🪔 Lundra: The Falling Rain – Part 4

There was no such thing as good luck.
Sure, there were times when a glass may fall to the floor without shattering or when a table might be kicked and the priceless relic of Ekilm’s wisdom only shifts precariously towards the edge—much to the relief of the cleaner. But were these moments an advent of good luck? Was the cosmic balance of fate shifted in some way to the positive? Lenith didn’t believe so.

Among the ever-weaving patterns of the existence, there were a multitude of gods who kept the ticking tocking and generally held reality together.
There was Soils, the mighty god of light and of sound, who would push the sun from his foundry each morning and ensure that the day was begun correctly. There was Dormir, a more pensive god who dwelt within death and in rainfall. He sat in his study, fussing over the patterns of clouds and wondering if a person’s soul should be unwoven or not. But of all the gods, of all the deities who had allowed themselves to become personified, it was Lenith who most flummoxed her followers.
She wasn’t a vengeful god by any means. Thinking on the subject, one rainy day in Lundra, Lenith realised that she wasn’t actually sure where even to begin with vengeance. You need to upset people, she imagined, make them really think about their mistakes. But it seemed to her that most people were already upset to begin with, that they lay awake at night and thought about saying good morning to someone in the afternoon. She didn’t keep favourites either. In fact, Lenith was such an anxious sort of deity, that she was known to hide whenever she was offered prayer and would discourage her worship at every pillar and at every post.   

Laying in a patch of clover, the god of fate watched some familiar clouds drift by overhead and wished better for the world. There were more gods once. There was an entire gamut of thread weaving creators who stitched their influence into the tapestry and made the world of Lamplight so much more peaceful than it was now–putting aside the more frequent deitious waring of course.  
Solis was fine, Lenith mused while frowning at a clover that was unfurling a fourth leaf in her presence, but he wasn’t a creative god. Every day he forged a new sun and then sent it across the heavens. Every day he trotted out the same old stencils of the same old glowing orb and every day Lenith wished that he would try something different.
No one cared about things like the clouds anymore, well, except for maybe Dormir.
No one important cared about the clouds.

Revelling in the saudade of a time that she could not return, Lenith felt as though she was a coin that had landed on its side.
She had been the god of time once. Technically she still was the god of time, but as beliefs were changed and as the tiny gears of progression had taken the place of sundials, Lenith found that she had been shunted towards the domain of fate, and then, by natural assumption, of luck.  
She hadn’t interfered much within the tale of existence. Fate was usually a thing that was able to work out its own path. But every so often, things would need a nudge. A tossed coin would fall into a crack, a person would find a cabinet laying on its side and then get to wondering where the butler went.
And that was fate. Things happening to others so that other things could happen to them too. Lenith had tried to give sensible omens, but people would just see misfortune in things: smashed mirrors, black cats. No one ever listened. 

Lenith felt as though there was something tangentially wrong about the day.
In being somewhat responsible for time, the god of fate knew that within every second there were a multitude of things that had already gone wrong and if left alone the following second would usually sort itself out. But today felt like an abnormally wrong something. There was a sag to the ceiling of reality about this day and Lenith cursed Dormir for no particular reason.
Was this a feeling of doom?

Rolling over into an awkward kind of sitting kneel, Lenith unceremoniously plucked the four leaved clover from the earth and inspected the thin thread of silver light that was stitched into its roots. Everything was connected in a way. Countless threads, woven together by a master’s hand. A powerless god, a weaver, had taken the essence of all things before they were whole and stitched them into tapestry. From fragments life had bloomed, a theft of singular existence but a gift of actual life all the same.
Pulling at the thread, an unstitched seam began to run across the field, a swathe cut amongst the grass and a line drawn in the fabric of the tapestry. The run would heal. So often would life become unsown that new threads were already looping together and undoing the scar. The seasons, a lifecycle in harmony.
Stretching the loose thread taught between her thumbs, the Lenith inspected the fragile line and read the history of the clover inscribed therein.

It had been cut.
After reading two-thousand years of, grow, pollen, shoot, repeat, Lenith had found a perfect cut in the clover’s lifeline. No evolution, no connection to another being, just a severed piece of history that forever was lost beyond. The first thought, the first figment of imagination that this clover could recall was a single word, doom.

‘Doom.’ Lenith said to herself, halting the wind and frightening a nearby rabbit enough for it to faint*. ‘What begins with doom?’
The clover patch had travelled a long way to reach this field; it had been worn on lapels, clung to muddy boots, it had grown from a field that was now overlain with city. Rain-soaked streets, a used bookshop. Inside there was–

A small pop to her side shook Lenith from her thoughts and the god of fate shifted to see two tiny legs buried waist deep in the dirt and kicking at the air in frustration. Whatever unfortunate creature having just been called into existence had the fate of doing so while being upside-down.

