The Monastery of Useless Gods

The Monastery of Useless Gods is set in the Eastern Hemisphere of Ishveos, far from the events of More Gods Than Stars. (And wow, was the vote for this one close. I swear, the lead between it and The Last Dragon of Ishveos traded places every time I checked.)

--------------------------------------

Teppit woke as she did every dawn, to the commandments of ten thousand hungry gods.

She’d slept with her soul suppressed, of course— it was the only way to sleep in the Monastery of Useless Gods. The only way to spend more than a few hours in the place, really. Even quiet murmurs from that many gods would drive most folks up the walls in no time. Prophets were forbidden from coming within a half-mile of the monastery, for their own sakes.

Stabs of pain shot through the soles of Teppit’s feet as she got out of bed— she’d spent too much of her teens and early twenties standing on hard stone floors in the warehouses she used to work in, and had damaged the connective tissue in her arches. The healing gods she’d consulted told her that her feet would heal fully in another year or two.

Teppit could have prayed for healing, but she could put up with another year or two of hobbling around like an old woman in the mornings. Embarassing, for a woman only in her late twenties, but… more prayers for the little ones.

The hundred or so small gods living in her soul knew better than to seek her attention just yet— she enjoyed tea, but didn’t need tea to start her day, unlike some monks, but her foot pain left her just as grumpy as the worst of the tea drinkers.

She staggered around her cell getting dressed for the day, donning the humble habit of a Useless Monk. By the time she made it down to the kitchens to help prepare breakfast, the pain in her feet had already started to recede for the day.

There were only forty-three Useless Monks in the monastery these days, so everyone greeted her by name as she served them oatmeal with fruits and nuts.

Admittedly, both the fruits and nuts were cashews— the Monastery had a whole orchard of cashew trees. One of the Monastery’s biggest investments each decade was paying for cashew harvesting boons for the monks that worked the orchard— the actual cashews attached to the cashew apple were easy enough to harvest, but the cashew apple itself could irritate the skin if harvested without the proper godgifts to remove the weak toxins. Beyond that, the cashew apples would decay rapidly if handled too much, and they seldom kept longer than a day or two anyhow.

They also had oat bread and jam made from the cashew apples, as well as fresh cashews and cashew apples— all pleasant, but the Monastery of Useless Gods wasn’t the place for folks who craved culinary variety.

Teppit kept her soul suppressed all through breakfast, from helping to cook to eating her own breakfast. She was looking forward to next week, when she would rotate off breakfast duty. Not that she’d sleep any later— the gods would still wake her at dawn— but she could lie in bed a bit longer.

When she’d handed off the kitchen to the dishwashing shift, she wandered over to the great chalkboard in the commons to check her prayer assignment, hoping she’d get library duty. Teppit loved library duty— the chairs were all huge and cozy, and you could pick out new books to read whenever you needed to. Not that you couldn’t read at other prayer stations, but...

On checking the duty roster, Teppit scowled halfheartedly. Entry hall prayer duty.

At least she could still stop by the library for a book or two on the way there.

------------------------------------------------------------

Teppit was one of three monks in the entry hall that morning— though thankfully, she wasn’t working reception. She hated dealing with visitors— she’d never been especially fond of people, always preferring the company of gods.

Still, every now and then a visitor would approach her instead of the receptionist, which was always irritating and confusing, given how huge and obvious the reception desk was. As a result, Teppit preferred to lodge herself in a secluded corner, on an old sofa blocked from view by a dozen wardrobes and a bookshelf filled with the holy books of dead gods the library didn’t have room for.

The fact that the entry hall was a maze of secondhand furniture, with barely enough room to walk, made things even more confusing.

She settled down in her preferred corner, sighed at taking the weight off her feet, and relaxed the suppression of her soul a little.

Only a little.

Even so, gods immediately flooded her soul with greetings, questions, and commandments.

She addressed the gods in her own soul first, doing her best to calm their excitement, then reached out to the gods around her.

There were around nine hundred of them in the entry hall alone, inhabiting all the old furniture, as well as masonry, doors, throw rugs, and the hall’s big stained glass window. Teppit was pretty sure only a hundred and thirty or so wanted her attention, and she was able to quickly calm most of them down with simple greetings.

Then she began her Meditation, the same one the monks used every day.

