Beneath Ceaseless Skies #406, May 2, 2024

“A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places” by Marissa Lingen

“A Series of Accounts Surrounding the Risen Lady of the Orun-Alai and Other Alleged Miracles in the Final Days of the Riverlands War” by Aimee Ogden

Reviewed by Mina

Two stories on our tricky dealings with gods.

“A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places” by Marissa Lingen is wonderfully tongue in cheek. The narrator travels with her mother to a deep canyon to petition the god of high places for a cure: illness robbed her of her sense of balance and she is constantly falling over and uses a walking stick. They arrive to discover that the god of war and his acolytes have taken over the temple. But the narrator and her mother are stubborn and fiercely organised; they pull together the acolytes of the god of high places and devise a plan to oust the god of war and his acolytes. They cannot fight them but they can make life uncomfortable for them with everyday pettiness and piques: “the entire canyon hummed with the sort of tension that arises from poor administration and small-scale malice.” The plan succeeds and the god of war flees but the narrator asks the god of high places for an unexpected gift.

In particular with this tale, I loved the gentle humour behind lines such as these: “The gods were most loved where their traits were least apparent—where their pilgrimages required the most of their followers. The god of fire lived in the depths of the ocean. The god of cities lived by herself in the forest—a great trial to her sophisticated followers—while the wild god held a tiny nook in the heart of the imperial capital’s most crowded slum, cheek by jowl with the god of wealth. The god of flowers lived in a desert that only bloomed once every hundred and thirty-four years.”

In “A Series of Accounts Surrounding the Risen Lady of the Orun-Alai and Other Alleged Miracles in the Final Days of the Riverlands War” by Aimee Ogden, Piran is collecting a saint’s relics. We slowly realise that he is collecting the remains of his wife’s body so that he can attempt to resurrect Esseris. Piran does successfully bring back Esseris’ body but it is not her spirit that inhabits the body, it is that of the goddess. A goddess who learns what it is to be human and who strives for peace and the end of the long war. A goddess who loved Esseris and feels affection for her husband and children. The story is interspersed with snatches of text from other apparent sources, so it’s like putting the pieces of a puzzle together to see the whole picture.