Mountain Barber
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TCTWETW Alternate Chapter 1
🕑 Added 2025-07-10 11:52:44 +0000 UTCFinally moved to Portugal, and getting settled in at last! Still going to be pretty hectic this month, so here's the alternate (original) chapter 1 for The City That Would Eat the World, written in... May 2021, I think? You can see a lot that's remained the same, but a ton that's different too- a first person POV, a MUCH more complicated magic system, etc, etc. All differences are non-canon, I'm not planning on including any of them in the main story. Looking at this again, I'm kind of iffy on if this is enough for y'all for the month, so I'm also working on a (very) short story I should be posting on here in the next couple days. Hope to be back to normal scheduling next month!
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I was eight years old the first time I was possessed by a god.
It was a tiny little whisper of a god, one that I could hardly even hear myself, outside my dreams. Its blessing was a trivial thing, but wondrous for a child.
It let me curve the paths of the balls the other children and I kicked around the fountain plaza just down from my family’s home. Or, the god would do it for me, at least. It’s always hard to tell whether you or the god is the one using a blessing when you’re possessed. It also let me better calculate the paths the ball would take as it moved across the field, though not unerringly.
It was several weeks before anyone noticed anything amiss. Even with the ability to know where the ball would travel, even with the ability to subtly alter the path of the ball, I didn’t become the undisputed champion of the fountain plaza overnight. Not least because the game we played was largely amorphous and rule-less, but also because I still wasn’t the fastest, largest, nor most agile child. I wasn’t even the only child possessed.
Still, I was soon a contender. I was important, I was respected, in a way that I’ve never been able to recapture. I’ve never felt as glorious ever since as I did during those heady weeks. I’m not sure anyone but a child is even capable of feeling like that.
All things must come to an end, alas, and one of the other children realized what was happening. I don’t even remember who, at this point, but there were countless accusations of cheating and that I was using magic.
Foolishness, of course. My family, of all people, wouldn’t have let me engrave something so frivolous into my soul.
My mother knew immediately that I must have been possessed, and the neighborhood seer’s confirmation was merely a formality.
On discovering my possession, my family did what any family atop the city of Wall would do.
They threw a grand celebration.
The first time a child is possessed is almost always a time of celebration, the younger the better. To make it to adulthood without ever being possessed is an ill omen indeed. My quiet little god was harmless, and had come to me years before most people were ever possessed. I went from just being another child underfoot around the family home to being, suddenly, the favored daughter, the one from whom great things were expected.
Great things, at least, so long as they fit into my family’s plans for me.
I never found out my little god’s name, or anything about who it had been in life. I think that’s a mercy, now, and I think Great-Grandfather likely did his best to ensure I never asked those questions when I was young. He was a stern man, but not a cruel one, and I think he immediately understood what took me years to figure out.
Who, after all, would become a god of kicking balls after death?
A child, of course.
Who else would care enough about a children’s game? They must have been talented, to have engraved their soul with magic so young, and they must have loved the game with uncommon depth, for few young children have purposes strong enough to spawn a god upon their death.
Perhaps I would have been fine with realizing that as a child. Children are often more resilient than many adults think. Still, I’m glad I remained ignorant.
The little god only possessed me for a year or so. Over time, I grew less interested in the game, and the god left me for another, younger child in the neighborhood. It left me with a gift, a lasting blessing— to this day, whenever I walk past a group of children playing in the street, I can always predict where the ball is going to go.
Perhaps I can still curve the path of the ball as well. I’ve never tried, though. I don’t think I’ve once kicked a child’s ball since I realized the truth about that little god of mine.
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The city of Wall was a place like any other, once. It was built alongside a river, less than a day’s ride south of the mountains. It had a name, once, other than Wall, though that’s been long forgotten, save by a few scholars. It had markets, homes, and even a grand palace. It had plenty of gods of its own, inhabiting its wells, its crossroads, and a thousand other places within the city. No city grows to any size without gaining countless gods of its own, one way or another.
And it also had a wall.
The wall wasn’t special to start with. It wasn’t particularly large, nor grand, nor invulnerable. It was the height of five tall men atop one another’s shoulders, and two men could lay across its width. There were far greater walls in the world— ones made of ice, ones made of mist filled with twisting paths, ones made of living forests bound together into one solid whole. This wall was nothing special.
What this wall did have, however, was a god. Like all gods, it started out small— the soul of a guardsman, one uncommonly dedicated to his job. When he died, his soul took up his watch. It became a god of place, unlike like the little possessor god of my childhood. More precisely, it became a god of the city’s wall.
Cambrias, Whose Watch Never Ends.
There are, and were, other gods of that wall. Laborers who died during its construction birthed gods who helped maintain the wall, who made repair-work easier. By this, at least, we know that the rulers of the city that became Wall were just rulers, who used no slaves and treated their laborers well, else the wall would have been inhabited by much less pleasant gods— ones who would have been more likely to seek the wall’s destruction, not its maintenance.