The Useless Gods were, almost universally, tiny, kept barely out of starvation by the prayers of the monks. They didn’t take much in the way of soulstuff to feed— most could only handle a fraction of the prayer a layman could provide.

Unfortunately, that meant most of a worshipper’s prayer capacity went to waste. An unquestionably frustrating issue.

So the Useless Monks trained to split their prayer. The more experienced monks could split their prayer dozens, hundreds of ways, but Teppit could still only manage nineteen different gods at once. Some of her prayer capacity still went to waste when she worked with the smallest gods, but not too much.

At least she’d reached the point while she could read and pray with the Meditation at the same time— her first six months at the monastery, it had taken her full attention, even just split four ways.

Teppit took a deep breath, and began to pray.

She prayed to a goddess whose gifts could temporarily change the color of belly-button lint. She prayed to gods whose gifts could manifest broken clothes-pins, inch-long frayed threads, and ugly wooden dice that always landed on three. She prayed to a god who could add vanilla to the scent of farts, though the rest of the fart still smelled just as bad.

Each and every god in the Monastery was utterly and completely theonomically useless. There was little to no market for any of their godgifts, and they were kept alive primarily by the charity of the monks.

The monastery barely kept itself afloat most years. They made a tiny bit of income from their sales of cashew products— cashews, cashew apple jam, cashew and cashew apple liquors, and the like— as well as the occasional sale of a blessing.

Overwhelmingly, most of the scattered blessings the Monastery of Useless Gods sold were to the children of rich merchants, as their parents tried to expand their souls as quickly as possible through burning through blessings— and there were no cheaper blessings in the Hsinh Valley than those in the Monastery.

Their small size also meant that they didn’t grow the soul very quickly, so only a small fraction of merchants— those just barely in the territory of wealth— came to the Monastery instead of gods with actually useful blessings, or gods whose blessings offered more soul growth for their price.

And each year, there were always new useless gods, either transplanting themselves into the monastery, its furniture, or the monks.

Teppit’s family didn’t understand her decision at all, didn’t understand why she would want to spend every day praying, living in near poverty, and isolating herself from the world.

That was entirely fine with Teppit— she didn’t understand why they enjoyed living in the bustle and noise of Hsinh City, with its dozen layers of underground streets above the caves and subterranean waters.

Her grandfather would have understood— Teppit had inherited her love of reading and quiet from him. Some of her fondest memories were of curling up with a book on the floor next to her grandfather’s comfy chair, where he spent so much of his time reading.

Teppit loved her life at the monastery. She could spend her days reading, not interacting with anyone save her fellow monks— who one and all respected the days she didn’t want to talk to anyone— and on her days off, wandering down to the valley floor between the sheer-sided limestone mountains around the Monastery, itself perched on one of the largest of the sheer-sided mountains, with just enough room on its grounds for the cashew orchards.

Teppit’s leg muscles were stronger than ever— the only access to the valley floor came from a long staircase wrapped around the limestone pillar, one that took twenty minutes to descend, and more than twice as long to ascend back up.

Once Teppit had her meditation flowing, her prayer automatically directing itself to the hungriest gods, she cracked open her book— a horror novel about a forgotten labyrinth spewing monsters out to attack a quiet mountain village— and settled in for a peaceful day.

A peaceful day she wasn’t going to get.

----------------------------------------------------------------

The gods in the entry hall chattered excitedly when doors opened, and the chatter only grew louder as a whole group of people entered.

Teppit did her best to ignore it all and focus on her book— she’d just reached the part where the whole village realizes the danger, and finally start listening to the shepherd’s warnings too late.

“May I help you all?” the receptionist asked.

“We’re here to speak to the Abbess,” a smooth, charming voice said.

Teppit disliked the man immediately. He had a salesman’s tones, the sort that was too friendly to be honest.

The monk on duty was far more polite than Teppit would be. “Of course. A moment, if you would? Verhit, could you fetch the Abbess, please?”

Verhit, the other monk on duty in the entry hall today, murmured her acquiescence, and her footsteps echoed through the maze of furniture as she departed. Better her than Teppit, at least.

Teppit went back to her book as the receptionist offered the visitors tea and chatted politely with them.

The miller had just been devoured by something that was mostly eyes and teeth— a cathartic moment, given that he’d been one of the biggest deniers of the problem earlier in the book— when the Abbess arrived in the entry hall.

