Gods of Water and Metal
A horror story from Worldweaver's Workshop
‘The well’s gone dry’ was the phrase of the day, apparently. Laban had heard it about a million times. Close competitors were ‘someone should do something about it’ and ‘nothing like this has ever happened before’, but on the whole, people seemed content to observe or complain with simple statements. The river was only a minute’s walk away, after all.
The well was also the spectacle of the day, as he found out when he went to see for himself. Half a dozen suntanned faces peered down into its depths at any given moment—men and women, old and young, but mostly the young. Laban’s was the oldest face by far when he came to peer down, and he was by no means old. He saw nothing but darkness.
“What’s everyone looking into the well for?” he asked. “Looks the same as ever.”
“That’s what I said,” said another man, walking past.
Laban set a bucket on the well hook and let it drop; a few seconds later there came the fairly distinctive sound of wood hitting stone. His expression and the expressions of everyone else peering down were various as he wound the winch and drew the bucket back up again, and found the bottom of the bucket bone dry.
“Someone should go down and find out what’s up,” said one of the children.
“Too dark,” said a second.
“Well, bring a torch,” said the first.
“Might not be enough air,” said Laban.
“Bring more air then,” said the first.
“You can’t carry air, silly,” said the second.
There was a moment of silence, but for the usual village sounds of wagons rolling and cattle lowing and someone yelling at someone else about unfair prices.
“I don’t think anyone’s going down there,” said Laban. “It’s too dangerous, and all anyone would see would be a dry underground riverbed.”
“You don’t know that,” said the first child. “You might find some kind of evil spirit drinking up all the water before it could flow anywhere.”
Another moment of silence as those around the well digested this possibility.
“I don’t think anyone should go down there,” said a young woman. “If we take the spirit away from the water, it will curse us with something far worse than a dry well. We still have the river. Let us not provoke it.”
“If there is a spirit, the old priest ought to know,” said Laban. “I will tell him our theory. Perhaps he can drive it away.”
“He’ll just blather about the curses of the gods,” the first child muttered. “He won’t actually go see what the problem is. No one will. My dad says he doesn’t see a reason to keep the priest around. There aren’t any gods, everyone knows that.”
“I think that ‘god’ was just an old word for spirit,” said Laban.
“Nuh uh,” said the first child, who was some thirteen years old and very knowledgeable. “Gods don’t come down into specific places just to annoy people. Spirits do. Gods have some great scheme that they spend their lives trying to do, claiming they’re trying to give the universe meaning, but it already has meaning—to survive. We don’t need gods to survive. More like the gods need us. Hah, more like the priests need us. Make us do a whole bunch of useless stuff just to waste our time and fatten their own bellies, all for the sake of some god that doesn’t exist and wouldn’t care about us if it did. Well, if the gods are cursing this village, they can smite me too, so there!”
“Oh, don’t say such dreadful things,” said the young woman. “The gods might exist or they might not, but isn’t it safer to assume that they do?”
“That’s always been my view of the matter,” said Laban. “Pour a few drops of supper’s wine into the fire for them if they do exist, and only lose a few drops of wine if they don’t.”
“My dad doesn’t hold with such nonsense,” said the knowledgeable child. “If there were gods there’d be big catastrophes. But nope, only little ones, like spirits would cause. Little ones like dry wells, when we have a river. The gods would have dried up the river too.”
“Perhaps the things which appease gods will appease spirits as well,” said Laban. “I will still go to the priest. Unless someone else already has?”
“I think you’re the only man who still thinks of the priest in times of trouble, Laban,” said the young woman. “I—well, I’m too embarrassed to go to him nowadays. I don’t know what to believe anymore, other than the thing that everyone else believes. How could more than half the village be wrong?”
Laban sighed, and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Guess it doesn’t make much difference anyways what people believe, or don’t. The well will fill again, or it’ll stay dry regardless.”
The woman gave him an uneasy glance. Then she slowly turned and began walking to the river with her jar balanced on her head. Laban too turned and went his own way, and the crowd about the well gradually dissipated. Only the knowledgeable child remained at its rim, looking down with scientific studiousness and a grim expression.
