More Gods Than Stars Preview Chapter #4

Time for the final preview chapter before release! The City That Would Eat the World, book one of the More Gods Than Stars Trilogy, is out February 11th- just a week away! If you could spread the word, that would be amazing!

Chapter 4: Flashback: The Black Sheep

Aven’s family had a story they liked to tell about her birth— that the first thing the midwife had said on handing the screaming baby to her mother had been: “This one’s going to be trouble.”

Trouble would be understating it.

Aven’s very first memory, from when she was still a toddler, was of getting in a fist-fight with an angry goose.

She lost, of course, but it very much set a pattern for the rest of her life.

She punched her cousins out of boredom when they were trapped in the family’s big longhouse by the rains. She punched other kids for stealing her candy or cheating at games. She punched her father for saying something rude about her mother during an argument. She punched her mother for saying something rude about her father during an argument. She punched the village’s head priest for telling her not to punch her parents. She punched another priest when she questioned Aven’s mother and father’s ability to parent.

And she punched half the village of Panian, at one time or another, for insisting that she was a boy, not a girl. That, or for calling her by her birth-name and refusing to call her Aven. Everyone learned better quick enough- it’s not like folks born with a body-soul mismatch were uncommon. Nothing the right god couldn’t help with, altering the body to bring it in line with the soul.

Honestly, polite reminders probably would have served as well as punches.

Aven might be quick-tempered, but she wasn’t mean-tempered. She did, admittedly, enjoy fights once they started, but she prided herself on rarely punching anyone who didn’t deserve it. And she almost always reconciled with her opponents afterward.

It was a running joke in the village that the only people she never punched were her grandmother and the village prophet— the former she was too afraid of, the latter because he already had a hard enough life, poor thing. At least he only had to deal with a few hundred local gods wanting to issue pronouncements and commandments out of his mouth, and usually got several hours of the day to spend quietly fishing or tending his garden. It could be much worse, he could be a prophet in a big city somewhere. Gods could speak to anyone close to them, but at a distance, especially when someone didn’t want to speak to them? They had to rely on prophets. And while most gods weren’t too talkative, with as few prophets as there were, it added up quick.

And everyone was afraid of Aven’s grandmother. The village liked to say that she had a kind heart wrapped in a whole forest’s worth of thorns.

There didn’t seem to be any particular reason for Aven’s belligerent nature. Her parents were maybe a bit more argumentative than most, but still loved each other. Her family’s longhouse wasn’t the biggest in the village, but it wasn’t the smallest, either, and her aunts and uncles and cousins didn’t overcrowd it. Their three household gods didn’t make any odious demands on them, being mostly content with prayers, and in one case, the occasional flower garland as well. She had a fairly normal, boring childhood.

Despite all the punching, Aven wasn’t particularly disliked in the village. Sure, she was trouble, always getting into fights, exploring somewhere she shouldn’t be, or trying to stick a live mimic in her mouth, but she was also quick to lend a hand carrying bags of barley or rounding up escaped sheep.

And with as little as happened in sleepy Panian, most people were happy just to have something to gossip about. Not much else to do but farm, fish in the river, or wander the woods. The followers of the local hunt gods kept it safe enough that children could wander unattended in any of the nearby groves or meadows without fear.

Aven probably would have left Panian eventually— there weren’t any gods there that could help her body grow the right way to match her soul, after all.

But she got a push sooner than she expected. The day before she turned nine, the village irrevocably changed.

A cut log floated down the river.

This wasn’t that uncommon of a sight in Panian, of course— there was plenty of logging locally. People had to repair homes and barns, after all. Building new longhouses was rare— not many folks wanted to live without a house god— but it happened every now and then.

What was uncommon was the sheer number of logs that started coming. A handful turned into dozens, which turned into hundreds, with workers running about atop them, guiding them down the river.

And they never stopped.

Day in and day out, logs and their riders floated down the river. Some guided miraculously, some by poles and brute strength, but they kept coming. Every so often a small raft would drift by, with sleeping bags and a little kitchen for the log riders.

And when the log riders were asked where the logs were going, the answer was always the same.

