"There’s an old story, a very old story. You’ve always known it.
About the Trawler-man, and a hundred other ancient gods or air of fire and earth and wood and water - all of those with a halfway reasonable claim to have been the very first.
The beats of the story are always the same. A hero with a great desire or a desperate need.
The hero is struck by a vision, or they hear a strange voice, imparting wisdom that has not been heard before upon this earth.
To receive their heart’s desire, the hero must sacrifice something they value dearly.
The hero does as they’re told. They sacrifice their husband, wife, their child: with knife, stone, or flame.
And at once the hero receives some divine reward or great miracle falling from the sky or sprouting from the earth, and they go running back down through the hills to tell the people of their village the good news, and so the very first god is summoned forth into existence.
A few faiths add a coda, too.
They say that the hero shed a single tear, in shame and in sorrow, as they sacrificed the person they loved.
And that in that instant a second god - a god of lasting regret and awful shame - sprung into being and seized the offering as its own, dragging the hero and the sacrifice down into the depths of the earth together.
And this is why we must not flinch, and we must not weep - when we make our offerings.
The old traveller - the man who was both an executioner and a priest - must have been thinking of that coda, when perhaps he lay down in this place, a great many years ago.
Wrapped in furs and pelts and dying from the cold, he sat upon the very height of the dolmen and he gazed out across the landscape.
And he felt shame and sorrow for the family that he’d abandoned, and for the faces that had stared up at him so many times from the flat of his great stone altar - for all feet that tread this earth for long are siblings to the hands that clutch the knife.
His tears fed the rock, and he withered and changed.
Becoming something else.
A saint of tears and shame, to catch those who came to this place thereafter."[2]
