"Have you ever seen this?" Jon asked Cerdic as they sat over their evening bottle of wine. The old Storm Voice gestured to his glass. Cerdic looked carefully and couldn't see a lot. The apple wine was vaguely sparkling, the bottles sent off with a dose of yeast and sugar in the Pelorian style. Totally unlike the flat Sartarite cider Cerdic had found Jon drinking when he'd first arrived in this neck of the woods.
Jon was always testing Cerdic like this. He loved playing games with the young sage. Cerdic took it as a compliment that Jon would even bother. The old man was wiser than he looked. He had a unique view of life that Cerdic found refreshing. If Cerdic uttered an opinion, Jon always had a considered view on the subject. Cerdic often wondered if Jon was very quick witted or just spent all his time trying to pre-empt the next conversation.
"Okay, I give up," Cerdic admitted in exasperation. "We have an expensive Lunar glass full of imported Carmanian wine. What am I supposed to see? Riches that only deep pockets like yours could afford? An opulence or lifestyle I'll never achieve?"
The old man laughed. "My, Sir Sage is being a trifle cynical today!" He looked at his tortoise shell cat, one eye open stretched on the ledge of the high open window and roared out laughing again. He wiped his eye and looked back at Cerdic. "Not as cynical as Ynla would appear to be."
Cerdic never asked what Ynla said anymore. The one time he had he'd regretted it. Ynla was Jon's cat. He never revealed what their relationship was, but Cerdic had heard that Ynla and Jon's second wife had been a gift from Orlanth in exchange for giving up his first wife. There again, you could never extract the truth from these damned citified farmers. So much of this old man's history was hidden. Cerdic had been hoping that Jon would open up and let him write a biography, but he never had.
After the fit of amusement, Jon found his train of thought again. "Well, I'll treat your comments with the contempt it deserves. You introduced me to this damned rot gut." To emphasise the rot gut aspect Jon farted loudly. "Culture eh?" Cerdic blushed. He came from a good family in Nochet and his civilised sensibilities were often compromised by Jon being deliberately coarse.
Jon peered carefully at the wine again. "Bugger, where is it?" he muttered. "Ah ha!" He exclaimed after a minute of carefully scrutinising the wine. "Look at that!"
Cerdic looked again, following the old man's bony finger. All he could see was a very small lump of sediment rising in the glass, trapped in an air bubble. The sediment wasn't rising very fast - it was a lot slower than the other bubbles. They tended to form on the inside of the glass, loose their adhesion and suddenly fly up to the top of the glass where they burst. Cerdic had a nagging suspicion that he was missing something fairly fundamental here, but he couldn't see what. It was fairly relaxing looking at the way the thing rose slowly through the liquid, the other bubbles racing it up and winning.
"What do you see?." Jon asked, his voice low and thoughtful. "You're the brightest idiot in that library, just think it all through."
Cerdic said nothing. He was feeling a bit detached from his body. He felt that this may be the final test that Jon was setting him in a series. Something monumental might be happening to him here, and he didn't want to ruin it by speaking.
"Come on lad, just say anything that comes into your mind."
Cerdic thought, looking away from the wine glass to the hard baked clay bottle in the corner. The wine came from there. The wine didn't bubble until you opened it, maybe that's what Jon was on about. He started to watch the sediment rise again, its film of gas expanding about it as it neared the top of the glass. After a minute or so longer, it reached the top, the covering of gas held against it for a couple of heartbeats by a thin film of wine before it burst. The sediment just lay there, on top of the wine, floating.
Suddenly he knew. His blood ran cold. The cheeky old bastard! He didn't want to know anything about the sediment, or the wine. He was using some sort of analogy. So much for Jon saying what he meant and not being able to stand the idea of fables, parables and other allegories! He looked up:
"Glorantha!"
(By Clarkus, Mirin's Cross, 1592 - from "Principea")
This riddle shows an analogy between Glorantha as a bubble of order rising through the void of Chaos with a bubble or impurity in an effervescent solution. We can deduce the following things from this riddle:
It is possible for order to exist when surrounded on all sides by Chaos. As the bubble rises, it will expand until it bursts on the surface of the liquid. In analogous terms, we can infer the end of Glorantha when it finishes rising through the void.
What supports the bubble? What makes it keep its shape? It must be the liquid around it. By analogy, the Chaos void around Glorantha gives it its shape. If the Chaos void didn't exist around Glorantha, Glorantha would not be held together. This shows that Chaos isn't necessarily an evil, destructive force, but is necessary for our existence.
An advanced mind may note that in an effervescent solution, bubbles form from the body of the liquid. This implies to us that even the stuff of Chaos may give rise to perfect spheres of order such as Glorantha, spontaneously and without the intervention of the mythical agencies that have formed Glorantha since it's birth.
(By Hiatus, Boldhome, Sea Season 1605 - from "Enlightenment of the Unwashed Infidel - My Sartar Campaign")
I have been studying Clarkus' first translation. I wish to advise the reader of the following Gedankenexperiment I have carried out. If the Chaos void were infinite then the bubble that is Glorantha would not be expanding, as does the bubble in the effervescent solution. If the bubble that is Glorantha is expanding then we may deduce that the Chaos void is finite and Glorantha is doomed! If the latter is correct, then one day we shall surface from the void and the bubble of the sky will burst and we shall die.
In RQ this riddle could be solved by Scan (cheesy, but you have to see the sediment to solve the riddle), Glorantha Lore (to realise that Glorantha is a bubble in the fluid of chaos) or Craft (brewing). I haven't managed this yet, but you might like to try and role-play this one out and see if the adventurer's player works out the correct answer. There again, you might not, 'cause they probably know more about Glorantha than their adventurers.
Correct answer, as always, gives +1% to the adventurer's illumination skill and an immediate chance of being illuminated.
Hiatus is a Seven Mothers Initiate and Determinist Illuminate. He has become obsessed with the idea that Glorantha is expanding and that this means the end of the world. He's been measuring the distance between the Seven Mothers temple in Furthest and Mirin's Cross by timing how long it takes for a cult spirit of a fixed POW to travel between the two. However, the times are variable enough to swamp any increase in time he may have found over the last 10 years of trying. He's come to the conclusion that the only way he's going to get any better results is to increase the distance the spirit has to travel. He's decided to send the spirit between Corflu and the temple at Mirin's Cross. The only problem is, he has to perform a ceremony at 5km intervals lasting a day between Mirin's Cross and Corflu to guide the spirit's route.
He's willing to employ adventurers as guards at standard mercenary rates and a dedication in his next book. ("The day I killed 1000 Fuzzy Wuzzies - My Agimori Campaign").
Standard mercenary rates:10 imperials a month, all the food the adventurers can eat and a point of spirit magic per season.
Last modified 23-01-00 by Ashley