Cambrias’ Wall. The greatest city on this or any other world. Cambrias’ Wall, so many hundreds, thousands of miles west that its inhabitants could see more than the top third of Viseas over the horizon, so far west that in parts of it the daily eclipse actually broke up the day, instead of just extending the night.

Cambrias’ Wall, whose thirst for lumber, stone, and every other natural resource was insatiable.

Later, much later, Aven thought that if the murder had happened first, things might have gone different, that the villagers might have tried to stop things before they got too bad.

But it wasn’t so bad, at first. You couldn’t swim as safely in the river anymore, thanks to the logs, but the log riders stopped by the village to trade for food and such. Aven’s dad traded some deer meat for a new knife from one of them. It wasn’t blessed or anything, but the blacksmith who made it had godgifts that let him work the steel true and strong, every time.

Aven also traded some stolen moonshine to one of the log riders for a set of brass knuckles. Still way too big for her, but she’d grow into them.

During those first months, the log riders were a respectful bunch— either professional foremen from far downstream, or locals from other nearby villages. Some of the villagers started hiring on for the two-month river trip to the city of Noriach at the edge of the woods.

Log jams were a frequent threat on the river— when enough of the floating timber jammed against rocks, sandbars, or mud, they could form a block in the river, forming natural dams of hundreds or thousands of logs. The most dangerous job on the river was jam breaking, usually reserved for men and women with godgifts that could help.

Villagers that took the two-month trip usually got back in less than three months— walking, even down the rough woods trails, was faster than the log drive. They earned more from those two-month trips than they normally would in a year of work back in the village. Not, of course, that Panian used money very often. Most villagers just kept tallies of who owed what to whom, in hours of prayer to various house gods if nothing else, and villagers would often conveniently forget that someone owed them for vegetables or firewood or the like when they were having a hard time. So the villagers who took the short trip would mostly use their pay to buy tools, fabric, and other goods the village could use. And plenty of offerings for the handful of local gods who liked physical offerings, for whatever weird theological reason. It’s not like gods needed anything but soulstuff, really.

The log drive down the river was just the first leg of the journey— the logs themselves would take almost a year to reach the edges of Cambrias’ wall, involving multiple overland treks and trips down other rivers. The drive foremen even claimed the logs would go underground at one point, hauled through a long tunnel by a giant god-harnessed millipede.

The changes to the river were gradual at first. The water was maybe a little muddier, but the changes were small enough that no one but a few of the minor river gods noticed. They tried to raise a ruckus through the village prophet, but he’d already started avoiding the river, staying far enough away so the gods a few of the log riders carried with them wouldn’t try to speak through him too.

It was the next rainy season when things started to really get bad.

The river always got silty during the rainy season, always flooded halfway up to the village, but this rainy season the river was more like a mudflow than water, and several of the longhouses closest to the river got flooded, one home washing away entirely. The housegod for the lost longhouse, one that could double the speed at which blisters turned to callouses, had been bound to both the floor and the central roof column, which had been destroyed entirely by the cut logs carried by the river. The young housegod was too fixed in purpose, too strong of a god of place to move, and the whole village knew it was doomed to slowly starve to death. They visited the broken foundation regularly, feeding the starving god soulstuff through their prayers, but they could only ease the god’s passing, not stop it.

A small group of passing log riders who witnessed that mocked the villagers for praying to a god who couldn’t offer them boons or blessings any longer, which almost led to a brawl. The group weren’t locals, but had traveled up from Noriach.

Aven was a little disappointed that it didn’t turn into a brawl, but cooler heads prevailed.

Over the course of the rainy season, the river didn’t get any better. It kept flooding, and never got any less muddy. Visitors from villages upstream started telling them of mudslides on slopes that had been fully logged, and of treeless riverbanks rapidly eroding.

When the dry season arrived, trade representatives from the logging companies arrived with it. They offered more than generous sums to the village for the trees on their lands, offered ludicrous amounts of soulstuff to the local forest and hunt gods for their cooperation, even offered to hire the villagers as loggers.

