Gulp Meets Death

Death's first (and last) encounter with a male hat troll, and the tale of Death's encounter with the White Mother

Long ago, before the birth of the gods or even the stars, hat trolls wandered the void, being pretty bored and feeling hungry, so they mostly fought each other. Finally, after many dull eons of wandering in nothingness and fighting the same old people, a godling came into being and declared themselves the first and best thing to exist and set about creating lesser beings to serve and entertain it. After a time, a hat troll stumbled onto one of these creations, and it...smelled delicious! So the troll jumped on it and started tearing chunks of it out with his mouth. In that moment, a new entity sprung into being: Death. The now less bored and less hungry troll, who named himself Gulp, started wandering with more purpose, hoping to find more of these tasty punching bags. At first, Gulp had no trouble catching lone creations and eating them, and Death was kept busy cleaning up their screaming leftovers, guiding them back to their creator to be re-clothed in tasty bits.

At first, this godling was entertained by the thought that something had come into being, clearly after he had, but quickly became irritated at how often his creations had to be remade, so he ordered them out in larger and larger groups.

Gulp, meanwhile, was very full and not at all bored anymore, having learned that Meat is Tasty and Eating is Fun, but as the groups of Meat Creatures got larger, it became harder for him to eat them, since one or another of the group would pull him off and then the group would run off. This frustration went on for...who knows. Time wasn't born yet, before Gulp realized that More Like Them could be handled with More Like Him, and so he set out on a long wander, gathering many feet of hat troll and finally stumbling on a group of Meat Creatures. Since they smelled so good, it took Gulp's group no time at all to chew them to nothing, and Death came to sweep them back to their creator.

Now, the godling grew angry. When he first created his creatures and set them wandering for his entertainment, he had not considered what they were made from--but now, now he was being stung by the losses; he was made less because the creatures were drawn from his own substance. Confident in the absolute nature of his power as first to exist, the godling decided to call himself Prexol (a worthy name he thought), and set out to find and end this threat. In no time at all (ha, see what I do there? Time joke! Hat troll make a funny!), Prexol found Gulp picking at the remains of a Meat Creature. This could not stand! How dare this... this thing consume the proud substance of Prexol himself?! And so Prexol fell on Gulp, tearing him limb from limb, and then joint from joint... but it wasn't enough. There were others eating his substance, and Prexol found and dismembered each of them so quickly that Death wasn't aware of Gulp's condition until the last of the hat trolls had been disjointed.

Death gathered the bits of Gulp, then was pulled to the next disjointed troll, and the next, and the next. All the while, Death gathered the bits in a sack, where they got mixed together with no telling where one troll began or ended. Death spoke quietly after the pieces had been collected. "You are no longer able to function--you are dead. Come with me and... wait, who made you--where are you from?"

The many feet of troll in a sack answered, "What mean, 'where you from' and 'made'?"

"Surely someone made you... put you together from something, like that Prexol makes those things you eat and make me clean up after you're done?"

"Nahp, nothin' make hat trolls be, just is."

"So... you've been around since the beginning? Tell me, what was it like before Prexol came?"

"Umm, many much nothing, darkness, boredom, hunger...oh, lots of hittin' and kickin' and bitin', too!"

Death, not especially used to great conversation from its charges normally, was even less impressed with this exchange. How could its progenitors be so... stupid? And if they were stupid... Death made an odd sound.

"Say, do any of you remember what bits belong to which of you?"

Fingertips scratched at forearms and shins, sometimes even a forehead. Gulp's face mumbles, "Wait, wuz der moar uv me before? I doan thin' so..."

Gulp, having a very long head and a tall hat (which was somehow still firmly seated on his detached head), was clearly, in the eyes of the other dismembered trolls, right. They were exactly as they'd always been. There was just more of them than before.

Hearing this, Death decided that enough was enough. They weren't getting paid to deal with this sort of headache (hey...they weren't getting paid at all for their service! they'd have to fix that later, once money was a thing), and they dumped out the sack and left the pile to figure its collective shit out, muttering, "Too dumb to know when they're dead, too dumb to know where they came from... and one of them MADE me! No one can ever know..."

After Death left, the troll heads began to realize they couldn't move, and they were pretty sure they'd been able to move before. Troll limbs realized they couldn't see or move, and they were pretty sure they'd been able to do that before Death had come around and put them in the sack. Not knowing something shouldn't be possible is the first step to making it possible, especially when your brain is more of a liability than an asset, so the heads and bits of limb didn't know to think that they shouldn't be able to regrow the rest of themselves from nothing--they just figured they'd always been able to do it, if they bothered to try.

Now, with many many feet of troll following several Gulps, the Meat Creatures fell in droves to the maw of trolls, and again Prexol stepped to meet this challenge to his power.

As he strode to challenge one of the Gulps, another of the hat trolls got a whiff of Prexol...and he smelled even more edible than the Meat Creatures! Without a thought, he threw himself on Prexol and tore a gob from his calf, scarfing it down and spreading the delicious smell of food to the rest of the maw of trolls. Before the godling could react, he was buried in a wave of many feet of troll.

Sighing, Death approached this mass for cleanup duty. Gulp's Finger, who happened to be in Death's path, grunted, "Who d'ya thin' y're?! Buzz off, arsewipe!"

"You know what? I'm going on vacation...screw working for thankless godlings and being a cleanup crew for these idiots, I'm out!"

And Death wandered far from the hat trolls until the gods of the other races came into being. Only after Death had come to be feared and respected by humans, Orcs, and other mortal beings did it bother to approach a hat troll again, and again the hat troll neither knew nor cared who and what Death was.

Time, which had finally been created by sentient beings, passed rapidly until The White Mother was brought into being by Da Moon. By this time, Death and Life had been made into two sides of the same coin by humans and other pinky races, races the White Mother studied in order to overcome. As she aged (a process the males never could understand, as Time wanted nothing to do with them), the White Mother came to realize that she, alone, could not keep her... if she was feeling generous... dull brothers out of trouble and fed, the job was too big for only one. As she lay bleeding after her great raid on the human settlement, Death approached her, with little hope of finding a reasonable and rational example of hat trolldom after all its previous encounters with males of the race.

"Ahhh, so you're Death. Funny you should be at my side now, after I visited you on so many humans," the White Mother rasped as blood flecked her lips.

"In all my existence, no single hat troll has known me for what I am... now I find one who welcomes me. Do you recognize what is happening to you," Death murmured into her ear.

"I am dying of course, you fool! But since death and life are joined, so birth--creation itself--and death are linked. While I was all things to my brothers in my time, my time is now coming to an end. But! My brothers need caretakers, guides to keep them from being excessively dim. In exchange for my going with you peaceably, as even now I could hold you off for some time, you will divide the aspects of White Mother, Valkyre, and Hag from my spirit and send them back to my brothers clothed once more in flesh and knowing from whence they came."

And Death, begrudgingly, agreed.

-Written by Oros, recorded by Witchdoktor Galya