“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Abbess,” the overly friendly salesman said. “My master sends his…”

“Unless your master is sending his apologies and a promise to never bother me again, I’m not interested,” the Abbess snapped.

Teppit blinked in surprise, looking up from her book. She’d never heard the Abbess sound angry like this before— even when there was trouble in the monastery, when a couple of the monks got into a fight, the Abbess never sounded angry, just disappointed.

“My master has nothing to apologize for,” the slimy salesman said. “His offer is far more generous than…”

“This monastery has been here for three and a quarter centuries,” the Abbess said, “and it will not be sold on my watch. Your master can find another old temple to serve as his country manor, there’s no shortage around here.”

“I think, perhaps, you haven’t spent quite enough time down in the city in recent years,” the salesman said. “Anetos is one of the most important men in the valley, and certainly the richest. What Anetos wants, Anetos gets— and he is offering you a truly generous price.”

The Abbess sniffed. “You had my answer weeks ago. Take your hired goons and leave this place, and do not come back.”

Teppit stood up off the couch, and sidled over to the crack between two wardrobes.

The hired goons were muscle-bound idiots of the sort that abounded in the poorer middle levels of Hsinh, while the salesman was… not at all what Teppit had expected. The man was tall, broad-shouldered, and ridiculously handsome— all of which just made Teppit trust him even less.

You should never trust a man that pretty, if you asked Teppit.

“You will regret this,” the salesman warned the Abbess. “No one says no to Anetos.”

As the salesman and his goons trudged out the front doors, Teppit flopped back down on the couch, to the irritation of its resident god, Vrescava, Who Ties Knots in Back Hair.

Anetos, Anetos… why did Teppit know that name?

Finally, it came to Teppit— Anetos had been the slumlord that owned many of the middle-level tenements near the warehouses Teppit had worked in before she’d joined the monastery two years ago. He certainly hadn’t been the richest man in the valley back then, though— must have moved up in the world quite a bit.

Teppit shrugged, checked on her Meditation to make sure her prayers were still being divided properly, then went back to her book.

Though, to her irritation, she couldn’t quite lose herself in it so well as before.

---------------------------------------------------

Teppit finished the horror novel before lunch, and just had time to swing by the library again on her way to the dining hall. She picked up an old favorite, an old travelogue that was notoriously unreliable, but gave some of the most evocative, lovely descriptions of the East Pole’s Necropolis ever written. Her grandfather had introduced it to her when she had first started working the warehouse jobs, to help distract her from the mind-numbing work.

The dining hall was much noisier than usual, both monks and gods busy gossiping about the visitors in the entry hall— and quite a few of them wanted to hear Teppit’s side of the story.

There were no secrets in the monastery, not with this many bored, gossipy gods around.

Teppit managed to fend off most of the attention by promising to tell her version of the story after she’d gotten her food— oat bread with cashew butter and a salad of greens and tomatoes from the gardens around the bases of the cashew trees.

Of course she didn’t have anything to add to the story, beyond her own paltry knowledge of Anetos, but that still set the gods and monks to gossiping. It was distracting enough that Teppit actually took her food to another table entirely so she could eat and read in peace.

The travelogue actually mentioned a monastery where all the inhabitants took vows of silence— Teppit had to admit, that sounded quite tempting at times like these.

-----------------------------------------------------

The day looked to be improving after lunch, when Teppit found herself on attic duty.

The monastery had no less than four attics, all of which had their own prayer stations— but one of them was far and away the best, in Teppit’s opinion. It was, in fact, her second favorite place in the whole monastery, after the library.

There were a handful of old trunks and crates in the warmly lit little loft, but most of the space was taken up by an especially comfy armchair, a padded footstool, a table with a self-heating relic kettle, and a big east-facing window looking out over the valley below.

It was a longish walk to the nearest toilet, down a couple staircases, and you had to haul up water for the teakettle yourself, but aside from that, it was a perfect, tucked-away nook. There were only fourteen gods in the attic, and most of those were sleepy, undemanding little things, whose gifts tended to be even more useless than usual for the Monastery. There was a god that helped you remember where you stored your own hair, if you intended to eat it later; a goddess that made bee stings hurt worse, but only for yourself; and a god who manifested beans made of poorly-glued together sawdust.

