Firkin was having fun. In fact, he had been having fun ever since they dosed the bread in the village. Truly it was difficult for him to remember the last time he had had this much fun. To be fair, he had difficulty remembering quite a lot of things. Including, from time to time, his own name. But he was fairly certain that his reduced circumstances had not allowed for this much fun in many a year. But here, now, praise be to all the whoreson gods in their mighty Pantheon, he was having so much fun he just might shit himself.
“Brothers!” he called. “Sisters! Very close cousins! Fathers! Mothers! Those who confuse the boundaries between them! The prophet has come!”
The thing he found utterly insane, beyond all possible reason, was that they listened to him. He could say pretty much anything that came into his head and they listened to him. All he had to do was tell them that the prophet had said it, or that the prophet was going to in a second, or that the prophet might say it someday soon, or that the prophet definitely hadn’t said it but wanted it known all the same—and they listened.
“Tear down the old world! Toss out the old! Reclaim your truth!” They loved that one. He sometimes—often when being tended upon by young and nubile things—wondered what they imagined it to mean. Still, he thought as he watched a gaggle of teenage boys smash the windows in several stores and snatch goods into their pockets, there was little enough harm done. And the citizens, just like him, seemed to be having so much fun.
“Burn your wasted years! Set fire to the ashes of your history!” That one, he knew, definitely didn’t make sense. You couldn’t set fire to ashes. They’d already been set on fire. But nobody called him on it. No one told him to stop gibbering. Nobody called him an idiot. If he’d told them the prophet had said they should drown him in alcohol they would have complied. It was fucking brilliant.
“To the heavens! Mount to the skies!” That was a new one. He wasn’t sure what they would make of it. It was fun to mix it up sometimes.
To the west, the dying light of the sun was being replaced by a new light as houses went up in flames. The heat rolled out across the streets toward him.
“Be reborn and usher in the new! Remake yourself in the prophet’s image!” Across the street, at that very moment, he could see a man dousing himself in oil. He set a torch to his clothes and ran off screaming down the street, arms flailing, smashing into buildings, leaving a wake of fiery destruction behind him.
Firkin smiled. Yes, he was definitely having a tremendous amount of fun.