Sunken Gods

This story is set on the moon of Ishveos, the setting of my upcoming series More Gods Than Stars. It shows off a small part of the magic system, and an even smaller part of the setting. This story was heavily inspired by the works of Craig Childs.

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Some philosophical questions are curiosities or toys, some intellectual crises. Some thrill rebellious youths, while others are profoundly dull and concern only barristers and lawmakers.

Some philosophical question, though, demand answers in blood. Questions about the right to rule, questions about the nature of power— too much is at stake for these questions to be answered with logic and rhetoric alone.

On Ishveos, lone moon of the baleful gas giant Viseas, there were many categories of philosophical questions that drew more blood than any question of succession, than any debate over whether gods or man should hold dominion. And one of the bloodiest?

Cartography. More than mapmaking, it was spatial philosophy itself, its practitioners grappling with questions as intractable as measuring coastlines to as life-threatening as arbitrating borders. Their discipline spilled more blood than ink, their errors measured in lives.

And few cartographic questions had drawn more blood than drawing the border between river and sea.

On most worlds of the multiverse, it would measure among the frivolous questions of philosophy. On a few, where civilization reigned above and beneath the waves, it could have history-altering implications.

But on Ishveos, few questions loomed greater— for river and sea gods were jealous of their borders indeed.

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Mesopa had once been a modestly successful god of coopers. Barrel gods like her were common in most cities— and, in fact, one of the nine council seats of her own home, Gzhemian, had been filled by the high priest of a barrel god. Like most successful barrel gods, that one had offered a preservation gift, one that slowed the rot of goods kept in barrels blessed by his followers. Fish, Mesopa believed, in this case? And a boon that strengthened the skin a little against splinters, one beloved by coopers and carpenters alike.

She couldn’t remember that barrel god’s name now. It had been so long.

Mesopa’s gift had been nothing so useful. Hers was a niche thing, one that gave coopers a better sense of what pieces of old barrels needed repair or were worth reclaiming. Useful enough to the many coopers of Gzhemian. Most would only pay for it as a blessing usable for a day, hiring prayer drudges for Mesopa in exchange. Barrel reclamation wasn’t a daily activity for most coopers in Mesopa, after all— the river port sent out many more barrels than it received back, and unlike in some cities, coopers in Gzhemian dedicated most of their time to new barrels.

Mesopa didn’t complain that few wanted her gift as a permanent boon— she earned more in prayer over the long run selling her blessing instead.

She was born in a riverside cooper’s shop— not one of the city’s large one, but not particularly modest, either. She was one of half a dozen gods dwelling full-time in the shop, with twice that many again dwelling in the souls of regular visitors. They were no Pantheon, but it was a pleasant little community of gods, and Mesopa was happy there.

And then the century floods came, so fierce they destroyed ships and piers, carried boulders the size of wagons like they were twigs. Ripped apart great chunks of the Lower Santrich’s riverbank.

Including the rocky outcrop the cooper’s shop rested atop.

Most of the shop was fine, save for the closest corner to the water, which was ripped away along with its stone roots.

In that corner of the shop were a dozen tools, a forgotten lunch, a half-completed barrel— and three gods.

One tool god in a handsaw reliquary, a second in a hammer reliquary, and a single place god in her stone shrine.

Mesopa.

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The cartographic neophyte may think the task of demarcating the river from the sea simple enough— just draw a line from one edge of the river mouth to the other.

This is the sort of solution that may only be enforced by the truly mighty, by emperors and kings, ruling Pantheons and great gods. For it is the least true map of a river mouth.

After all, of the four types of river mouth, only one allows for clean lines of that sort to be drawn.

Those deltas where the river current dominates the system form great messy deltas that reach far out to sea, growing like tree branches; and are the most violent interface of waters, for they draw land gods into the mix— for the land built up by the river current, mud and silt deposited from far upstream, is strictly temporary, and blurs together all definitions. The swamp gods found in deltas, at least, tend to be more peaceable, for they are by their nature more used to cartographic confusion.

Those deltas where the tides dominate, where they stab mazelike channels of brackish water and mangroves into the river and the land— these hardly exist on Ishveos. Oh, the sea is not gentle, but on only child Ishveos, one face eternally locked to giant Viseas, the only tides that move within human lifetimes are those of the sun, and they are slow and weak indeed.

The third kind, where the river rages with such depth, speed, size, and force that it simply stabs into the ocean; travels too swiftly for any delta lands to dare form; and rips great canyons in the seafloor… well, most worlds lack this sort, or have one or two of its kind at most. Ishveos, proud and lonely moon that it is, has no less than three.

