NOVGO.NET I.2 — A Boy Who Only Wanted to Feed a Village
He was not born special. This detail matters more than almost anything else in the story that follows, and it is the detail that every later telling — the frightened, garbled versions passed down through generations of mortals who never fully understood what they were repeating — tends to lose first.
He was born in a small farming settlement, the kind of unremarkable place that produces the overwhelming majority of every world's overlooked dead, in a season of drought severe enough that the ordinary trickle of ambient current most people drew without thinking had thinned, that year, to something barely worth the drawing. He watched, as a boy, crops fail that should not have failed, watched neighbors who had never once needed to reach for more than their modest inherited share of the world's current suddenly discover that modest share was no longer enough to keep a family fed through a hard winter. He watched an old woman two houses down draw so hard and so desperately on what little current remained in the depleted soil around her home that she collapsed in her own garden and never fully recovered her strength again.
He decided, with the specific uncomplicated clarity that only ever seems to visit the very young or the very determined, that he would learn to draw more. Not for glory. Not for power in any sense the word later came to carry once his own story outgrew him. He wanted, simply, to be able to reach deep enough into the world's current to keep his own household fed through the next hard season, and the one after that, and however many more came after those.
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He trained the way people train when the stakes are painfully, immediately real rather than abstract — not for years, but for what became, without his ever quite intending it, the better part of his mortal life. He learned to draw a little more each season than the season before, learned the specific discipline of pulling current without pulling so hard it tore something vital loose inside him, learned patience the way a farmer learns patience, because a field does not reward force, only correctly applied time.
He crossed the threshold at an age most people considered already old for such a thing, in the middle of an ordinary evening, doing nothing more dramatic than trying, one more time, to draw enough current to see his village through one more difficult winter. There was no ceremony to it. No chorus, no light from the heavens announcing his arrival among the divine. There was only a sudden, disorienting tearing sensation, and then the unmistakable, vertiginous feeling of standing somewhere his body had never been built to stand, and around him, for the first time in his life, the World of Gods.