Sometimes I write things

In the Kingdom of Not there was in prehistory an age of gods and heroes. It was a time wholly before the modern era: a lawless, reckless age without the Seven Lances to guide. A hundred heroes walked the breadth of the world, up and down the byways of Not, and the strongest of them was not Maroosh. The wisest of them was not Maroosh. The most beautiful of them was not Maroosh. Maroosh was not the strongest swimmer or the strongest singer. He was valorous in combat, but his battle-glory was not the greatest among the heroes of Not.

Maroosh possessed no singular virtue which marked him as unique among the denizens of those days; he was a hero among heroes, a protagonist among the herd. His deeds were mighty, but among the rolls of honor which in that era hung from the high towers of the city called Unity (for Maroosh trod Not when Unity had not yet fallen) they were hardly notable.

Indeed the only tale of Maroosh which has endured to the present day is the story of his doom. The death of Maroosh became the subject of ballads and skalds by the river folk who claimed to have witnessed it, and even today the divers along the river that ate Maroosh hum the epic while they labor.

It is said that Maroosh was strolling across a great marsh, the scope of which is scarely credible: a week’s hike across and two weeks’ hike deep. The waters of the marsh were muddied with silt and bugs, and the mud sucked at his big hero’s feet with every step he took. The mud grew softer and wetter, until Maroosh was sinking knee-deep into the muck with each stride, and hardly advancing at all. Maroosh liked this not at all.

“Ho, water!” Maroosh is said to have cried out. “Why do you bother me in this place and time? This day is sunny and mild, but you are turgid and full of sorrow. Drain from the swamp, and pour across the river valley out to the sea!”

The water answered him (for, according to legend, in those days waters often told heroes their problems, and cursed or blessed those who crossed them) with a mighty burbling and quaking, and Maroosh felt the ground fall away under him as he sank hip-deep into the mire. “Your noise bothers me,” the water told him, “for I was napping in the summer sun and do not like to be woken up by half-worthy heroes. For your trespass you shall never leave this mud so long as I am here to stop you.”

For three and twenty days, Maroosh sulked in the mud. His long legs could not pull him out of the mire, nor could his strong arms haul him up. There were no branches or vines such as could support him, and constantly the water mocked him, and called him lowly, and tom-noddy. And on the twenty-fourth day of his humiliation, Maroosh was visited by the red hawk, which is even today called Good Fortune by the folk who dwell along the the river that ate Maroosh.

Now, in those days Maroosh and the red hawk Good Fortune were allies and sometime comrades in arms against the giants that strode the stony wastes north of the forest called Empty. Maroosh therefore greeted Good Fortune and begged her to lift him front out the wet muck.

She wheedled and hemmed, and only after Maroosh promised her a basket of emerald rings did she agree to aid him, for Good Fortune does as she pleases and cannot be forced, only cajoled. This is why today green-glass rings and stones are considered lucky by the folk who dwell along the river that ate Maroosh, and every spring throw hundreds of them into the river, which once seemed lined with emeralds (and in places even yet today still it is).

Then Good Fortune flew off, and Maroosh cursed her, for he did not realize that the waters had heard every word of their conversation, and therefore its heart had been hardened against any trickery on Good Fortune’s part. Maroosh’s moping at the bird’s betrayal was in fact instrumental in Good Fortune’s plan: it was necessary, absolutely, for the water to believe that Good Fortune was no agent of Maroosh’s.

To further this secret plan, Good Fortune flew for two days until she reached the Costume Shop of Doctor Magnificent, about whom nothing more need be said. From the masker, Good Fortune purchased a canyon-suit, wide and deep and inviting, and put it on Maroosh’s account. She dressed herself thus and, disguised as a canyon, returned to the mire in which water held Maroosh so fast.

In disguise as Canyon Bright-Water Heaven, a fictional waterway wholly invented by the art of Good Fortune’s trickery, the bird declared her everlasting love and desire for the water which would become the river that ate Maroosh. “Come caper under my high cliff walls,” she told it. “Come slide down my smooth rocky beds, and strew your fine sediment over mine, and let them intermingle! Come be my beloved, and ride with me down to the sea!” And Maroosh recognized Good Fortune, for one could not mistake a comrade-in-arms, not in those days of gods and heroes, but he bit his tongue, to see what she was playing at.

The water, who had hitherto never considered becoming a river that joined the sea, who had resigned itself to forever wetting the mud of the swamp, and who had in the past secretly dreamed of one way capering over a riverbed (but who had put away that dream along with all its other childish things) let itself be moved, and loved, and began to love Canyon Bright-Water Heaven in return. Nine and sixty days Good Fortune in her canyon-suit courted the water, and on the seventieth day, the water agreed to drain its swamp and flow through the canyon’s beds to the sea.

And Good Fortune lay with the water, and the water flowed over her, and for the first time she felt beloved.

And Maroosh felt the water drain away from around him, and the muck hardened slowly, and at last he could lift his long legs out of the mud and stand once more on solid ground. After eight and ninety days enmired, Maroosh freed himself and gamboled about the dried-mud plain which he been a swamp. After a suitable period of celebration, he gathered his fortunes and spent them on a wide shallow basket of emerald rings, rings of silver wire and gold bands. There were platinum wheels studded with tiny emeralds, and a great copper hoop in which a huge flawed green gem hung. All these treasures he gathered, and took them to Good Fortune, who still lay with the water in her canyon-suit.

And Maroosh called to Good Fortune, and bade her drop her disguise, and join him once more in the endless war against the giants who strode the wastes. He sprinkled his emeralds into the riverbed, as a show of his good faith and gratitude, and the water heard him speak, and asked Canyon Bright-Water Heaven, “is this true my darling? Have you come to me, and courted me, and lay here with me, all in the aid of this petty hero? Are you a hawk in a canyon-suit, and not a canyon at all? Is this true, o my beloved, with your wide flat beds and your excitingly jagged spurs that turn me all akimbo?”

“Of course not, o my beloved, with your frothy surf and your deep pools where our beautiful fish may lurk,” replied Good Fortune, and to prove her faithfulness to her beloved water she rose up and knocked Maroosh into the deepest pool. Let us consume this petty and worthless little man.”

And they did, and that is how the river that ate Maroosh gained its name.