But the Santrich is not one of them.

No, the Santrich is the fourth kind, dominated by waves, where the river empties meekly into the sea, bordered by pleasant sandy beaches to each side. The one kind of river where you could, hypothetically, draw a line from one edge of the river mouth to the other.

If, of course, you were an empress or queen, ruling Pantheon or great god, and none so mighty to achieve that feet claimed the mouth of the Santrich.

Because, simply speaking, it didn’t work. Simple geometry could never contain the complexity of any river mouth— nor would warring river and sea gods accept such solutions, not least because while their realms were defined by the border of river and sea, their strength was not defined by the strength of the waves nor current.
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Mesopa, for all that she had spent years alongside the river and had never lived anywhere but the river, didn’t actually know that much about the river. Didn’t particularly know its moods or currents, its strengths.

It wasn’t because she was a barrel god, plenty of gods took interest in things outside their portfolio, she just… had never been particularly intrigued by the river.

So when her shrine fell in, she felt fear, yes, but not crippling fear. She expected to sink to the bottom of the river, and to have to wait there for days or maybe even weeks to be retrieved.

She did not sink, though.

It is ironic that those who live in deserts, who have experienced flash floods, are perhaps most familiar with water’s ability to carry great boulders like they were twigs. Gzhemian was far from desert, though, and the Lower Santrich a generally well-behaved river. So Mesopa had no reason to know one particular law of water.

The faster, stronger, and more rage-filled a current is, the larger the objects it can carry. A river flowing slow enough will struggle to carry even grains of silt, while a river flowing swift enough can carry boulders bigger than houses.

Mesopa’s barrel-shaped shrine had been carved from a boulder only twice the weight of a man— and it was dwarfed by other debris the Santrich carried that day.

Mesopa was a place god, not an object god, so she could have fled from her shrine to the cooper’s shop itself, if she’d been fast enough. Both the shop and her shrine were included in her definition of place, after all.

It would have been costly, would have set back her growth by months, though. That, in combination with her lack of understanding of the laws of water, made her hesitate too long.

And so her shrine was swept too far, was carried downstream. It was battered against canyon walls and other debris. She lost touch with the hammer and saw gods that the river had taken with her.

And in a mere three hours, she was carried a distance that would have taken a ship days, save the swiftest relic or reliquary ships.

It was there that the flood dropped her from its grasp. Not because the river had calmed, but because she had reached its mouth. Freed from the prison of river banks, the water’s fury was soothed, and it could no longer maintain its grasp on Mesopa’s shrine.

So she sunk at the mouth of the Santrich river. Plummeted down through the water, and half-buried herself in the sand and mud.

And there, she found herself in the company of other sunken gods.

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Mapping is hard enough on land, where rivers move and angry farmers yank up surveying stakes.

In the water, where everything moves?

Well.

It isn’t hard to see why it’s so difficult to map.

Oh, some cartographers have tried measuring the border of sea and river by flow, by movement of water. Mapping by flux instead of stability, current instead of landmark. Using movement to show where one becomes another.

You should see the flaws already, though. Mesopa’s own tale thus far gives the clue.

The movement isn’t stable.

In some seasons, the river flows more strongly than others— sometimes it floods, other times it flows gently. In some months, the waves crash against the shore more strongly than others— sometimes storms lash them forward to war, other times they are too slothful to even climb the beach. And though the tides of Ishveos are weak things, they still occur, and can still alter the balance of power.

If that weren’t enough, the very shape of the river and seabed lives in a constant state of push and pull with the movement of the water— the fluid reshaping the solid, which in turn redirects the fluid.

Oh, cartographers have tried to create flux-maps, to create boundaries based off average water movements, boundaries that flex in response to current conditions— and they may have even worked, save for two facts.

First, though all maps and boundaries are open to interpretation, these flux boundaries are more open to interpretation than most. And second, there is no will to cooperate between the river and sea gods.

Their interpretations are mutually exclusive, and they will not compromise.

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Place gods are not meant to move. Grow, yes, but be entirely transplanted? Not at all.

It is to Mesopa’s credit, then, that she only closed herself off from the world for a couple of weeks after being deposited in the sand and mud of the Santrich delta. Like other place gods who survived their shrines being moved— who were few and far between— Mesopa sealed herself away from god and soul-senses within the Firmament within minutes of coming to a halt.

The other gods in the delta were unsurprised. She was not the first place god to end up there, though her shrine was larger and heavier than most. Still uncommon, compared to the much more frequent tool gods— but there were, for obvious reasons, no possessor gods among their number, mostly for reasons of lack of air for their hosts.

