O sinner man, where you gonna run to?

The trickster god has overturned the battlefield.

Three armies have clashed. Lives have been lost. A whole lot of fleeing has gone on.

Č’s troops had claimed the field. Though beyond exhaustion, warriors gathered all available wood for pyres and laid the dead upon them. The task could only be begun and would continue into the next day, perhaps beyond. Healers moved about, hoping to rescue and restore life where possible, or to ease passing if not. [The capital] had been marked by banners of mourning white when armies arrived; now ashes marked the faces of all who were in or around the city.

There was no victory yet; only movement. Everything up to now had been preparation. This was the beginning of the deciding battles. F. did not open its gates.

[For those noting his unfingered playing, he explains in comments at YouTube that "The G is lowered to F to make it an Open D minor. Thanks for noticing that."]

My fictive parallel world has its parallel "Christ event" but the missionaries have not yet arrived in this part of that world. (Soon, very soon.) So the first three and a half books are all in a "pre-Christian" setting: a world with its own mythology, rituals, piety, and imagery.

Part of the great fun of creating something like this is pondering questions like "how do people pray?" and "how do people swear?" and "what mythic imagery do they use to speak of natural phenomena?" and "what language expresses amazement?"

The result is that I now think in some of the imagery of that fictional world.

Like Hinduism, say, the world view recognizes only one ultimate reality with many manifestations. There are thus many deities yet it is not truly polytheistic. Behind and in everything is The One.

The deities are the constellations. The twelfth sign of the zodiac is the Trickster. When the cycle has run its course everything is upset allowing newness to break forth again.

And so the Trickster did his work in the events that unfolded around the capital that twenty-first day of the Herb Month in the sixth year of King Digrak of Hlv and the third year of King Avroth III of Thyelos.

(There is no end of back story.)

Sweet dreams, my boisterous bonobos!

--the BB