Cambrias, though, swiftly grew in popularity, and soon he was the most prayed-to god on the wall. Every guardsman would give a little tithe of soulstuff to Cambrias when they passed one of his wall-shrines, and with those prayers, Cambrias grew, and grew, and grew, and the power of his blessings grew with him.
The great wall-god offers three blessings, and he offered them only to Wall’s guards.
The first two are of great use to any guardsman. One helps keep guards alert, keeps boredom from encroaching while they guard the wall. The second, well… it’s the source of many jokes, but is just as useful for a Wall Guard— it lets them wait longer before needing to use the chamberpot.
The final blessing, however, is the reason Cambrias grew so swiftly, and to such great heights.
Wall Guards do not age while on duty, and do so more slowly while off-duty. Most Wall Guards live well over a century, often a century and a half.
Great-Grandfather is over two centuries of age. He’s not actually my great-grandfather— he’s several generations older than that, I’m not sure how many.
And despite his monumental age, he never misses a single shift of guard duty. He’s one of the highest ranking members of the Wall Guard, but not even close to the oldest.
Most people attempt to extend their lifespans by engraving their souls, but most fail. They might gain a few years, or even a decade or two, but the process is viciously difficult, and varies from person to person, for extending one’s life might require strengthening a weak heart in one person, or preventing buildup of fluid in the lungs in another, or preventing the growth of tumors in a third.
That last is the cause of death of most would-be immortals. There is no universal preventative, no soul engraving that can stop all tumors. One will always appear in a place that surprises you, and the battle only grows more severe over time.
Unless, of course, you become a living god, but living gods are far, far rarer than true gods- not least because most of them ascend from our world sooner than later.
In life, Cambrias was not a man who had attempted to prolong his own life. Instead, he’d engraved his soul to give him the power to extend the life of his only child, who was born too soon in a birth that killed the mother. Cambrias the man spent hours and hours every day simply using his magic to keep his only child alive.
Most people don’t know if the child was a boy or a girl, today— it was many centuries ago, and Cambrias himself does not remember. His church has schismed before over the question. Gods are born of human purpose and human souls, but it must always be remembered that they are not those people. We don’t know much of Cambrias’ life, really.
But we do know that Cambrias saved his child, and that he never missed a single shift of guard duty, though he lived to have grandchildren. And when Cambrias-the-man died peacefully in his sleep, Cambrias-the-god showed up to his shift on the wall the next day.
And Cambrias, Whose Watch Never Ends, brought with him his three blessings. And that third blessing grew out of his soul engravings he used to preserve the life of his own child, and it came to be applied to those who served his purpose of guarding the wall.
Cambrias-the-god’s blessing is different than Cambrias-the-man’s engraved spell, of course— death fundamentally alters one’s magic. No one is entirely sure how the blessing is so effective at extending life.
Soon, positions atop the wall were being fought over. Bribes were being made by powerful nobles for jobs guarding the walls. Duels were being fought over the rights to man the walls. People were rushing into the city for hopes of working the walls.
The stories say it was the last queen of the city that became Wall who came up with the idea, but that’s always been too easy for me to trust, too much like a children’s tale.
Regardless of the source of the idea, it was a simple, though expensive one:
Expand the wall.
At first the expansion was a simple one— a couple half-circle extensions of the wall, like tumors growing from the city to encompass more land for the city to grow. Those new areas filled swiftly, however, and demand for wall-duty grew even faster. Shanty-towns began springing up around the city, and bandits from the plains and raiders from the mountains struck them regularly.
And so the wall expanded even further, to protect the new shanty-towns.
Eventually, someone came up with the next idea. The stories, of course, attribute it to that same queen, but I don’t think it should be surprising that I don’t believe those stories. It was almost certainly some clerk or scribe in her employ.
They started widening the walls, until they were wider than the widest city street. They began placing buildings atop the wall. Shops and houses, barracks and markets. Soon fountains and parks even found their way atop the ever-growing walls. Barges of stone blocks arrived at the docks every day from the mountains, then twice a day, and then became a never-ending stream. More and more land was enclosed in great segments by the wall. It crossed the river, the wall seamlessly turning into bridge and back to wall.
And then the walls encountered another city, and they simply… absorbed it. Ate it. Turned it into another enclosed section of land. There had been a battle fought over it, of course, but it had been years and years before, and the Wall Guards had easily repelled all attack, and were readily replaced if they fell. The second city to be enclosed by the wall had long since grown to accept its slow, creeping conquest.
And then the wall ate a third city. And then a fourth. And then it began growing across the plains like a great network of roots, like the mycelial tendrils of some great stone fungus. The wall split, curled in on itself, and intersected with itself, creating a great network across the plains. And as it grew, the god Cambrias grew with it.
