Blood Oaths

The gods, goddesses, and deities that together watched over Ennen did not, as a rule, play games with the fates of mortals. They were charged, Diza and Dia (god and goddess of judgment) would say, with being careful stewards of the mortal world. Shirking that obligation, they would continue, would be irresponsible and dangerous.

In retrospect, they couldn’t have tailored that statement to be any more of a challenge to Ithria if they had tried.

All of the members of the pantheon had traits in common with the domains they watched over. Duximas, as the goddess of adventure, was brave and daring; Dirata, as the goddess of family, was caring and kind. Ithria was the goddess of weather and music, and as such she was capricious, temperamental, and, yes, even dangerous and irresponsible.

Not only did Ithria fully intend to play games with the fates of mortals, she intended to do it literally.

Most everyone else had learned long ago to leave Ithria to her own devices but, and this was the important part, not get involved. Sunthe, goddess of elements and creation, had also learned this lesson, but her meek and easily-cowed nature meant that she couldn’t put it into practice.

Sunthe and Ithria sat on opposite sides of a two-person table. They were in the kitchen of the Centrality, the extraplanar home of the pantheon; since they didn’t generally need to eat, the kitchen was often vacant.

“So, Sunny, what’s your pleasure?” Ithria asked, slamming her palms on the tabletop.

Sunthe recoiled. “My, um, my…?”

“What game do ya wanna play?”

“Oh. Er… I don’t, um… why d-don’t you choose?”

“Hey, sounds fine to me!” Ithria snapped her fingers and between them appeared a floating image of the world they watched over. It flowed and moved in real time, allowing the two goddesses to see every single being living in Ennen down to the smallest ammon. Ithria made an arcane hand gesture and the image zoomed in on a town nestled away in between forests and foothills. They watched a man, short of stature and with the musculature of someone who handled large animals for a living, catch his foot in a closing gate and erupt in a torrent of salty language.

“O-oh. Him.” Sunthe swallowed.

“Yup! Talus Mellifluous Johnson. Ol’ Melly. Big Talus. John-john.”

“D-does he go by any of those nicknames?”

“Nope! Now here’s the game…”

Talus Johnson wasn’t having a good day. This wasn’t unusual for him, since he tended to view every day as an affront against him and believed that the gods themselves were making his life miserable. This wasn’t true, at least not until today. He herded gausheep for a living, and a herd of gausheep was enough to make anyone doubt whether life was worth it.

If it were anyone else, being followed around by a group of animals that were equal parts soft fluffy wool and sharp needle-like teeth would be the most interesting thing about them. Not so for Talus. His leathery, worn skin was covered, seemingly at random, with scar tissue that wound around in intricate loops and spirals – the remnants of many, many blood oaths.

The idea behind a blood oath was simple. If you were grievously wronged and wanted to really drive home exactly how much revenge you were going to take, you’d cast a specific spell and carve the oath directly into the skin. The spell would stop it from healing completely, leaving a scar – and a reminder. Most people regarded blood oaths as a barbaric practice, but not Talus Johnson, who had sworn so many blood oaths over the course of his miserable life that he had to keep a ledger of who he hadn’t paid back yet.

Talus’ routine every day was simple. He would wake up, eat a light breakfast, and tend to his gausheep, or, in other words, try not to get brutally maimed by his gausheep. Today was no different.

Talus owned a plot of land on the outskirts of town, where he could let his herd roam as they liked without the risk of them accidentally happening upon an innocent passerby. It was very important that the field be free of everything except for grass – the mere presence of anything the gausheep couldn’t eat tended to send them into a furious frothing rage that was altogether more horrifying than their regular baseline furious rage.

This is why, when a boulder appeared as if from nowhere in the middle of his field, Talus let out a howl of anger and frustration. After he calmed the gausheep (at great personal cost to a pair of pants that he was fond of), he stared the boulder down, swore a blood oath against it and its brethren, and stomped off to his shack to carve the requisite marking into himself.

He was back on the field shortly – after so many blood oaths, he was something of a pro, not that he was the type to brag. To his surprise, the boulder had disappeared, leaving no evidence that it had ever existed. Never one to doubt his own sanity, Talus instead thanked his lucky stars that it wouldn’t be an issue anymore.

That’s when the bees arrived – a whole swarm, from out of the blue. The gausheep reacted predictably in that they tried to fight every single bee one-on-one, a matchup that didn’t favor the gausheep as much as they would have wanted. Though they were lethal and powered by undying engines of hate, the gausheep weren’t the best at hitting small targets. The bees didn’t even have to sting – they just flew in between the gausheep and the gausheep began attacking each other.

Talus was, aside from furious, boggled. He knew that nobody kept bees anywhere near him; the beekeepers all stayed on the other side of town. There weren’t any bees in the woods that bounded his property either, he was pretty certain. And yet, here was a respectably-sized swarm, their appearance as sudden as the boulder. He dutifully chased the bees away with a broom while swearing a blood oath against their hive, then calmed the gausheep down and went to find his blood knife.

When Talus got back outside, he noticed to his horror that it was raining – and that thunderclouds were gathering. It wasn’t supposed to rain that day, at least not as far as he knew; his copy of The Collected Almanacs of Octavius Esry had only predicted snow clouds. Granted, every copy of the Collected Almanacs came with a disclaimer inside the front cover that said: “This almanac does not take into accounts acts of Ithria; please be mindful on days she has been drinking.”

Thunder pealed and lightning struck. One thing that gausheep had in common with lowland sheep was a fear of loud noises; the difference came in the reaction. Lowland sheep would run, fall over themselves, and occasionally stumble closer to the source of the noise due to a dearth of intelligence. Gausheep would attempt to viciously attack whatever frightened them and, failing that, then anything else that was moving. A thunderstorm, unprepared for, could decimate a herd.

Talus sighed, swore a halfhearted blood oath against the sky as a whole, then ushered the gausheep to shelter before they could get too into it.

The final indignity of the day came when, after the storm cleared, someone from the library knocked on Talus’ door, asking about the fees owed for a book Talus had kept past due. Talus had dutifully returned it and paid up, but not before cursing the name of the librarian and swearing not one, not two, but three blood oaths against her and her family. Sometimes, Talus reflected later, it was the little things that made him feel better.

“So,” Ithria said, from her seat on one side of the table in the Centrality kitchen, “let’s tally it up. I got a blood oath off’a him with the thunderstorm.”

“Um… and I got him with the, uh, the boulder and the b-bees,” Sunthe said.

Ithria’s shoulders slumped. “Two to one. Nuts.” Then her eyes narrowed. “Wait, then who sent the librarian?”

Around a corner, in the hallway outside the kitchen, Meion, the god of records and knowledge, laughed to himself. “Three points to me.”