The priest’s name was Jono. He was eighty years old, which was ten years older than the next oldest man in the village; people were expecting him and his religion to die any day now. He had yet to fulfill those expectations.
“I won’t pass until the gods have appointed my successor,” he’d say.
He was sitting in the sun on the porch of his house in the village outskirts, sleeping, when Laban approached. Having nothing else he was particularly anxious to do that day, Laban sat on the step beside the priest’s chair, admiring the beautiful day while he waited.
The river splashed beside them, flowing towards the village proper. It was a stone’s throw in breadth and ran all the way from the Great Mountain to the foot of the Great Valley. The village didn’t have better names for either the enormous mountain or the enormous valley, but that’s what the mountain and valley had been called since time immemorial, so they figured the names were good enough. Certainly, they were great: the valley in particular, in addition to being enormous, was filled with vibrant greenery at all times of the year. When drier seasons came, the river somehow swelled to keep the land watered, and when the wetter seasons came, its flow somehow lessened.
These peculiar, almost illogical features of the river were no small aid to the farmers of the valley, but they had long since been taken for granted. For these reasons, apparently, the river was not called the Great River, though that was a somewhat popular nickname. Its proper name was the Tamed River.
Laban was a lazy farmer, more often in the market than the fields; he alone of all his farming fellows found the time to wonder about the answers to pointless questions such as ‘Why?’
“Ah, Laban,” said an awakening Jono, startling Laban out of his aimless ponderings. “It was good of you to visit an old man like me. What is it, child?”
“Why does the river swell in the dry season and shrink in the wet season?” asked Laban, forgetting he had another, more important question to ask.
“That’s a long story,” said the priest. “Ah, but all stories are long. Short stories are only stories that have not been told fully.”
“Tell me,” said Laban. “I want to know what you think about it.”
“So you think it has something to do with the gods?” asked Jono, eyeing Laban. “You’d not have asked me otherwise.”
“Doesn’t seem like something spirits or nature would think up,” said Laban. “It’s too predictable and regular, and yet also strange.”
“Predictable, and yet also strange. Hmm,” said Jono. “Indeed, that is what the gods are. If they should make the Tamed River defy nature for our benefit, why should we complain? It is a blessing. You ask why they will the river to do this? I will tell you who did not will it—the gods of water. Why should the gods of water—for they are many, much as a river has many droplets—why should they defy their own principles? You know the principles of the gods of water as surely as you know the principles of water itself, Laban. The gods of water will not turn from their path till they reach the sea. If their path is not an easy one, they will stop. They will work for no one unless it is easier to work than to stand still, and I think you of all people should know that it is very easy indeed to stand still.”
“Carry on with the story,” said Laban, impatiently.
“Yes,” said Jono. “That much of the story anyone who believes in the gods could tell you. It is evident simply by gazing intently enough upon the waters. But when the waters act contrary to their nature? Then you know that there is another force, another will at work. And so hear now what my grandfather told me, who was priest before I was in a day when more people still believed: the tale of the god of metal, who enslaved the gods of water, and bent them to his will.”
Laban had heard many stories, but not this one. He sat up, attentive and curious, as Jono settled deeper into his chair.
“Once, the gods of water held free reign over this valley. They flooded it in dry season and wet alike; nothing grew in its drowned soil. But it was the only place with water for miles around. Many men came from all over the lands of the Great Mountain, during the dry season, in order to pay tribute to the gods of water, and to receive water for their needs. But the tribute was steep, and costly. Those who did not pay were devoured by terrible beasts from the depths of this flooded valley, beasts with hide of lead, who could walk through the currents without being swept away. If one tried to take water without paying the gods, the beasts with hide of lead rose from the depths and dragged their prey back with them. So the people paid the price of water, and cursed the gods of water. But those who cursed the gods too loudly and too often found that their water would spoil. So the people paid the price of water in bitter silence, and remained bitterly silent even when they had returned home, even when the rains came again. The whole land grew bitter.
Then the god of metal came, in the middle of the dry season, the driest season men had ever known. Even the gods of water had less water than they usually did, and their cruel prices rose ever higher. The god of metal saw all this.