And then one day, the old city didn’t exist anymore. Its buildings were all still there, of course, and it had a government still, and still had all its people. But its wall had become the city of Wall, with more people living atop it than lived below, and the city that had birthed it became merely one of Wall’s countless neighborhoods.
Today, when Wall encompasses nearly the entirety of the plains? When you can travel for two hundred leagues, more, without ever touching the ground? No one save scholars are even entirely sure which of the old cities enclosed by Wall was its birthplace, and even they argue sometimes. Most of those old cities are gone, now, dismantled to be used in the construction of Wall. Now, only farmers, herders, and hermits live in on the ground in Wall.
Cambrias is far from being the only wall-god, of course. I’m not sure anyone has ever, or could ever, count how many there are. While most who join the Wall Guard do so for hopes of long life, many still join because they believe in it, or grow to believe in it. It becomes their purpose, and when they die, that purpose spawns a new wall-god.
The great champions of the Wall Guard, with the blessings of hundreds of wall-gods of place, inhabited by dozens of living gods, and carrying powerful reliquaries, are powerful enough to withstand anything short of an Ascended living god. That is no true concern, however, because Wall has no less than a dozen living gods of its own, all dedicated to its protection and maintenance. Some ascend beyond our world, but others soon replace them.
Wall is, without question, the greatest city on the world of Ishveos. Perhaps the greatest city on any world. I cannot imagine any city takes up more geographic space, or has used so much stone in its construction that it has leveled entire mountains. I cannot imagine that any city on any world has more countless teeming millions than Wall.
Some think that Wall has reached the extent of its growth, that it is trapped inside the plains.
I have my doubts about that.
And my family, according to legend, has served faithfully in the Wall Guard for centuries and centuries. According to family legend, our ancestors lived in the seventh city absorbed by Wall.
If they had said we came from the original city, or from the second city, I might have doubted the family legend. But the seventh city? That’s too oddly specific, too humble.
And even if it is a myth, well, some myths hurt no one, and are better to believe wrongly than to doubt rightly.
Regardless of whether the family myth is true or not, one thing is absolutely true:
My family serves in the Wall Guard. Nearly every adult, in every generation in living memory. And in Wall, living memory can go back centuries. My family serves in the border guard, that keeps out invaders. We serve in the city patrol, to keep the peace. We serve in the builders, who maintain and repair in the wall. We even have a distant cousin who is a lesser champion of the wall.
You can find members of my family in nearly every role among the Wall Guard. It is a point of deep pride for my family, and those who don’t join the wall are black sheep, shunned by the family. For me, the golden daughter, who was first possessed by a god at the age of eight, to not join the Wall Guard? It would be a scandal. It would shame my family, and hurt them beyond anything else I could do.
If this were a story told to children, like the story of the last queen of the city that built the wall that became Wall, I’d follow my heart and not join the Wall Guard. Because, to my shame, I don’t want to spend centuries patrolling, guarding, keeping the peace.
But this isn’t one of those stories.
I joined the Wall Guard. Whatever my heart desired, I wouldn’t shame my family, I wouldn’t dishonor their legacy.
But part of me never stopped looking for a way out. A way off of Wall that wouldn’t dishonor my family.
A way to see the world.
I will find it.
Comments
John Bierce
Yep this is absolutely a thing people practice on Ishveos! It's tricky in practice, not always self-sustaining, and requires a certain amount of trust and mutual aid, but it's absolutely viable. One of the new characters in MGTS 2 was actually raised to Sainthood this way.
George McArdle
Sooo intricate Theoeconomy question: is there a positive feedback loop that can be started by pooling your prayers to create Saints? e.g. if 100 people got together and drudge prayed to elevate a Saint among them, then that Saint in turn added their prayers to that pool to raise the next Saint, is that cycle fast enough and efficient enough to create a self-perpetuating cycle? You probably see where I'm going: could a close/group form a coop to try and break the cycle? That kind of thing doesn't quite work with money (say, a trust fund) because of inflation and the chances of a business failing (wiping out all investment). However, raising someone to Sainthood seems a more reliable path to ROI, with the only risk being that the person dies/takes off before giving back enough into the community pool.
John Bierce
Yeah, I hadn't even thought of Divines or Living Gods at this point, back then it was going to be a completely tierless magic system.
Vardite
The magic system differences are very interesting, so it seems in this version people can choose their own magic, which influenced what blessings their god gets? It also seems like the distinctions between divines wasn't in place at this point or maybe divines weren't a thing at all yet, since it mentions the powerful wall guards seemingly being akin to both pillars and sanctums. Living gods seem to be very different as well, if everyone can give themselves their own magic power what makes them different? That they eventually ascend somewhere is fascinating, what was going on with that?
