On The Birthing Of Gods

On The Birthing Of Gods is an instruction manual on creating faiths by Elaine Trask. There are two versions of the book, a revised and un-revised version. The revised version is often referred to as Upon The Birthing Of Gods.

ATTENTION: SPOILERS AHEAD! Beyond this point, major plot spoilers are expected. Continue at your own risk.

Notable Events

The Watcher In The Wings

Paige receives the revised version of On The Birthing Of Gods from Hembry, an ex-coworker of hers from OBC.

The Birth Of The Many Below

Paige, Hayward and Dennis use the revised version of On The Birthing Of Gods to create The Many Below. They aim to create a god that can be used against those in power, a god that protects its disciples.

Providing Comfort To Paige In Hayward And Carpenter's Absence

While Hayward and Carpenter head to Glottage to make contact with Adjudicator Shrue, Paige asks Elgin to find her the unrevised edition of On The Birthing Of Gods. She uses this version to see if there is a way to kill The Many Below, if she needs to.

Contents Of The Books

Revised Version

First Instruction

Faith may be practiced in solitude. God-birthing, however, is a communal activity. Please do not kid yourself. You will need others.

Second Instruction.

Ensure that you have a simple and communicable concept in mind.

Once you have settled on your god’s concept, immediately take the time to cross-reference said concept against an up-to-date register of licenced faiths.

Remember that international law prohibits religious plagiarism, and your national authorities are legally bound to seek out and nullify any attempted breach of copyright.

N.B. If you are defining your god as a committee, ensure everyone is on the same page from the beginning. Schisms during the planning stages benefit no-one.

Third Instruction.

Know your history.

Even if your chosen concept does not infringe upon the intellectual property of other licenced faiths, it is absolutely inevitable that someone has had exactly the same notion before you.

You’re not an unprecedented genius, stupid.

Search the archives for abandoned or stray faiths.

If you can find any record of why a faith was abandoned, make a note of this information for future reference, as it may impact your licencing, claim.

Also make a note of any known prayer-marks. These will be your first retraced steps towards building a shared language, a way to speak and a way to be heard.

Fourth Instruction.

Test your communication method.

Establish a connection.

You should begin this process by deciding on a conduit, or conduits; some manner of hierophant, seeker, prophet, who can relate particularly strongly to the concept at hand.

If you are not the conduit in question, share the following steps with your chosen candidate, and then retreat to a safe distance.

You will need: first, a variety of psychotropic smokes and commercial-grade teas (see the next chapter for a suggested list to get you started).

Second, some limited but meaningful form of sacrifice (a god must feed, and until you’ve established the exact ritual of sacrifice, blood and life remain the most effective general standbys).

Third. Patience. A great deal of it.

Fifth Instruction.

Focus on your god, to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Devote mind and body to drawing it forth.

Let your mind open up new pathways through the sullen waters of reality.

Obsession is the winding road that will lead you to your god.

Again, you will need resilience and still more patience.

You’ll know when you’ve arrived. It’ll feel as if a piece has fallen into place. A satisfaction so absolute that it terrifies you.

Like the world was incomplete until now.

And the words will rise upon your lips-

The marks will flow from your fingers, readily conjured, in the dirt and in the wet grass-

Because you’re not giving birth to anything.

You’re re-discovering something that was already dormant in the world. Already buried in you, beneath flesh and pumping organs, in the aching bones of you.

And as the three of you drool and mutter in the dirt before the cracked soldiers’ monument, your eyes are white and wide and trembling with tears.

Your god is rising in your throats and in your lungs as you croak maddened hosannas, together.

A bright new colour you can finally see.

An old song you’ve always known, even if you kept on forgetting it.

And the white crocus splits the trembling concrete like lightning splits the sky…

...as something new…

...as something new begins.

Un-Revised Version

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Finishing What You Start.

Can a god die? Can a god be killed?

Two simple enough questions. And yet both of these would be considered dangerous blasphemies according to the tenets of over a thousand international faiths - at least, when it comes to their own chosen deities.

False gods, we tell ourselves, perish all the time. Ours alone are immutable. Ours alone have purpose.

The truth - as we have painstakingly established across the previous chapters - is this. There is no idea so grand that it may not be murdered one day in the slumber of its own complacence.

There is no tool which may not be repurposed, no meaning which will not turn to nonsense - given time.

Time is the cruellest and the kindest deity, for it mocks those who seek to triumph from it; for it suffers no power, humours no tyrant; it topples every great justice, dismembers reason, rots progress, forgets the stories we laid down at its feet.

If you have raised a god, dear reader, and you are now beginning to wonder exactly how to rid yourself of it - I leave you with this.

Take heart.

In faith and in life, in the sacred texts, in every story, and in the depths of the polluted lands themselves, there is only ever one ending.

Everything dies, in time. In this regard, at least, you are no different from the thing that eats you.

Chapter Forty: What’s Yet To Come.

What do I dream of, when I dream of the future?

I dream of the polluted lands. Ten thousand square miles of abandoned and entirely unlivable landscape, twisted beneath the thrall of raw idea, raw principle.

A dumping ground for plastics, undisposable garbage, and the gods we can no longer bring ourselves to love.

Sunless, wind-scoured, haunted places. Raw firmament, angry sky and endless storms.

Those who venture briefly in report back - pleading voices, taking on the form and tenor of long-lost loved ones, rasping and inhuman, begging to be fed.

Altering us into their own dreadful image, should their whispers creep in beneath our protective suits.

Spyplanes swoop in and out, mapping brief tracts of transformed land, navigators of the Tangleknot Queen losing their minds and abandoning their controls as they attempt to make sense of the hills which will not remain hills and sky which does not stay sky for long.

In these eternal wastes, the chaos and creativity of the polluted lands, nothing grand or meaningful remains of the entities that once held sway over the lives of our ancient forebears in the west - save for a ravening hunger, and a voice.

People lived out there, once, some 6000 years ago, before the first primitive Peninsulans fled out of the hills in horror at whatever raging gods of cave and hunt they’d summoned up.

People lived. Gods fed. Cities stood. And nothing yet remains that we can understand.

Historians speculate that there must be some cataclysmic event that first led to the Peninsula’s polluted lands becoming polluted, some dark miracle at the very epicentre of the hunger - but we do not know what it was, and we have no way of knowing.

This is nowhere, and nowhere is spreading.

When we have exhausted our own living places, when we have hollowed ourselves out in our ceaseless invention and our ceaseless growth - where then shall be left for us to go?

And what, given the chance, will we leave behind us?