The Wagering Lords of Elpaloz

The story of the wagering lords of Elpaloz is a cautionary tale from the pre-Wesmodian mythical traditions of the Eleven Cities surrounding the Sea of Jars. It chiefly involves the deity Zargyod and interestingly demonstrates a point of contact between his seemingly discrete capacities as a god of good fortune and the sea.

Narrative

A group known as the lords of Elpaloz forbid the worship of Zargyod in the city, arguing that fortune, being by definition random, requires no deity to oversee it. Zargyod visits the city in the guise of an ordinary sailor and wagers with the lords that the tide will not return tomorrow. Exactly what he wagers is not always stated, but the lords take him up on his proposition. He waves his left hand and the ebb-tide does not return. Over the succeeding days Zargyod allows the tide to come and go, but not in any predictable pattern. The lords begin making a game of this, wagering each day on whether the tide will leave or return, heedless of the fact that this uncertainty is complicating the flow of food into the city. The populace feel the effects of this before the lords and stage work stoppages to prevent the funnelling of goods from the port to the wealthy inland areas of the city. After this insurrection spreads to the staffs of the lordly households, the lords are forced down to the port to unload the ships themselves. At this point Zargyod reveals himself, waves his left hand again, and causes a horrendously high tide which floods the port and drowns many of the lords. Those who survive, chastened and wary, raise portside shrines to the god.

Literary/artistic tradition

The myth is recorded in detail in The Book of Favour held in Chogyos Customhouse. It is one of the more popular inclusions in copies of the book held in Chogyos and elsewhere. Its absence from other mythopoeic texts is a point of interest among those who study such things.

Commentary

The myth is interesting in that it seems to combine two aspects of Zargyod's divine portfolio - his control of the sea and his governance of the more abstract concept of fortune - which often seem to sit quite separately in his divine character. The location of the myth in Elpaloz, a city situated on the northern coast of the Sea of Jars halfway between the northern outposts where Zargyod appears to have first emerged as a sea deity and the southern cities where he was revered primarily as a god of wealth and well-being, may be some sort of allegorical melding of the two conceptions of the god by the anonymous author of the Book of Favour. Very conspicuously, Elpaloz has never been governed by any nebulous body of "lords," making it very clear that the story does not originate there, or in the mind of anyone with any particularly close acquaintance with the history of the city (or, conversely, any concern to depict that history accurately). The fact that Zargypd is the only named character in the account plays into this.
The Book of Favour also makes it very clear that Zargyod achieves his godly actions in this story with his left hand. This is an interesting point of contact with both the oral and written traditions surrounding the psuedo-historical thaumaturge Morogyad, accepted by widespread biographical tradition to be Zargyod's begotten son. Those who study the Esoterica of Morogyad, which includes a series of discussions about the use of the left hand to perform magic, often refer to this myth as evidence for the validity of their research in the broader mythopoeic tradition surrounding the god and his offspring. 










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