Glim's Laugh

When the emerald fell, no one thought of gods.   In the city of Tarris, there were never many temples to the Old Gods and even the few there were had long since been shuttered or repurposed before the Planar Conformation, rededicated to the Imperial Faith or Lynodyth, or turned into warehouses, taverns, or quiet ruins wrapped in apple trees.   Glim, once the trickster among the divine, had no worshippers left in the city by the fifth century APC. The month bearing his name in the lead up to midsummer’s height, was only celebrated for its wine quotas and tide-fairs and there were no sacred ceremonies.   So when the emerald fell from the sky on Midsummer Day in the year 484 APC, no prayers were offered.   It was the kind of day when the sky is too blue to trust and the sea speaks in riddles. The people of Tarris were busy with a secular festival: dancers twirled on docks, nets were strung with glass charms, and somewhere a pig was being hoisted aloft for reasons no one had quite remembered. High noon rang, and the city paused in silence for the Sun Toast, as tradition demanded.   And then the sky cracked.   Not a thunderclap. Not a fireball. Just a sudden green streak, slicing west to east across the heavens like a finger drawing a grin.   A soft boom echoed over the bay.   In a rocky inlet near the breakwater, a fishing boy named Iven Trost found a stone embedded in the black glass of a freshly cooled impact ring. It was warm, smooth, and green enough to ache the eye. The water around it hissed gently—not with heat, but as if telling secrets to itself.   The stone’s colour, a bright trickling green, resembled the famous Oasis Root stone of Klaractazum, where a tiny, eccentric circle of Glim-devotees still lingered, preserving half-lost rites of whim and revelation at Glim's Wall. They would later claim they dreamed of the emerald’s fall the night before. But at the time, in Tarris, no one knew or cared.   And yet… odd things began to happen.   The stone resisted classification. It hummed in keys no one could name. It rotated slightly each year on the hour of its landing.   At first, these quirks were treated as curiosities. The Society of Arcane Adepts rejected the stone as “noncompliant with magical theory.” The stone didn't care. The local temple from the Way of the Harmonic Path dismissed it as "not worthy of serious concern". The stone didn't care about that either.   A street magician tried to eat it. Someone hid it in a chicken coop and claimed divine eggs would follow.   But the date of its fall and its unpredictable powers, began to stir memories. A minor chronicler of temple ruins noted its colour matched the glaze used in old Glim-altars. Soon after, a wandering archivist from Klaractazum passed through Tarris and declared the stone:  

“a cracked mirror of Glim’s wit, reflecting not what is, but what isn’t quite.”

  An old sea-witch claimed the stone fell not by accident, but because Glim dropped it while juggling stars and “laughed too hard to catch it.”   The Emerald was said to glow faintly when told a lie, though only when the lie was truly believed. Pilgrims came. Then copyists. Then sceptics. The stone was oddly warm, sometimes vibrated in the light of Lumina, and appeared just slightly more green than should be allowed. It sometimes hummed in sea shanty rhythm. Once, it cracked the tuning fork of a fussy mage who tried to analyse it. Despite its appearance, the stone could not be cut, polished, or pocketed unnoticed.   By the next midsummer, a corner of the old spice market had been converted into a prayer circle for Glim, where offerings of broken clocks, unfinished riddles, and false confessions were made beneath an awning of shifting green glass.   No great miracles followed. But odd fortunes did:   A street acrobat missing for three years returned on Midsummer's Day claiming he’d been “trapped in a palindrome.” A girl who cleaned the shrine daily found a ring lost at sea twenty years ago in her fishing net. The Reeve of Tarris suffered a spontaneous bout of involuntary rhyme for twelve hours while seated near the emerald.   The clerics and devout of other faiths scoffed, but the people laughed. They told each other:   “Glim’s back. He just never knocks.”   Now children in Tarris play a midsummer game called "Catch Glim’s Eye", where they pass a green stone in a circle until it stops changing colour.   The Emerald of Tarris, sometimes also called Glim's Laugh, is held in a small oratory beside the harbourmaster's towe. It is officially categorized as a meteorite of cultural interest but unofficially worshipped every midsummer by a growing congregation of “irregular faithful.”   Children leave riddles scratched on sea shells. Sailors offer mismatched socks. Priests of other faiths walk the long way around.   And Glim?   If he ever left, he returned laughing.