Being the god of metal, he was cunning as a craftsman, and also very rich, for all of the world’s gold was his to command. Yet it is said that his heart was of gold, too, and not of iron, for though it was set on acquiring great wealth, it was also soft. The people loved the god of metal, and begged him to save them; he loved them in return, and said that he would.
He came to this valley, where the gods of water held sway, and their chiefs came out of the lake to meet him, accompanied by many of their beasts of lead.
‘What do you want?’ the gods of water asked.
‘I want water,’ said the god of metal. ‘How much gold are you asking for it?’
The chiefs conferred. ‘This man is very rich,’ they said. ‘Let us charge a hundred times more than we usually do for a jar of water.’ And so they turned to him and said, ‘Five gold coins for a jar.’
‘I do not want a jar,’ said the god of metal. ‘I do not want fifty jars. I want all the water you have and the land that it sits upon.’
The gods of water gasped. ‘It is our land!’ they cried. ‘You cannot have it!’
In answer, the god of metal raised his hands; gold coins began to spill out of his empty palms, and the flow of gold did not stop till he closed his palms. When he did stop, a small mountain of gold lay at his feet. The gods of water stared; the god of metal had already buried his hooks of gold in their hearts of stone.
‘You may continue to live here in this valley, of course,’ said the smiling god of metal. ‘I will still need you to manage my water for me. And of course I will pay whatever you think fair for the land and the water, and for your work after you have sold them. All this gold and more I will give you if you will turn over your water to me. How much do you ask?’
The gods of water conferred again, and their beasts stirred uneasily. For seven days they whispered in conference, the god of metal waiting on the banks of their flooded valley all the while. Till finally, with a greedy light in their eyes, they demanded a hundred thousand gold coins for their land. The god of metal made pretense at protest, but he gave them what they demanded when the gods of water were finally certain that it was they who were robbing the god of metal, and not the other way around. The gold poured out in torrents from his hands, and the gods of water snatched it up and left laughing with derision.
They then retired to their underwater coves, counting their untold riches. But it was their chiefs who helped themselves to most of the gold; the other gods of water felt poorer for the sale of the valley, not richer, for they saw the chests full of gold that their superiors had, and felt as though their own boxes of gold were a measly pittance, even though with them they could have bought villages. Envy sprouted in their hearts. But in the hearts of their beasts! Now there was the true hatred, for the gods of water had given their beasts nothing. Yet the beasts were too frightened of their masters to do anything.
Then the god of metal approached the caves of the beasts of lead in the dead of night. Curious, they flocked out and surrounded him like wolves. The god of metal smiled and asked them why they served the gods of water, who gave them dead corpses to eat, when they could be serving him, who would give them more gold than he had given to their masters, and treat them more kindly than they had ever been treated. The beasts of lead were all his before he had finished speaking, and he guided them up to the surface, to the peak of the Great Mountain.
And there he set them to digging and building with the steel tools he gave to them. First he built them new homes, but then he set them to build a great castle of stone and of steel. He and his beasts burrowed down deep into the earth, till they found the source of all the water that came into this flooded valley—the great blue dragon, in whose breath are the tides.
The god of metal drew his sword and took up his chains of steel, and fought with the dragon for five years, he and the loyalest of his beasts. Often were they beaten back by the torrents of water which the dragon spewed at them—but they always returned with greater resolve. Till finally they struck the dragon down and bound it and forced it to serve them, making it pour its water elsewhere, where they wanted it poured.
And thus the flooded valley began to drain. The gods of water, who had been fighting all this time over who was owed how much gold, finally realized the true import of why the god of metal had bought every last drop of their water. They came to the surface screaming curses and demanding the god of metal give them their water back, but he paid no heed to their cries.
Then the gods of water took their weapons and called for their beasts, murder in their eyes—but their beasts had left them much like their water was leaving them. Their lust for blood doubled at this belated realization, and they marched to war against the god of metal. The god of metal had seen this moment coming long ago, however, and was well prepared to receive his uninvited guests—the moment they stepped across his threshold, he caught all of them in chains of steel just as he had caught the dragon, and he dragged them down screaming into the depths of his castle, and those cruel gods have not been seen since.
Then the valley finished draining, and the god of metal went down to reclaim the gold that he had given to the gods he had conquered. But while there he noticed that the valley was a fertile place, though a dead and drowned one. He kept this in mind as he returned to his castle.