Teppit spent the next few hours reading, staring out the window at the valley, and fantasizing about long journeys— which was far preferable to actually taking long journeys.

She may have napped a bit as well, but the attic gods certainly weren’t complaining.

The sun was getting low behind the monastery when the shouting started.

-------------------------------------------------------

Most of the shouting was from the monastery gods, of course, though Teppit could vaguely make out human shouting coming from below.

She glanced out the window, at the monastery steps, and sighed heavily.

Teppit shook her head, then spent a few moments looking for her bookmark before finding it had slipped down the edge of the chair’s cushion.

A crisis was no excuse to dogear a book or leave it lying face down.

She stood up, her feet protesting angrily, and set out down the stairs at a brisk walk.

It only took her ten minutes to reach the front steps, but that made her one of the last monks to arrive— most of the rest, led by the Abbess, were clustered angrily, facing a small army of hired goons that outnumbered the monks at least three or four to one.

An army led by the too-pretty flunky from earlier, the one with the salesman’s voice.

“You can’t evict us!” the abbess said angrily.

The salesman smiled widely. “I’m not evicting you, Hsinh City is. This morning was… a last ditch attempt to come to equitable terms. My master was rightfully pessimistic you would refuse, but the Council insisted on the formalities.”

“The Hsinh Council holds no authority over the monastery,” the Abbess replied. “We are outside its borders, and have never formally recognized its rule.”

The salesman smiled wider. “Yes, that was rather a strong motivator for them to agree to this annexation. Dear Abbess, this isn’t about legitimate authority— it’s about power, and the exercise thereof. Now, are you and your useless monks and gods going to leave peacefully, or will we need to drag you out?”

You could have heard a pin drop in the following silence.

So everyone heard Teppit’s yawn quite clearly.

The other monks gave her an assortment of amused and annoyed looks, while Anetos’ lackey and the army of goons gave her confused or dismissive looks.

The Abbess sighed. “Teppit, I know you’re not a fan of socializing, but please try to treat this moment with a little more dignity.”

Teppit blushed in embarrassment. “Sorry, I was on duty in the smallest attic, and it was especially warm up there today.”

The Abbess smiled at that. “My apologies, then, I think we’ve all fallen asleep up there often enough.”

“This is all very droll and cozy,” Anetos’ lackey interrupted, “but if we could…”

“Oh, shut up,” the Abbess told him. “When I told you that you can’t evict us, it wasn’t because I was leaning on legitimacy or rule of law. Like you said— this is about power, and the exercise thereof.”

The monks knew their cue, and all at once, they unveiled their souls fully.

Revealing that each and every one of them was a Saint, even Teppit and the other couple of newcomers, and that fully nine of the older monks, including the Abbess, were Divines.

Turned out that when you spent your whole day praying for cheap blessings, you could grow in power extremely quickly.

The goons took a step back almost as one, but Anetos’ lackey just rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. A Divine with useless godgifts remains useless— you’re no more threatening than any layman.”

One of the monks began to laugh, and it quickly spread throughout their ranks. Even Teppit chuckled, despite her annoyance at being dragged away from her book and armchair.

“Would you care to let me in on the joke?” the lackey asked irritably.

“Oh, it’s just the full name of the monastery,” the Abbess said cheerfully.

The lackey frowned in confusion, his smooth look and tone of voice vanishing for the first time. “You’re just the Monastery of Useless Gods, everyone knows that.”

“Well, it’s certainly a more convenient name,” the Abbess said. “But no, it’s not our full name.”

The Abbess turned back towards the monks and the monastery, gesturing to it with her arms.

“This is,” she said, “the Sacred Monastery of the Compassionate and Benevolent Order of Caretakers to Theonomically Useless Gods.”

The lackey’s look of confusion grew even deeper, and a hint of scorn crept in. “Why do I care what your full name is?”

“You should really only care about one of the additional words,” the Abbess said. “Theonomically.”

The lackey— and the brighter of his goons— had just enough time for looks of realization to start spreading on their faces when the monks began activating blessings.

Blessings by the thousands.

Teppit used three dozen blessings of Vrescava, Who Ties Knots in Back Hair, on the hairiest of the goons she could see, and their back hair immediately and forcefully began knotting itself together, stretching the skin of their back painfully.

Teppit used two dozen blessings from Doarnelo, God of Compulsively Pulling Loose Threads, and the garments of an equal number of hired goons began to fray and dissolve.

