makes space infinitely malleable, they rear their bright dwellings and demesnes
with no tool but thought, and alter them at whim-changing, too, their own forms
as mortals change clothes, for similar reasons: hygiene, courtesy, boredom,
special occasions. Like mortals, too, they have their pet issues and favorite
causes. There are collaborations and feuds, amours with mortals or other
divinities, arguments between pantheons or within them. Some of the gods find
this likeness to mortal behavior distressing. Most profess not to care, just as
most profess to ignore the deeper light that often broods beyond and within the
Bright Dwellings, watching what gods and mortals do.
Recently the neighborhood had seen the advent of one Dwelling that wasn’t always
bright. It tended to be either a high, chaste, white-columned temple of the kind
aesthetically promising mortals built, or a low thatched hut of stone crouching
defiantly in a rammed dirt yard. But either way, it always had a positively
mortal look about it that passing deities variously found tasteless, deliciously
primitive, or avant-garde. The dwelling’s changes sometimes came several to the
minute, then several to the second; and after such spasms lightningbolts tended
to spray out the windows or doors, and thumps and shouting could be heard from
inside. The neighbors soon discovered that the division of this house against
itself was symptomatic. The goddess(es) living there were in the middle of a
personality crisis.
“Do you ever think about anything but clothes?!”