Minor Gods, Cursed Deities, and Theological Mistakes

A man. No further details are recorded. Priests of Grumph dispute whether this is because he is unremarkable or because he does not like being described. The dispute has been ongoing for four hundred years and both sides are doing okay.

She stands in doorways. Not blocking them. Not guarding them. Just standing there when you open the door, looking at something slightly past you. She is always gone by the time you look back.

No confirmed sightings. His priests insist he was here moments ago and will be back shortly. His temples are warm and smell occupied. Offerings left overnight are gone by morning. Something drank the wine.

Only ever seen in peripheral vision. Sharp. Waiting. Priests do not wear shoes inside his temples. This is not a religious requirement. It is a practical one.

A child who was here before the fire started and will still be here after it ends. He is not responsible. He is also not not responsible. He finds this distinction less interesting than you do.

A gray figure standing outside the venue in the rain, which is entirely his doing, watching through a window at a wedding he has no connection to and ruining it with total sincerity.

A gaunt man with festering, putrid bowels hanging freely outside his body, trailing behind him like a grotesque banner.

Depicted as a man carrying something very heavy up stairs that do not end. Temples to Trogg are built without ground floors. Worshippers enter from above and work their way down. This is considered holy. It is also how the faith loses members.

Has no body. Has no face. Exists only as the fragment of a song that begins playing in your head at the precise moment you most need silence. Beldris has never written a complete song. He does not need to.

Your keys are where you left them. Pokkle knows this. Pokkle has always known this. He will not tell you. He will watch you check the same three places six times each with the patient stillness of a god who has nowhere else to be.

Not a figure but a timing. His priests can only describe him in relation to events: he was there when the cart tipped, there when the tray fell, there when the rope snapped. Whether he causes these things or just shows up for them is a religious question his priests have agreed to stop asking.

Arrives two days following any significant event. Says nothing. Looks at what remains. Leaves without comment. He is not a god of consequences. He is a god of the specific color a bruise turns on the third day, and what that color means about what you did.

An innkeeper who has been open every day for thirty years and can tell you exactly when things started going wrong and has chosen not to.

No one has ever seen him arrive. He is simply there when the numbers are added up, standing behind whoever is doing the counting, reading along. He has never once been wrong. This is not considered a blessing.

Her temples are full of display cases, all of them empty. Priests argue about whether the cases should be locked. They should not be. That is the whole point.

A waterlogged man dragging a chain of bells through standing water. The bells ring even when there is no wind.

A whore reeking of cheap alcohol and sweat-soaked bedsheets, whose smile reveals teeth the color of old brass.

A woman sitting at a kitchen table at eleven at night with a glass of something and the lights off. She is fine.

His priests hold that all food is already in the process of spoiling, and that cooking is simply choosing where in that process to intervene. Non-priests find this view difficult to eat around.

No fixed form. She is the specific sound that fills the space after the wrong person laughs at the wrong moment. Her priests are not popular at wakes. They attend anyway, and they hold that this is a form of ministry.

Physicians who have spent more than thirty years in practice sometimes report seeing the same patient twice - same complaint, same location, different decade, different city. They do not report this to colleagues. There is no useful thing to say about it.

He has a warm handshake and no shadow. Courts have attempted to bar him. He is always already inside.

Allegedly the impression of a body left in a chair - still warm, never explained.

A woman in last night's makeup who smells of poor choices and holds yesterday's wine glass like evidence she is not ready to accept.

He does not appear on roads. He appears when you are already certain you took the right turn. The certainty is his. He lends it freely and asks for nothing in return, which is how you know something is wrong.

No avatar is recorded. His presence is felt in the gap of a quarter-inch between a door and its frame, in the lid that will not quite close, in the moment before you admit that something is the wrong size and you are going to need to start over.

His temples function as hospitals. Survival rates are average. Recovery rates are below average. Patient satisfaction is, for no clear reason, very high. No one has been able to explain this, including the patients.

A warrior in tarnished armor carrying a broken spear. His face looks like a man who fought well, won, and found it made no difference.

She does not appear before the breaking point. She appears after it, standing in the kitchen doorway, holding something heavy, having already decided.