There were a few dissident voices among the villagers calling it a bad idea, the river gods and Aven’s grandmother loudest of all, but the coin and prayer were enough to sway the humans and gods of Panian.

The changes came swifter and swifter after that, and by her tenth birthday, Aven barely recognized her village. By the start of the next rainy season, when the murder happened, she didn’t recognize it at all. And before that rainy season ended, she left Panian for good.

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When she was little, the forest came right up to the edge of the village. By the second rainy season of the log drive, there were only a few isolated groves of trees in sight of the village, those that were sacred places of local gods.

The logging crews had moved over the local forest like locusts, but they’d stopped at those remaining groves to pray every day, honoring their deals with the local gods scrupulously, glutting them with soulstuff.

Aven’s own parents started working for the logging companies. Her father started riding the logs downstream to Noriach, while her mother joined the logging crews.

Her father came back from his first two river trips flush with gifts for the family. Toys for Aven and her cousins, tools for her aunts and uncles, and fancy gifts for her mother. Both times, he looked strong and healthy from the work.

Aven’s mother, who’d always seemed a little aimless, found purpose she’d lacked on the logging crews— or at least enjoyed the camaraderie.

And then, on Aven’s father’s third trip, he didn’t come back at all. Just his pay, and the news of his death.

There’d been an especially bad log jam, and the jam breakers had called in help from the log riders coming downstream. Her father had been one of those log riders, and he had slipped and fallen between the logs.

He hadn’t suffered, the company men told them. He’d been crushed instantly.

Aven’s mother took the news poorly. She started drinking heavily, came home less and less.

Drunken brawls became commonplace in the village, often spilling out of the new, rough-built tavern on the bank into the village proper. The river water went from muddy to foul-smelling, and on bad days, swimming or wading in it would burn your skin a little. Trash started piling up in weird corners, and the logging company had started putting up a strange building with a waterwheel and big chimneys by the river. They said they were going to start making paper there, like they were upstream.

The paper mill started operations less than a month before rainy season, and the village never stopped stinking after that. The disgusting filth it dumped into the river sent fish floating belly-up downstream of it, and the burning of the river stopped being mild.

Two weeks after that, the out-of-town loggers reneged on their deal, stopped praying at the shrines and sacred groves of the hunt and forest gods. There just wasn’t enough timber near the village to warrant it anymore. You had to walk three days to find proper dense forest again. Aven barely saw songbirds anymore, just bonethieves. The white raven-kin with the black spots could thrive anywhere.

Even the local mimics were dying off. Bark, leaf, and moss mimics were painfully obvious now, without their preferred habitat to hide in. The dirt and stone mimics were doing better, but there weren’t enough of them to keep bug populations under control, and mosquitoes became common. Bluemidge swarms grew out of control, but bluemidges didn’t bite or eat gardens at least— they just annoyed you and buzzed in your face.

Well, the stories claimed you needed to start running for your life when a bluemidge swarm grew too out of control, but Aven didn’t know anyone who’d ever seen it happen.

As for those forest and hunt gods that had done so well, glutting themselves on endless prayers from the loggers? With no forest left beyond their scattered groves, they found themselves facing much the same fate as the poor house god that had finally withered away that dry season. A few of them would likely survive until the forest regrew, with regular prayer, but not all of them, not a chance.

The poor village prophet was seized by their rants, curses, and commandments, sent racing about the village to yell at villagers and strangers alike.

On the second day of the rainy season, one of the log riders— one of the rougher, nastier sort, who had grown more common of late— got sick of the prophet’s raving and beat him to death. Even Aven knew better than to mess with that sort, but the gods wouldn’t let the prophet leave them alone.

A year before, the villagers would have rioted at the murder, thrown out the log riders.

Now, though? Half of them were gone with the log riders or logging crews, and the other half just… didn’t care anymore.

Aven never found out what happened to her mother. One day, her grandmother told her that her mother wouldn’t be coming home, and that they were leaving Panian.

None of her aunts and uncles would listen to her grandmother, so when Aven left her family’s big longhouse it was just the two of them. And the only memento she carried was a boon from one of the little longhouse gods— one that made walking through mud a little less tiring.