All the water the god of metal had taken from the valley, he poured out into the arid lands of the people that had begged him for help, all those many years ago. He made them pay for the gift he was giving them, but it was a price they were more than willing to pay for a gift that would make their arid lands flourish. And so even today the lands about this mountain that were once a desert are desert no more. The people were more prosperous despite the price, and of course the god of metal was richer than he ever had been. Nor did he sit on his gold, but he traded with his people, making himself and the land even more prosperous. When war came, he arose, he and his beasts of lead—for though under his care they were beasts no longer, still they retained the name as a mark of their great prowess on the battlefield. And they defended the land. And the god of metal was renowned more and more—and the people swore to remember his name forever.”
Jono fell silent and looked over the beautiful valley, as though the god of metal had just now, in person, come and given it as a gift to him.
“Did he make the river the way that it is?” asked Laban.
“Yes, yes, he did,” said Jono. “I was getting to that. I think.”
“But it’s simple to guess what took place,” said Laban. “Clearly he instructs the dragon to pour more water into this place during the dry season than the wet, and he is instructing still.” Laban paused. “Is the god of metal still alive?” he asked.
“In spirit,” said Jono. “Every ten or so years I and my predecessors have taken an amulet made of a certain rare stone, covered in gold, and brought it up to his altar near the peak of the mountain. My father told me that it gives the god of metal strength to face the next decade.”
“I was going to ask,” said Laban. “What was his name? The god of metal’s name?”
“I—I do not know,” said Jono. “It has been lost to time.”
“Lost to time?” said Laban.
“Yes,” said Jono, strangely. “Lost to time.”
It was only later that Laban realized he had not asked Jono to take a look at the well, or even told him about it. By then it was too late in the day to walk back and ask him—and besides, as everyone was saying, the village still had the river. Laban shrugged and decided to forget about it.
Something occurred the next morning to jog his memory.
“Has anyone seen my boy?” asked a mother walking through the marketplace. Laban, idling nearby, glanced up at her as she continued to ask everyone she came across, “Have you seen my son?”
“Which son is your son?” asked Laban. “How old was he?”
“He was such a clever boy,” said the mother, ignoring him. “Wherever could he be?”
“Reckless little child drives his mother mad,” said a nearby marketplace stall-keeper, a woman old enough to be Laban’s grandmother. “He’s the one that kept staring down into the well for hours yesterday. Managed to throw himself in, like as not.”
Laban frowned, stood for the first time in several hours—his joints cracked—and walked over to the well, which was a stone’s throw away.
The bucket was at the bottom, and the winch handle had snapped.
Laban swore quietly. He took the well rope in his hands and began drawing up the bucket without the winch; it came up almost empty. Almost. There was a tiny bit of water pooled at the bottom of it. Dropping the bucket back down and hearing it clang against stone, and glancing back at the broken winch with worry, Laban stopped his hands halfway from grabbing the rope to slide down himself.
He came back moments later with a torch and means to light it, as well as a knotted rope that would be far easier to climb than the well rope. Distrustful of the thin beam that the winch had been attached to, he retied the well rope to one of the sturdier wooden pillars that held up the well roof, and tied his knotted rope to another of the pillars.
People were already glancing at him, but all eyes began staring when he took hold of the smooth well rope and slid down into the depths.
The well was deeper than he’d realized, but his feet soon hit the ground. He lit his torch, and was glad to see that the knotted rope, though suspended a few feet out of his reach, was, all things considered, long enough. Then he looked around. And the cavern at the bottom of the well was round. Too round.
“Good gods,” whispered Laban, staring at the enormous spherical chamber. He was at its bottom; a hundred glinting black eyes stared at him from the walls all around.
Laban gulped and averted his eyes, turning them back to the floor. And there he saw the corpse of the missing boy, the clever one who had said that someone ought to investigate the well. A waterlogged stick of wood with a blackened end lay beside him. He had drowned.
Laban hadn’t said a word to anyone after crawling back out of the well with the boy’s body slung across his back. His white face forbade questions, and his refusal to show his face in the village for weeks prevented anyone from asking, anyway.