They were mildly surprised at how quickly Mesopa awoke, though.

<Help!> Mesopa sent out, jerking out of her slumber.

Oria, Goddess of Untangling Knots, and Adalu, God of Almost-Correct Geometry, were interrupted in one of their usual arguments about esoteric topologies, but it was Apin, Goddess of Repelling Red-Winged Biting Flies of the Nias Swamp, who reached out to Mesopa first.

Apin’s voice was weak and sad, but still kind. <Calm yourself, young one. You’re here in the delta with us now. You’re not going anywhere.>

<I’m not supposed to be here,> Mesopa told her. <I’m supposed to be in the shop, helping with the barrels.>

<You’re a barrel god, then?> Oria asked.

<I help repair and disassemble old barrels,> Mesopa said proudly. <I’m very useful.>

There was a chorus of disappointed sighs, from all save Apin. Though, if anyone had been watching Apin’s gold bracelet reliquary through the Firmament, they might have seen the god shrink a bit in regret.

<I’m sorry, young one,> Apin said. <But you’re going to be here a long, long time, I’m afraid.>

<I don’t… I can’t,> Mesopa said. <I need to… you’re starving. Why are you starving?>

<I’ve been here decades now, barrel god,> Apin said. <Decades without prayer, without a hint of soulstuff, save the occasional pitying donation from the deep dwellers. We’re stuck here for good, unless you bear a gift of particular interest to the deep dwellers.>

<I can’t…> Mesopa said, then trailed off.

<What’s your name, young one?> Apin asked gently.

<Mesopa,> the barrel god told her.

<You are among friends now,> Apin said. <We may be all doomed to starvation, but at the very least… we may starve among friends.>

Gods had no eyes, no tear ducts, no tears.

But they may still weep.

And so Mesopa did.

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The next clever answer to mapping the border of river and sea?

Salinity.

It is the clearest, most obvious difference between the waters, after all. It is the truest thing that distinguishes them.

Yet it fails to map still.

There is, after all, no point that cleanly divides fresh and salt water. No place where you may float half and half, just a slow gradient of brackishness.

Oh, if it were a clean transition, it would be so easy to measure. Not just by taste, but by buoyancy, for salt water is more buoyant; and by salt detection boons.

But it is not clean. The gradient moves and shifts. Changes in current send plumes of saltwater upstream and headwater rains send spikes of freshwater seaward. And always, always, the freshwater carries traces of its own salt, for all salt in the oceans once resided on land.

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Though Mesopa woke quickly, it took her longer than most to adjust to her new circumstances. Her new community was gentle and patient with her, but it was nearly eight months before she began fully engaging with the rest of them.

She was a fairly young god, though, so once she did adjust, she adjusted thoroughly. Gods do not have childhoods, any more than they have bodies, but a sophont less than a decade old will always have a comparative lack of experience compared to older sophonts. The trauma seemed all the greater to Mesopa thanks to her youth, but once she found her balance once more, she adjusted more wholly to her new circumstances than others.

A year passed, and then two. The community, all two dozen or so gods, watched ships pass overhead, named various aquatic mimics, fish, and other marine dwellers who visited them, and did their best to enjoy their time together.

Mesopa was particularly delighted when a stone mimic took up residence on the side of her stone barrel. The little creature was no skeuomorph, adapted to mimicking human artifacts— it seemed unlikely its lineage had ever even encountered the works of civilization before. It did well mimicking her stone, but it had no idea how to properly imitate the carved lines in her barrel, and its presence was always obvious to the collected gods.

The little mimic was a filter feeder, though, so it spent most of its time unfolded, waving its cilia and lattices through the currents, only folding itself up again to hide when fish approached.

Mesopa named it Silly.

Three years passed. Two new reliquary gods were added to the community, and Mesopa helped Apin welcome the new gods when they arrived, scared and confused.

Four years passed, and a third reliquary god joined them. This time, Mesopa introduced them to the community alone, for Apin had grown weak, and stirred herself less and less.

Five years passed, and so did Apin. The fly-repelling god had grown weak and thin over her many decades in the delta, and eventually, quietly, she simply dissolved into the Firmament once more, and the whole community of gods mourned.

Not even a month after Apin died, a new reliquary was washed downstream, and Mesopa encountered the deep dwellers for the first time.

There were many different kinds of deep dweller, but this was the most common— a colossal, sapient octopus, one far bigger than the little land-bound octopuses that would steal scraps from the cooper’s shop Mesopa had been born into— or, for that matter, bigger than the cooper’s shop itself. The visitor came to collect the new reliquaries, a copper god in a copper chalice, who could gift the power to prevent copper corrosion.

