter, and fight the baleful soulless demons on the gods’ behalf in the places where They could not reach.
“The great-souled demon became the Mother’s champion and captain, and She loved him without limit for his soul’s incandescent splendor. And so began the great battle to clear the world of demons run rampant and restore the order of the seasons.
“The other demons feared him, and attempted to combine against him, but could not, for such cooperation was beyond their nature; still their onslaught was terrible, and the great-souled demon, beloved of the Mother, was slain on the final battlefield.
“And so was born the last god, the Bastard, love child of the goddess and the great-souled demon. Some say He was born on the eve of the last battle, fruit of a union upon Her great couch, some say the grieving Mother gathered up the great-souled demon’s shattered dear remains from the stricken field and mixed them with Her blood, and so made the Bastard by Her great art. However so, their Son, of all the gods, was given agency over both spirit and matter, for He inherited as servants the demons that His father’s great sacrifice had conquered and enslaved and so swept out of the world.
“What is certainly a lie,” dy Cabon continued in a suddenly more prosaic, not to mention irate, tone of voice, “is the Quadrene heresy that the great-souled demon took the Mother by force and so engendered the Bastard upon Her against Her great will. A scurrilous and senseless and blasphemous lie . . .” Ista wasn’t sure if he was still paraphrasing Ordol, or if that was his own gloss. He cleared his throat and finished more formally, “Here ends the tale and tally of the advent of the five gods.”
Ista had heard various versions of the tally of the gods what seemed several hundred times since childhood, but she had to admit, dy Cabon’s delivery of the old story had the eloquence and sincerity to make it seem almost new again. Granted, most versions did not