Laban’s wife was just as lazy as he was, spending all her time dreaming about fancy clothes but never so much as picking up a needle. She stared at him out of the lattice of their house, wondering what had gotten into him: for the first time in his life, Laban was working earnestly at his farm, endeavouring to wash away what he had seen with his sweat.
Those empty eyes staring at him… at the boy… drowned in a dry well…
He had mixed feelings when he went to the river to get water for his crops. On the one hand, the river’s water was here, and honest. It behaved like one expected it to—swelling as the dry season approached, like it was now, and shrinking when the wet season came about. When you looked for it, it was there.
On the other hand, the boy had drowned. Drowned in a dry well.
Laban poured ten times as much wine into the fire as he was wont to do, much to the scorn of his wife, till she remembered how pale his face was nowadays. So she went out of her usual lazy way to acquire more wine for him to drink and to pour to his gods. She had never been beautiful, but her face half-lit by firelight and filled with concern for her husband was the closest she had ever gotten.
Still, she dared not ask what it was that he had seen in the well.
And so the days went by. Laban didn’t go to the village anymore, so his wife did instead, much pleased with her new important position as the sole source of information on Laban. She painted him as a man who had stared at horrors beyond the comprehension of man and yet had retained the semblance of sanity; this led to her acquiring a small following for herself of those who were interested in hearing the latest news of the man who had descended into the deep and returned bearing the boy who had angered the spirits. She considered calling herself Laban’s priestess, as a joke—but decided that wouldn’t be in particularly good taste when the news came that the old hermit Jono had been found dead. Oh well. She had all the mystique of a priestess anyway. Now if only she could dress the part…
But her sense of self-importance always died away when she returned to home and found Laban still working without a care for his own health. She tried to coax him inside, to eat and sleep, but seldom succeeded. When she arose in the mornings after such evenings, she’d find him sleeping out in the field. He insisted that he was fine when he awoke; he continued working day after day—till he collapsed from exhaustion. Then, and only then, did his wife manage to persuade him to stop working.
So for a week Laban sat still. And alone, for the most part, with only the distant river’s rushing in his ears. He began to feel calm once again. The days of toil and the days of rest together combined to ease his mind.
He had known that he needed to understand, but hadn’t known what to think. Now he no longer felt the need to understand. And without that need to understand, he no longer had to think about that which he could not understand.
It was just a moment of his life which he would never understand. That was all. It was unimportant. It was nothing more. It was nothing.
The week ended, and he stood up that evening, feeling like his old self. He went back to pouring a mere drop or two of wine into the fire, and the following morning he walked to the village with his usual intentions—of doing nothing in particular, but of seeing what there was to see today.
He wandered across the bridge that stood between his home and his village, thinking of nothing in particular, his mind entirely at ease. But something made him stop. Some crack in his ease, some flaw in the wall between him and the outside world. He resisted the urge to think, but it was too strong—and he finally looked to the river that the bridge crossed.
It was barely a trickle. The dry season was coming, and the Tamed River was going dry.
“Jono! Jono!” Laban cried, running towards the house of his friend. “What have we done? What has happened to the river? What have we done to anger the gods?”
There was no reply.
“Jono?” said Laban, opening the door to the inside of the house.
There was a closed coffin in the house, and the tools to dig a grave, but that was all that was new or out of place. Laban crept to the coffin and opened it; he shut it swiftly, breathless.
“What have we done?” said Laban to the coffin. “What have I done? What do I need to do? What is happening? Why do I need to know, to understand, or else die? Why do you vanish the instant I need you?”
For no reason other than the overpowering desire to know, Laban ransacked the house. He opened every door and every drawer and looked under every piece of furniture. He even looked inside the coffin again to see if the dead priest had some final message for him held in his hands, but there was nothing.
Nothing, until Laban stumbled upon a loose floorboard. He lifted it up at once, and found a chest beneath it, which he likewise lifted up at once, and opened.
Inside, there lay a golden head, roughly cylindrical, and clearly unfinished. It had the wide open mouth of a man out of breath, and a well-defined nose, but no eyes. Everything above the nose was just blank; the head was bald as well as eyeless.