A thin man with blue fingers who exhales nothing but fog and appears only in doorways, stairs, and narrow bridges.

A perfectly still figure encased in golden amber, eyes open, watching everything. Whether the look on his face is contentment or horror depends on the light.

A woman with her mouth against the other side of every door in every city, simultaneously.

She carries a small knife and uses it with great tenderness. Farmers who worship her report sleeping better. They do not think carefully about why.

Appears as whoever you most recently argued with, wearing your face back at you slightly wrong.

She is the reason the new buildings use different materials than the old ones. Not because anyone decided to change. Because she is still standing in the old streets, and some stonemasons would rather work around her than ask her to move.

A man with very steady hands who pours exactly one glass and has never in his life poured only one glass.

A priest and a gravedigger standing over a hole, arguing in lowered voices. They have been arguing since the burial. The burial was last Thursday.

A woman tilting an empty jug over her cup, watching nothing come out with the look of someone attending a small, private funeral.

A great pink rabbit capable of transforming into an impossibly beautiful woman or an irresistibly handsome man the moment it senses impure thoughts in those nearby.

His theology holds that all relationships are, at their core, parasitic, and that the only honest question is which party benefits more. His church is extremely popular among merchants, landlords, and marriage counselors.

She has spoken three thousand recorded prophecies. Every one has come true. Not one has ever helped anyone. Scholars have spent decades trying to understand how this is possible. She finds their efforts touching.

A stabby little man covered in his own cuts, freshly surprised every time the knife bends.

She holds that love and eating are the same thing expressed differently, and that anyone who disagrees has not loved something deeply enough. Her priests do not argue with this. They have seen what she does to priests who argue.

A figure coming apart at every seam, thread by thread, still reaching back toward the loom as though wanting it badly enough would be enough.

A child with no visible hands and more coins than any accounting can explain.

He is not down there waiting. He is the marsh. The marsh is not out to get you. It is simply much deeper than it looks, and it does not care whether you fell in or walked in on purpose.

Physicians know her by her work. She leaves no avatar because she does not need one. By the time anyone thinks to pray to her, she has already been there for a week.

A red-faced man in a funeral suit pointing at someone across the open grave. The deceased would have wanted this.

He attends the reading of every will in every city, seated in the back, never named in any document. His presence is noted by clerks and ignored by lawyers. He appears to be waiting for something to be left to him. Nothing ever is. He comes back the next day.

Stands just outside your peripheral vision at all times. No one has ever confirmed what he actually looks like, and those who tried turned around too slowly.

A gigantic rock, allegedly sentient, which occasionally falls from the sky without warning and kills whoever happens to be standing below.

An elderly woman who has clearly never once reconsidered a sentence before it left her mouth. She means well. This does not help.

His faith has no temples, only markets. Worship consists of short-changing a customer by a very small amount and feeling nothing about it afterward. Congregation size is estimated at several million.

A small woman in good clothes who appears at endings nobody holds funerals for. She is very busy.

She looks different in every account. The only consistent detail is the smell: something expensive, applied over something that needed washing first.

He does not appear. He is the sound the dark makes when the house is quiet and you are awake when you should not be and you cannot stop thinking about the thing you did in the third year of your marriage, or the second job you did not take, or the letter you did not send.

Her temples are full of broken things that were later fixed. The repairs are visible. This is considered part of the service.

Her avatar does not truly exist. In all honesty, it is not entirely clear whether the goddess herself is real or simply a very persistent rumor.

A carpenter's apprentice holding exactly half of everything he was given, still not sure what he did wrong.

He does not fish. He watches other people fish and says nothing. Whatever they pull up that has no name, that is his. He does not take it. He simply waits near it until the fisherman throws it back. Then he is gone. The fisherman does not sleep well after.

A large woman behind a counter who has heard everything and charges extra for the rooms where something happened.

A mediator with ink-stained hands and a headache that has lasted seventeen years, surrounded by two parties who both walked away feeling robbed.

He appears at court functions, well-dressed, unrecognized, eating the food and drinking the wine of whoever is currently in power. He has perfect table manners. Historians can identify him in portraits going back three hundred years. The families in those portraits are gone.

