There Are No Gods

It was a long, slow winter. A time when it seemed the snow would stay forever. Some died, of course, the very old and the very young. Heads already bowed against the cold and the biting wind bowed lower in grief and forlorn hopelessness.

The midwinter festival was not the usual raucous revelry where people call on the drunken gods to wake from their long hangovers and bring about the spring. This time there was talk of the gods abandoning us, even talk that there was no such thing as gods. Talk the direst threats and tortures of the priests could not silence.

Soon, as the snows continued, the priests themselves ran for cover as the crowds in the increasingly bare market places turned on them. As I overheard one of my guards say to a serving wench, 'It is not often you see a thin priest.'

I – of course – have never had much time for gods and priests. I am more of a god than most of those the priests light the candles for and make sacrifices to. I have the power of life or death over some, but my Lord has that power over me. So perhaps it is easy to see that – to some minds – there should be someone, or something, that has the power of life and death over lords and kings and even over this world we walk through.

Myself, though, I have seen too much to believe in gods, both the worst and best that this world can do to people and the worst and best that people can do to one another.

No, there are no gods and no-one to blame for this winter that looks as though it will never end. We have only ourselves, one another, and this world and what we make of it.