Laban picked it up; it was lighter than he’d expected—clearly not made of solid gold. He remembered what Jono had said about an amulet made of some strange material and covered in gold, and how the priest would go up the mountain once every ten years to offer it to the god of metal. In order to give the god strength. But clearly it had not been delivered recently.
Would that weaken the god? Was that what was happening? The god of metal was weakening, and the gods of water were breaking free, and taking command of their former lands once again?
Laban’s mind fastened to these things as an explanation he could understand. He wouldn’t ask why the amulet was covered in gold, why the god of metal needed it, why Jono hadn’t delivered it. He knew what he had to do. Why he had to do it was unimportant.
Laban tucked the amulet under his arm, left the house, and began running towards the Great Mountain. It was morning yet. Perhaps there was still time.
The strange mixture of forest and cliffs that led between the village and the mountain was difficult to navigate in the day. It was a hundred times worse in the dark, with only the last remnants of breakfast in his stomach to give him strength.
Only the ancient road that he eventually stumbled onto saved him from wandering forever in that uncharted wilderness. It was cracked and crumbling, and it was made of some kind of grey stone that Laban had never seen before, but it was definitely a road. It was difficult for him to imagine how long it would have taken for this road to be built, till he remembered the god of metal’s army: the beasts of lead. And once he imagined them labouring day after day on this road of alien stone, he began to see things in the shadows beside the road. He couldn’t decide whether to be unnerved or merely wary at the presence of the spectres—had Jono told him what had become of the beasts of lead as time passed on?
Another question that he felt the need to answer, to understand. Hopefully the feeling would pass by the time he’d left this eerie place.
Yet there was a feeling that did not pass, the feeling that he was walking the same path as the priests had since time immemorial. That he was taking a part in a ritual for which he had never prepared himself. The gaping golden amulet beneath his arm was a symbol of he knew not what—why was it carved as it was? Did it have to be carved into a certain shape to be effective? Should he try to fashion eyes and ears for it, or—but Laban was too terrified of the ritual he was performing to try to change or fix anything. He didn’t understand anything about the mysterious ways of the priests long dead, and he knew it.
The road wound on and on, eventually coming to run straight beside the dry riverbed. Laban paused a moment here to rest, and to see if the riverbed was entirely dry. There was still a trickle, but it was even smaller than it had been that morning. Laban shivered and continued on.
At long last, late into the night, driven on only by either madness or duty, Laban came to the end of the road. A gaping gate of metal stood open on either side of him, and before him stood a clearing. Within the clearing, amidst hundreds of broken fragments of that grey alien stone, stood a small stone hut. It was a perfect cube, and it reminded Laban all too much of the perfect sphere at the bottom of the village well. Yet he made himself pick his way forward through the jagged fallen stones. How had these stones come here?—but that question didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but his quest.
The moon shone bright on the front door of the hut. It was open. Indistinct sounds came from inside.
Laban forced himself to enter. The amulet under his arm felt cold.
There was nothing inside the hut but a stairwell, from which the sounds came, and some kind of mural painted on a canvas of metal. Laban approached the mural, glad to ignore the stairwell for the moment. The mural’s paint—he thought it was paint—was faded. Faded paint, and faded writing that was illegible to him—was it even in his language?—but one part of it was clear, even if it still meant nothing to him: an enormous red triangle, with a black line, broken in two, running through its middle. The upper part of the line was a good deal longer than the other.
Some ancient rune left by the god of metal? But that too was a question which he could not answer.
Laban turned away from the rune, and towards the stairwell. It was whispering indistinctly. He tightened his grip on the amulet, and descended.
It was a long, long descent. Laban kept hearing things through the walls—things like the flowing of water and the creaking of metal. The metal stairs beneath him creaked too, and it was a mournful symphony all told, one he was thoroughly sick of hearing by the time he made it to the bottom—but here it only grew louder.
A pair of fallen doors revealed another room in the shape of a perfect cube. In the center of the room was a pyramid of steps, leading up to an altar at its peak. At least, he assumed it was an altar.
The world was whispering as he entered, and ascended the steps. The dripping echoes resounded far louder than they had a right to. He thought he could feel the amulet vibrating in his hand—or was that just his hand shaking? His whole body shaking?
