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The Four Gods

Gladriana's voice quivered with her age as the wrinkles on her face reinforced the seriousness of the words as she spoke them.  I was a curious little boy there, listening intently to her words.

When the world began, there were the four gods, and no others to vie for power.  They ruled over all but each other.  They came together and split the world.

The God that Swims took the waters and ruled over the oceans and seas.

The God that Flies took to the air and ruled over the skies.

The God that Walks took to the land and ruled over the continents.

But, the final god, the God that Crawls, saw no part of the world left for him, and so he crawled deep within the world and made a new world.  The God that Crawls made dark lands beneath and in his anger towards the rest of the gods and their worlds, he made all sorts of creatures that would be the bane of the others in the world that flew and walked and swam.  And, in his own time, that god, the God that Crawls, planned his vengeance against the others, a time when the monsters that crawl would take all of the world.

The words rang again in my mind as I remembered the telling of the tale when I was a child.  Gladriana was long dead.  The village tellers had long stopped telling the tale of the four gods.  Now they spoke of the new gods, the living gods, the gods whose avatars came to this world, who gave clerics power, and paladins purpose.

But here, now, I stand before a Tarrasque, perhaps some 200 feet or more in length as we mine around its corpse.  These creatures of normal size cannot be killed, but it is dead.  It is a hull of a once magnificent god-like creature.  A tarrasque half this size terrorizes the world when it awakens; this one would have ruled all the lands.  Is this, perhaps, the God that Walks?

I wonder what we have yet to discover.


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