Here is my piece for the @falsegodszine! I wrote about a moody, misanthropic water god and his burgeoning relationship will an earnest and selfless priest. I had a lot of fun developing this world and these characters with my artist partners—thank you all for your beautiful contributions!
Title: The Priest and the Water God
Themes: fantasy, original mythology, gods, priests, hidden identity, developing relationship, ambiguous relationship, human/god relationship, self-sacrifice, bittersweet
Marin feels his lifeblood drain from him like a lake’s flow reversed; it flees up its tributaries and leaves its basin a barren crater. So now is his vessel; there is a hole in his breast, and as he watches, water leaks from it. There is a red-headed boy with a crinkled brow who kneels by his bedside, holds a cloth to the hole, and does not understand why he cannot staunch it. Marin raises a hand, bluish like a human corpse, and claps it over the boy’s. The boy gives a start; his eyes, hued as the seabeds, leap to Marin’s.
“Leave it,” Marin orders, and sits up in the human’s bed.
The boy hops back, tripping over his own feet, which are bare and scrabble across aged wood. Marin looks about him, at the enclosure of some wooden cabin or hut, and finds the commonalities typical of human abodes: a wash basin in the corner, a red brick oven, two oaken chairs, a matching table with the remnants of a solitary repast, a dresser, a bookshelf stuffed with old manuscripts, live plants in terra-cotta pots, and a mat of woven reeds spread across pine-board flooring. In three walls, there are windows, draperied and dark. In the fourth is a door where a single pair of shoes is lined up. There is a fire in the oven; the smell in the air is of some human grain product that Marin only vaguely recognizes. The space is small but not uncomfortable. Marin determines that this must be the boy’s home.