The altar was a horrid cube of that same alien stone which lay scattered and crumbled all throughout the clearing. The altar, too, had crumbled; the cube was missing a few corners. But in its center, there was a hole.
He held up the amulet. Its golden surface, its gasping expression that now seemed to be an expression of immeasurable horror. He didn’t want to do it. This amulet—surely it could be sold for a fortune! Surely the gods would understand if the village dispensed with their wasteful customs. Surely—but suddenly, a loud snap resounded somewhere from above. And the whispering grew louder. Laban froze, arm and amulet still suspended in the air before him. A new strain of the whisper, louder than the others, rushed like water through the air, and it spoke with the menacing voice of rushing waters.
“Sooo…you came, came, came, came, came…”
The whisper only grew louder.
Suddenly, there was a crash from above, and the ceiling cracked, and water began to seep out.
Laban screamed. “No! No! Please! Have mercy, gods! I beg you—”
Another crash. Water poured in. Laban’s greed finally faltered to be weaker than his fear, and he flung the screaming golden amulet at the hole—but it bounced and fell upon the flooding floor, its screaming face dented out of recognition. A few minutes ago Laban would have run away for his life, but now he was too terrified to run anywhere but forward.
Water crashed and crashed and crashed, and the whispering rose in volume above even the crashes. Laban seized the amulet up from the floor, and shoved it into the hole. But the denting had changed its shape. It no longer fit perfectly in the hole, and got stuck halfway in. Laban hammered at it with his fists, and bruised his fists. It went down an inch.
“No. No. No! Please! I’m trying!”
The ceiling split in two, and stones fell to the ground. Laban was hammered to the floor by a falling sea which swept him away from the altar, into the pits churning with icy water. He clung to the stones; they slipped out of his grasp. It was more water falling from the broken ceiling and into the pools that flung him back out onto slick, solid ground. Laban’s head cracked against a fragment of one of the fallen stones, and, poleaxed, he gazed up into the yawning darkness above the broken ceiling.
Holes, holes, holes by the thousands. Like a million angry faces, clustered into groups of three or four or ten, they stared down at him. And all of them were whispering, screaming, roaring, and all of them poured out water in a torrent.
They were the gods of water. He was going to die for his greed.
Laban staggered to his feet, seized the nearest thing for support as another tidal wave swept down the steps towards him—that thing was the stone he had cracked his head on. He was shoved down and half a dozen feet backwards, but was saved from being shoved further by the stone being too heavy for the water to move. Another, smaller stone came flying towards him, but Laban dodged, got up, and ran up the slick steps to the altar as fast as he could, before—
Another crashing wave of water came falling from the ceiling, worse than any that had yet come, and Laban clung to the altar. The wave passed, and he was left there, sodden, bruised, bleeding, but still clinging to the altar. He seized one of the smallest of the fallen, jagged stones with one hand, forced himself upwards with the other, and hammered the golden amulet that still lay stuck in the altar’s hole with all his remaining might.
The gold scraped off from the blow, revealing the phosphorescent material beneath, and the amulet sank down into the abyss. Laban heard a clang, and a shattering, as it hit something down below. But as another torrent of water fell, he didn’t bother staying to find out what would happen.
Down the steps he went, the water shoving him down the last few. The floor was covered in a foot of water. But the ancient stairwell of rusting metal stood firm. Laban climbed, and came back to the surface.
Then, a roar, a greater roar, greater than any he had ever heard, resounded throughout all the valley. The earth shook. Laban ran. And he began to hear the sound of marching soldiers, marching in clockwork unison, their armour clanking and their voices a roar, marching faster than Laban knew men could march. He ran, he ran, he ran, but still the ghastly legion of the beasts of lead pursued, matching every step of his with two of their own. The gods of water joined the chase, as the dry riverbed began swelling full again with more force than Laban had ever seen it flow.
Yet somehow, Laban outran the beasts—and the waters, though overflowing their banks with a fury, could not reach far enough beyond their borders to seize him as they had before. Laban outran them, and fled far, far away, back to his own home.
And as dawn came, steam and smoke began rising from the Hill of the Gods, the spirit of the Lord of Metal having returned for ten more years to his rightful seat.
Published with the kind permission of Worldweaver’s Workshop:
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