A woman hopping on one foot, swearing in six languages simultaneously, three of which she only knows the bad words for.

He appears only to people who are certain he does not exist. The encounter is brief. He does not explain himself. The atheist is left with the experience and no good words for it, which he decides, after a while, was probably the point.

Takes the form of a typical politician of whatever land one happens to be in - bloated with words, hollow with action.

A man with very large ears pressed against the other side of every door in every city at once, writing everything down and filing it somewhere you will never find.

An old woman in a gray coat who smells of wet wool and has been standing outside your window since the first of the month.

A transparent figure you can see through but cannot quite see. He always looks like he has just realized something, but only after it stopped mattering.

He does not take sides. He preserves them. Every grudge passed from parent to child is held in his keeping, intact, still warm, still specific, even after the original offense has been forgotten by everyone including the families still carrying it.

A woman covered in roosting crows, each carrying a message she has already delivered and that no one believed the first time.

There are no temples to the Soft God. There are only very comfortable rooms that used to be temples to other gods, gradually redecorated.

He is always present at decisions. He is the option you did not choose. He does not follow you afterward. He stays at the crossroads, patient, next to the road not taken, available to the next person, and the one after that.

A massively built man with empty, hollow eye sockets and a great two-handed axe that has never been cleaned.

A woman with a measuring rod she has clearly used as a weapon before and carries at a height that makes this obvious.

A blackened figure still walking, destination unknown. Stopping is not something he has given himself permission to do.

His avatar changes with every city. The constant is that it is always something people step around without looking at, and that it is always listening.

A man of linked iron who moves slowly, loudly, and treats this as your problem to solve.

She is kind. This is the problem. She is warm and patient and takes her time with everyone, and she does not leave until she is done, and by then you have already introduced her to everyone you know.

His maps are beautiful. They are detailed, look official, and wrong by just enough to matter at exactly the wrong moment. He has never been held responsible for this. His maps are still the most widely used in seven kingdoms.

A woman scrubbing a floor that will never be considered clean enough by anyone who matters. She keeps count. She has always kept count.

An alert figure with excellent posture, looking in exactly the wrong direction with complete confidence.

A scantily clad maiden smeared liberally in flour and marmalade, giggling at something no one else can hear.

A pleasant, vacant figure who agrees with you completely and will agree just as completely with whoever disagrees with you next. Extremely popular. Entirely useless.

A thief standing over a flawless scene, holding the one thing she forgot to hide, watching the guards arrive.

He catalogues what is gone. Not what it contained - that is gone - but the shape of the gap it left, and the proof that something used to be there. His library is enormous. He considers it incomplete.

A figure for which no pronoun exists. Seeing it does not help. Looking away helps somewhat.

She has buried four husbands. The funerals were beautiful. She plans them herself now, in advance, which her current husband finds difficult to bring up without sounding ungrateful.

A builder standing beside rubble, not quite smiling, but close.

He does not warn. Warning is not part of his domain. His domain begins at the moment after warning would have been useful, and ends whenever it ends.

Depending on the season: a mighty lumberjack in summer, a bony and irritable philosopher in winter. Both check your work twice and find it wanting.

A breathless courier at every crucial door at every crucial moment, always with news that cannot wait and could not have come at a worse time.

He appears to people who have just broken something by trying to fix it. He does not speak. He simply stands there with the same look that the object had before you touched it, which was: fine.

He saved a city once. The city built a statue. The statue was of someone else, due to an administrative error that was never corrected because correcting it felt unkind, and then the city was destroyed in an unrelated event, and now no one remembers any of it.

He does not disagree with the first diagnosis. He simply stands next to it in silence until you begin to wonder whether you should ask.

A person in a crowd, watching, arms folded, who already knows what he will say when someone asks why he did not step in.

A postal carrier with very tired legs who is always just a day too late and has stopped reading the letters he carries because it is better not to know.

A bureaucrat stamping documents with great efficiency while the building burns behind him. The stamps are perfectly legible.

It is said she has no avatar - because the moment she creates one, she murders it. She considers this a reasonable arrangement.

A man pointing at someone who has already left the room, in a house where no one is listening, at a party that ended hours ago.