How a society believes in (and fears) a god or group of gods influences how that society develops. We offer a look at two of the Tolmiran pantheon's members--the detached and distant Arithaan, and the nebulous, nefarious Uulix.

ARITHAAN, AND THE ORIGINS OF TIME AND MAGIC: Before Fire and Water departed the world, Arithaan was the God of Knowledge. His interests were in uncovering the secrets of the cosmos left veiled even to the eyes of the Divine, for not even the gods were omniscient. This need to understand the unknown combined with his distaste for the company of the other gods led him to the very edge of creation, the outer boundary of the world. There he hoped to study the nature of the universe--and what might lie beyond it.

Now, it is important to understand that before the Sun and Moon began their chase across the sky, there was no time as we understand it. Things did not age, did not decay, did not change without the action of some outside influence. When the chase began, this all changed, and time ripped outward from the world like a wave.  The other gods were unable to react before time enveloped them, but Arithaan was different. Perched upon the edge of creation, he was able to sense the disturbance that was the origin of time, and ward himself against it, calling up an impenetrable barrier around his realm.

There he remained, for nothing could enter and nothing could leave so long as the barriers remained in place. As time went by on the outside and the other gods received no word from their lost brother, they assumed that he had been annihilated, smashed against the walls of creation by the great wave. From within his shell, Arithaan could not know the same had not happened to the rest of the cosmos. Unable to lower his protections without allowing the corrupting influence of time into his realm, and unable to contact the outside without lowering his protections, Arithaan became restless--and as the god of Knowledge his curiosity would not let him sit and wait forever. Unable to return to creation, he began to look in the other direction: To what lay beyond.

This month we begin a new, two-part story set in Mal Nassrin. Fetish brings a look at the city through the eyes of Anikka, a young woman apprenticed to one of the city's healers. Missed any of our earlier stories? See our complete list of serials here.

Fetish
By Sonja Littell-Trotter
Chapter 1

Autumn light is always slanting light, when not even the noonday sun can hold shade perfectly beneath it. Somehow the shadows always slip away, sideways. It was a dusty saffron afternoon, when the weather should have cooled with the approach of winter, but had not. Anikka stood in the doorway of a house not her own and listened to the sound of women weeping.

The boy was dying.  That was all.  The women had waited too long, cared too little, or been too poor, none of which mattered now.  Anikka only half-listened to the women's lament, though. Her new shoes pinched her feet and she was absorbed in trying, unobtrusively, to flex first one foot, then the other.  Nevertheless, when her mentor spoke,  all thoughts of grieving women and cramped feet fled as she lifted her head trying to see what he wanted before he named it.  Catching her eye, he gestured curtly to the bowl that sat by the boy's head, and then wordlessly turned his attention back to the women.

The priest, Gideon Mather, stood with arms crossed at the foot of the bedroll where a young boy lay.  He had donned Oron's Hands, symbolic of Oron's work, the wide black bands wrapped once around the palm and twice around the wrists, their ends tucked precisely into the small pulse-hollow where the wrist joined the hand.  Master Gideon had bands made of heavy silk proper to his rank and experience; hers were simple dyed linen.  Moisture made the dye run and stain her hands, but she wrapped her wrists anyway.  The first was easy--her left hand was smart, after all--but she fumbled the wraps with her dumb hand and bowed her slight body down to hide her clumsy fingers from Gideon's sharp eyes.