‘Mmmumph!’ came a voice from below the dirt.

Carefully, Lenith scooped the kicking legs from the ground and placed the creature down with a dusty plop, ash pluming outward from the little sprite as if it were a dropped bag of flour.
‘A hearth sprite.’ mused Lenith with genuine surprise, ‘How did you get here?’
A spirit born from domestic neglect was seldom brought into existence within a field.**  

‘A lady.’ the sprite replied, struggling to reorient itself from the temporal dissonance of sitting down in one place and then appearing in another. It clapped a sooty hand against its head and dislodged a droplet of brackish water.
‘Have you ever had a bath, miss?,’ it said, ‘Thoroughly unpleasant and bloody hard to pull yourself back together afterward. I must have gotten discombobulated. Say, you wouldn’t know where a good fireplace would be? It’s colder than a wet chimney out here. What’s all this green stuff?’
Grabbing at its sides the misplaced hearth sprite shivered in the ashless word around it and began to jog on the spot, shoulder deep in the dew-covered clover patch. It looked a miserable sight and Lenith offered it her hand so that it could stand somewhere above the grass line.

‘Anything could be a fireplace with enough matches,’ Lenith joked, feeling a softness for a creature so out of its place, ‘but, there’s an abbey not too far off that I could take you to? It looks like that’s where you had come from at any rate.’
The tread trailing from the sprite was old. Whatever fireplace it was that it had been living in must have been neglected for a few years.              

‘No abbeys!’ the hearth sprite jumped backward in fright and almost fell to the distant ground below. Regaining its balance, it then tried to furtively kick some of the fallen soot from the lonely-eyed lady’s hand in hope that she wouldn’t be inclined to drop it. ‘Err…It’s just that I’ve experienced some unpleasantries in regards to abbeys and I’m swearing off them for the time being. It’s bad luck haunting an abbey.’    

Lifting the sprite closer, Lenith wondered when she had last seen a house sprit outside of a home. They were a curious being. From unfinished chores a home could create life from the mundane. Cornice dancers that carried mould in their wanderings, stich eaters, who ruined favourite socks and stole buttons from every wash basket. But a hearth sprite embodied frustration; they moved things. Stealing a key that had just been placed down, shifting your reading glasses to the top of your head or to a place that you obviously had left them all along. Every time you had to leave the house and couldn’t find your shoes would mean that it was probably time to clean the fireplace.    
‘There’s no such thing as bad luck.’ Lenith replied after a time, trying to mask a note of sadness in her voice.

‘Says who?’ the sprite said, hooking its thumbs into the sides of its grubby shirt and turning its head dismissively.  

Lenith had never considered the theological implications of questioning her own existence.
‘Says me, I guess. There are some statues that say so at least.’ Imagine hearing your name be praised and be cursed within the same breath, she wanted to say, imagine watching a loser walk away from every conflict and hating you for simply existing. You try to be fair, but no one wants fair.

‘You’re a spirit, aren’t you?’ the hearth sprite shrunk back down into itself. Tall spirits were usually bad news, it thought.

‘Think higher up in the weave,’ Lenith laughed, standing from the clover patch and blurringly stepping onto the surface of an ocean.
Turning on the ball of her foot, the god of fate then walked upon the treetops of a bush fire, she stood within the stone circle of a forgotten glade, she sat amongst a field so verdant with clover that the sky above faded in lustre when compared to the emerald green below.
Holding the sprite with great care so that it may not fall, Lenith smiled at the shaking knot of soot and placed it back upon the grass covered earth.
‘I’ve got something for you to do.’ she said, now fading into the form of a standing stone, long covered by moss and by clover, ‘There is a fireplace, some four days without tending. You shall live in its ash, and you will write a word there for me, somewhere where it may be seen. I give you this word as a name and by your name I ask that it be done.’      

‘Four days! How’s a sprite supposed to build a good bed of neglect in four days?’ What’s your name? what’s the address? What’s the word?’
Throwing its cap against the stalk of a four leafed clover, the hearth sprite then felt a pull against the datum that held it to the world. It was as if an invisible thread had been unstitched but for a moment and then refixed upon a point way beyond the horizon.

The wind returned; the sun continued its journey across the heavens. Looking around the empty field, the hearth sprite heard a single word and felt a fresh shiver rise from the ground as if to underline it. Upon the coldest night upon the coldest winter, such a shiver would not be felt.  
The tall spirit had given the hearth sprite a bond to the world, and it knew that its task must be done.
It thought of its name for a moment.
Doom.

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*Rabbits, who were quite prone to moments of fright, had little experience in hearing the true voice of a god and tended react in the same manner that they would after too much fermented cabbage.
This rabbit was just thankful that it didn’t reawaken with a hangover. 

**Lawns, yes. Unfenced fields, no.    

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J. McCray
2023