Babita and Og, Chapter 1, installment 1

In some places, particularly the beginning, footnotes of pronunciation and mild explanation have been added for your pleasure or annoyance, depending greatly, of course, upon your individual temperament.  Thank you. 

Chapter One: Og

The city of Oard(1) was awake again.  Og didn’t know how long it had been asleep.  He didn’t know how such things were even possible.  He didn’t understand how an entire city, complete with citizens, streets, byways, buildings, and flying ships, could simply vanish from time and memory only to return again centuries later.  Yet he did not bother himself with such questions either.  Riddles of the universe were best left to philosophers and astronomers—beings with their heads in the stars.  He saw no point at all in wondering about such things.  He knew what everyone knew about Oard—the legends—and that was enough.

Og knew the story of how the inscrutable Chaos Lord, Roland Wrightson, along with his intrepid band of explorers, had ventured into an Angustian ruin and had somehow, against all odds, emerged from its cursed and blackened borders alive.  No living creature had ever done this; not since the ancient cities had been blighted and destroyed by the gods, an event that had brought the First Age to a dramatic and decisive end(2).  

This remarkable feat was somehow—impossibly—only the beginning of the legend of the Chaos Lord and his companions.  Roland Wrightson had not merely escaped an Angustian ruin.  He had also, astoundingly, brought with him, out of that dead and most unholy of places, the very living, breathing, essence of the chaos city of Oard.  He had brought it forth replete with its alehouses, market squares, public fountains, bureaucratic institutions, cobbled streets, and its flying ships.  He had brought it complete with Mrs. Wiggins’ Cake Shop, The Society for the Protection of Reason, the Craft Guild, The Gnomish Auxiliary Balloon Corps., and the mighty Docking Tree.  He had brought it back just, one might suppose, as Oard had existed so many millennia ago.  Only the fledgling Chaos Lord knew if this was true or not, and only he knew the secret of the city’s awakening.

To the average citizen, the whole affair had been like some magician’s parlor trick— a ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ cosmic ruse.  The city had not been, and then, in the blink of an eye, had very much been—delivered to the mother of reality like some cosmic babe pulled from an ethereal womb.

Og did not understand such things.  He only knew that he enjoyed being awake again.  He delighted in his city.  He loved its people, its absurdities, and its ever-changing scenery.  He took pride in his role as a navigator and a guide.  It was a comfort to him to know his place and his purpose.  Oard needed him.  He was integral to its functioning, for Og was a slodhi(3), and a slodhi was a very special, and very useful, creature.

(1) Oard—pronounced: Oh-ard (ard as in ‘charred’).

(2) This story takes place in the Eighth Age, some four thousand years after the decimation that concluded the First Age.

(3) Slodhi—pronounced: slow-thee.