Deity Awakened.

The mist swirled around the boat, coiling like the World Serpent of legend. Kaza couldn’t see anything but the fog, boat, and water, despite the lanterns hung on the front and rear of his skiff.

“I shouldn’t have come alone,” he mumbled into the clinging mist. The butterflies in his stomach began morphing into dragons. Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

For its part, the mist swallowed his words but otherwise ignored him, except for the all-too-real coil of fog around the boat. Sometimes it would get close enough to touch the boat. On any other lake, that wouldn’t matter, but the Naming Lake was different. The fog-serpent had form; substance. Every time it touched the boat, the boat rocked. Tiny ripples raced away from the skiff, all of them pointing like a beacon to where he sat watching.

Kaza studied the encircling fog as if he had a choice about its placement. The serpent had scales of mist and vapor with tiny fog legs or fins. Kaza couldn’t tell, couldn’t begin to wrap his mind about what he witnessed. Everything was so ethereal. Its body was as thick as he was—not arm or leg thick, all the way around his middle kind of thick. Terrifyingly large would do as a description. And it just kept coming out of the fog bank. The whole of the situation was beginning to affect his calm.

A gurgle rushed up from his churning stomach, the bitter taste of acid chewing at the back of his throat. No one had seen the World Serpent in several generations. Or, rather, nobody who had seen it and lived to tell about it had made it back to do so. Kaza didn’t know what to expect next, either. His Teacher hadn’t told him what might happen, just that he shouldn’t go alone. Ever.

Kaza and rules didn’t spend much time together. That’s how he came to be floating on the Naming Lake alone.

“What am I to do?”

His voice faded into the mist, no echo, no answer from another person, just the encompassing gloom seeping into him. He wanted to put his oar in the water, but he would have to push it through the fog. At the moment, the World Serpent appeared to be closing down the option and you didn't poke a god with a stick, so he sat and watched, waiting for a response.

Lights began glowing beneath him. Thousands upon thousands of tiny dots of light floated in the black depths of the lake. Nothing in the evening darkness all around him indicated whence they came. There were no mirroring lights in the air, only the mist. It agitated his unsettled state, ratcheting it up another couple of degrees.

Kaza rubbed his hands together as beads of moisture formed in his hair and fell like rain. Their echo in the pooling water on the bottom of the skiff provided him with the only other sound he’d heard since the World Serpent had introduced itself. The mist clung to him tightly, soaking all he had and falling off elbows and eyebrows like soft rain in the boat. A slow rain, certainly, but rain.

He leaned toward the side of the skiff to look into the water and get a better idea of the floating points of light. As he did, a bead ran down the bridge of his nose and stood poised to fall. At the same time, a collection of points of light coalesced beneath the surface, forming a wobbly, glowing ball. As the bead of water dropped from his nose, the light shot upward at him, startling him into quickly drawing back into the boat.

A second later, a small globe of light floated up above the gunwale. It warbled with varying brilliance as it surrounded the bead of water before attaching itself to the World Serpent. As if some boundary had broken, other points of light floated up and engulfed mist droplets. Then, in turn, they affixed themselves to the World Serpent.

Kaza watched with rapt attention as the mist became enrobed in light, shattering the darkness as the World Serpent birthed in front of him. He had no idea how long it took—time seemed broken and out of touch. All around his skiff, the fog became tangible, though he dared not reach out and touch the strange fusion. It also showed no notion of moving in his direction. As for the rest, some beads floated, others raced. All of them congregated on the World Serpent.

As the mist disappeared and the serpent grew, mountains appeared in the distance. The serpent stopped coiling, too, arching away from the boat. It slithered across the surface of the water, unraveling the boat-wrapping coils and dragging them behind as it undulated up and into the night. Light-globes followed it, some attaching of their own volition, others gaining purchase as a piece of the World Serpent’s foggy form caught them on its way past. The inky black water underneath the shimmering goliath swam with pinpricks of light though they shed no information or vision of what else was in the water. Kaza didn’t think anything else would want to be there anyway. He certainly didn’t.

Time remained immovable as the night became full of light-wrapped droplets. They were everywhere, replacing the mist entirely. Light bathed the distant hills. The nearby shoreline, tucked beneath a steep and unfriendly cliff, stared back at him through a forest of glowing and prismatic light. He couldn’t see the trees he had snuck through to launch his boat, though. He couldn’t see a way home. Also, there had never been hills around the lake before, and there certainly wasn’t a cliff. Next to the skiff, a mound of mud and rock arose, pushing through the black water as beads of light raced to catch the last of the water droplets. Still, the World Serpent grew in size, color, and corporeal nature as it gathered the light.

Unceremoniously, Kaza’s boat tipped, spilling him out. “Argh,” he screamed, certain the next instant would be a cold baptism into the dark waters. Swimming in the lake was strictly forbidden. The water had an odd way of interacting with flesh. They only buried their dead in the lake. Instead, he landed in a pile of rapidly hardening mud.

Kaza looked around from his hands and knees and then stood. The World Serpent danced overhead, its body as big as the sky and brighter than a noonday sun. Around him, the lake had vanished. What he thought were distant mountains and a cliff face were instead the lake bed minus the water. A voice boomed in his head.

“BY WHAT RIGHT DO YOU AWAKEN ME?”

Kaza grabbed his skull in pain, using both hands and doubling over. Retching followed, but the light from the serpent burned away the shadows of any attempt to hide discomfort.

“I WILL NAME YOU 'CHILD.' YOU WILL JOIN ME.”

Kaza decided now was a good time to panic, but all he could do was hold his head. A river of light beads leaped from the serpent’s form and raced toward him.

"The Naming Lake," he thought.

The ribbon of light angling at him would overtake him in a moment. He pleaded, “I cannot. I am late and need to get home.”

Like a spear, the light struck him, washing over him and pushing through his shirt to his skin. He felt the pricks of light cling and burrow deeper. Every drop of blood they drew became encapsulated by yet other pinpricks of light. Astonishingly, each time a bead of light touched him, another memory grew in his mind. The images of distant peoples, times, fantastic achievements, and proud moments appeared limitless. Every bead brought more knowledge, changing him, forcing him to adapt and accept the World Serpent’s offering as he morphed into something greater than himself.

There wasn’t pain in the transformation.

The greater serpent eventually shed his entire sheen of light, the beads collecting around Kaza instead. Then, once back to its ethereal self, the World Serpent’s voice crashed through his mind again.

“THESE ARE YOUR PEOPLE AND YOUR HISTORY. I ONLY WATCHED THEM FOR A LITTLE WHILE. YOU WILL TAKE CARE OF THEM NOW AND KEEP THEM SAFE.”

With a final flare, the World Serpent’s form collapsed into a cloud of mist on the night wind as it flew across the land. Whether it left to find a new people or home, Kaza knew not. He stretched himself, extending the flippers on his sides and unhinging his jaw to roar soundlessly into the night. The howl chased the rain from the clouds, draping the old lake bed in sheets of torrential rain. It slowly began to refill. As it did, Kaza squirmed through the mud and deep channels, smaller than his parent but still enormous, until he was little more than a dim glow beneath the waves. He slept, then, for a long time, listening to the prayers and concerns of his people. As he listened, he collected their thoughts in little balls of sunlight, tucking them into the mud around him. He used them to feed himself on the history of his people as they grew. In time, he too would need to find an heir and pass the mantle, but that was thousands of years in the future. Until then, he could sleep and dream the dreams of his tribe.