Teppit used a dozen blessings of Selvuvles, The Dance Student’s Nightmare. Selvuvles’ blessing caused its target a spike of pain when they weren’t in proper dance posture, meant to teach students to be better dancers through harsh negative reinforcement— but unfortunately for the dance goddess, she didn’t actually know how to dance, and could only teach students to flail awkwardly. Teppit had no complaints about teaching Anetos’ goons that.

Teppit used a great collection of random blessings she’d picked up since arriving at the monastery, ranging from ones that roughly cleaned under fingernails to ones that made simple fart noises.

And she burnt through all of those blessings in heartbeats. That same Meditation that allowed her to pray to so many gods at once also allowed her to use blessings swiftly and simultaneously.

And around her, each and every one of the monks did the same. The goons’ clothing basically exploded off their body from the sheer number of useless clothing godgifts, their skin erupted in weird boils, and they were overwhelmed with noises and smells all at once.

There was one type of blessing that the monks used more than any other, though.

Teppit manifested broken clothes-pins, inch-long frayed threads, and ugly wooden dice that always landed on three, and beans made of poorly-glued together sawdust. She manifested umbrellas made of lace, hats made of lead, and fragile glass slippers shaped like bees. Just by herself, she manifested over a ton of temporary matter.

And most of the other monks carried far more blessings than she did.

Anetos and his goons barely had time to suffer from the first wave of blessings before an avalanche of junk coalesced in the air above them, burying them completely.

And kept coming.

The flash flood of useless crap flowed down the hill almost like water, much of it shattering back into colored motes of godstuff in the current— but it was swiftly replaced by more.

And then the whole useless mass flowed over the edge of the cliff, down to the valley floor below.

And none of the powerful combat godgifts amongst Anetos’ lackeys did the least to aid them against the onslaught.

Teppit had long since run out of blessings when the Abbess raised her hand to call for a halt. A last few pieces of junk rained down, and then the whole mass began dissolving back into godstuff, resulting in great geysers of intangible colored motes drifting in the air.

And when those vanished, there was no sign of any of Anetos’ goons, save a single empty shoe.

The Abbess spoke theatrically to the empty air in front of her. “Too many people forget that one doesn’t need to be theonomically useful to have value.”

The monks all stood staring out at the cliff and the valley below, probably contemplating the strength of the weak united, or the blindness of the powerful, or something else deep like that.

Teppit mostly contemplated her aching feet, and the excitable cheering of the gods lurking in her soul.

One by one, the monks suppressed their souls once more, to hide away from the overwhelming concentration of gods in the monastery.

At last, the Abbess turned back to the monks and clapped her hands. “Well, that was eventful. Dinner’s not going to prepare itself, cashews won’t pick themselves, and prayers won’t perform themselves. Let’s get back to work, everyone.”

“Finally,” Teppit muttered, as the monks headed back to their duties, most of them chattering eagerly about the attempted eviction.

---------------------------------------------------

Teppit didn’t head straight back to the attic— instead, she stopped by the library once more.

Not to pick up another book— she wouldn’t finish the travelogue until tomorrow, at least— no, she had another purpose here.

Teppit headed straight back to the back of the library, to a tucked-away reading nook.

And in that nook sat an old, familiar chair, one long familiar to her. A chair she’d spent countless hours lying on the floor next to as a child, reading.

Teppit gently sat down in the soft armchair and stroked its arms, and felt the little god inside it wake up.

<hullo Teppit>, said Ymm, God of Healing Dog-Eared Page Corners In Books You’ve Owned For At Least A Decade.

“Hello, Ymm,” Teppit said.

<Teppit stay and read to Ymm?> the young god asked.

“Not yet, Ymm, just stopping by to say hello,” Teppit said. “I’ll be by after dinner to read to you.”

<Teppit best,> the little god said, already falling back asleep.

She waited for him to fall fully back to sleep, then carefully stood up to go.

Then paused, and smiled at the battered old armchair.

Her grandfather’s battered old armchair.

Her grandfather’s battered old armchair, holding the god her grandfather’s soul had given birth to when he died.

A god who was anything but useless, at least to Teppit.

Even if she never dog-eared books.

Teppit patted the chair one last time, then headed up to the attic.

Her prayers wouldn’t perform themselves, after all.