After it did so, it took the time to offer prayers to the collected gods. Its alien soulstuff tasted nothing like human soulstuff, and was slower to metabolize, but it was Mesopa’s first meal in years.

She was tempted to refuse the charitable prayer, out of pointless anger that it was too late to save Apin, but the pangs of hunger had grown strong in her.

The community was grateful that it hadn’t been one of the other types of deep dweller. Few were as generous as the octopuses, and the eldest of the remaining gods spoke in hushed voices about one particularly monstrous deep dweller who had buried a reliquary that had irritated it, so deep that its inhabitant could no longer speak to the rest.

The conversation turned then to the never-ending debate about whether octopuses— the little, normal ones— were a type of mimic or a type of animal, but Mesopa stayed out of it, sadly remembering her friend.

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There have been so many different attempts to map the boundaries of river and sea.

Cartographers have tried mapping by species and ecosystem, by which fish live where— but this was far too easy for various competing gods to manipulate, often simply by bribing fishermen.

Cartographers have tried creating boundaries out of scratch, physically planting sturdy stone or metal pillars in the seabed to demarcate the boundary— but these inanimate cylinders have a curious habit of learning to walk, or even to swim away to sea entirely.

It is, in the end, a pointless endeavor— because the gods of river and sea will never accept any compromise, any outcome but total victory.

And it is a pointless endeavor because there is no boundary between river and sea. It is an entirely meaningless exercise, one driven only by the greed and ambition of water gods.

It is not even a necessary one.

There are river deltas of every sort that have escaped this pointless conflict on Ishveos. Not the majority of deltas, but common enough. Deltas where the local communities have negotiated settlements with their gods, where the gods themselves have come to reasonable accords, or where the mighty have forced those accords from high.

That last category seldom lasts long, of course, and the theological warfare erupting between the worshippers of river and sea gods in the aftermath tends to be fiercer than ever, but peace is possible.

It was once more common, as well. These definitional wars, these geographic bloodsheds— they are a new thing, historically speaking. Driven by new theonomic systems, by more competitive theological environments, by the shrinking of the moon’s unmapped spaces.

By cartography itself.

The Santrich is not one of the exceptions. The Santrich Delta is not a place of open conflict between religions, but the peace there is a fragile one, that requires careful negotiations to even allow the passage of ships.

And that peace is not one strong enough for negotiations over sunken gods, for one side to claim the washed-away reliquaries and shrines for themselves.

Each time one of the deep dwellers seize one of the sunken gods, the river gods make an uproar— but it is mere play-acting, for they know perfectly well that the deep dwellers do not worship the shallow gods the river gods compete with, have little interest in the boons and blessings the surface gods have to offer.

Someday, perhaps, the fragile peace will be broken, or be repaired into something more robust. The cause for either could be anything— a particularly powerful reliquary being washed into the delta, a major shift in the river’s course, any number of things.

But for now, the delta stagnates, its only constant change.

And so Mesopa and her little community slowly starve, in water shallow enough that they can be seen from above the water on sunny days while the water is clear. They starve, for lack of worshippers to act through. They starve, when it would be easy for divers to retrieve them, or at least to attach ropes for them to be hauled up by winches.

The divers wouldn’t even need to be Saints, simple unaugmented humans with only a handful of godgifts could do it.

But the gods of river and sea cannot agree who should profit off the rescue, so the rescue doesn’t happen.

Thus is the moon we live on.

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There was one night that Mesopa would always remember keenly, as long as she rested in the sand and mud of the delta.

It was perhaps a decade since she had been stranded, a decade of waiting, of long rambling conversations with the other gods.

It was a quiet night, the other gods sleeping to conserve their strength or keeping to their own thoughts. Her little pet mimic Silly, grown old and sluggish, waved its fronds gently at her side, picking plankton out of the brackish water.

Something floated down the river then. Nothing divine, no reliquary or shrine.

Just mundane wood, only altered by a weak blessing.

But it was intimately, painfully familiar to her.

It was a half-broken barrel— one that had unquestionably been built in the very cooper’s workshop where Mesopa had been born.

It was fresh-built, its wood still sturdy and well-seasoned, not yet water-logged.

Mesopa wondered how it had been broken, wondered how it had ended up in the river. She luxuriated in running her divine senses over its form, exercising her gift for the first time in years as it floated over her.

Most of all, she took comfort in the knowledge that her former home was still there, still making barrels. That the family of her early years was still intact.

For long minutes, Mesopa watched the barrel float away, until it drifted out to sea, out to the limits of her senses.

<Goodbye,> Mesopa told the barrel softly.

There was no answer.