Binders – those mages who draw their power not from spells, but from the residue left clinging to the planes by the old, disappeared gods. When we speak of binders, we inevitably turn to tales of Orthos, the "smyleful mage". . . .
After days of traveling, Orthos (as he was known in those times) dismounted and literally stood before the face of the mountain. It was a monumental stone relief, a giant motionless face carved right into the exposed natural marble and bound in living cords of creeper vines. To either side, massive stony fingertips protruded from the cliff. It was an exquisite treasure, carved by a gifted and purposefully anony
mous sculptor, designed to become a part of a place so remote from any civilized country that only the hardiest or wildest sages would ever lay eyes upon it. Above the face of the bodhisattva, the crest of the mountain reached into the low clouds. The effect would have been something like standing before a god pinned beneath a storm cloud and lassoed into inertia by vines; or else, a mountain giving birth to a round-faced godling.Orthos set his steed to graze in a field not far off. After four days and three nights of fasting in preparation to meet the remnants of the bodhisattva of Stillness, he drew an arcane sigil in on the readied ground and built a fire on it. He sat down in front of it there, crossed his legs, and closed his eyes.
The apocryphal record of the heathen scholar Bulfhen Hewn VVybulder records that “Orfos was plesede vvif his vverk and pleasede with the vvarmf and der didd he smyl.” Savant Leo of the Yellow Curtain notes that Orthos’s fire would have been fed with the barberwood pines that grow in the moist cloud forests of central Neruwae, and so the smoke would have been thick and greedy, pulling the moisture from brave Orthos’s lips, and making it impossible for him to smile comfortably. On this question, Silling the Bard remarked to me, “Anyone who has spent a night or two with a family of stony barbarians in the cloud forests during the wintertime will no doubt remember how swift the shift from daylight’s foggy steam showers to the evening’s dry winds can be. Even serene Orthos’s lips would have been cracked by leechlike barberwood smokepits.”
At this juncture it bears mentioning that all this debate about whether or not Orthos might have been smiling during his first encounter with the bodhisattva of Stillness has significance only to the rare practitioner of binding magics and the few, odd persons left in the world who consider the details of his life to hold theological significance. Of course here we subscribe to the former concern, and thus my recommendation to binder mages interested in using the topic of the smile in their own workings is to take note of the following piece from VVybulder’s epic account, beginning at the moment when Orthos would have begun “calling down” Stillness.
Brafe Orfos vvent a-smylin
Closede closede vverr de curtins uf lyt.
Grinnin he vvente.
Closed closede vverr de vvindos uf lyf
Grinnin he vvente
VVat, vvat chant mayd his vvurld felle?:
Here, sage VVybulder switches from his heathen dialect into what we must assume is the wording of the chant as it was passed down to him. At any rate, the chant is from the common tongues of neither VVybulder’s nor Orthos’s periods.
na’siddha na
na’bodhi na
jaar ha jaar hwa
om siddha na
na’nata na’sara
na’siddha na
Returning to the better known accounts, we can imagine Orthos chanting the mantra in a bellowing voice at first, as he was recorded doing in Bhaveena’s Third Book of Evolutions upon the occasion of summoning the vestige of a legendary king. But Stillness had never been a king, and those who would compose chants and sculpt mountains in his image would remember him as a suicide god, as a god of self-destruction. And so this chant called for a gradual softening of one’s voice. Quieting himself bit by bit, Orthos repeated the mantra for three more nights, until it was nothing but a whisper, a whisper of a whisper, a light exhale of inhuman subtlety, and then but a gentle trace of his own dimming breaths. Finally, it was the still background of the universe. Pitched into the emptiness between planes, Orthos confronted the Bodhisattva of Stillness.
The suicide god had once been a mortal man, who had pursued a strange quest. So disgusted with the inevitable pain and suffering of life, this man – his birth name has been lost to the eons – set himself to completely remove himself from the universe, as a final protest, to which even the gods and the planes themselves could never respond. He was at first a good man, but he soon shed all concern for aligning his moral inclinations. Amoral and driven, death would have never been enough for him: he wanted to completely escape from the responsibilities of life, from its entanglements, its corruption. The meditations and research required to uncover the secrets of Stillness, the powers of self-disintegration and nihilism, took him well beyond his natural lifetime to discover. Indeed, he spent centuries searching for ways to lengthen his lifespan, just so he could search more concertedly for the path to his ultimate demise, more complete than mere death: by utterly wiping all remnants of his physical form and all traces of his psyche from the planes.
Yet even after successfully wiping himself from the mortal plane thousands of years ago, there was something left of him, some odd bit that had slipped into the cracks in the ether, which fills the space between worlds. Stillness, here in the cosmos, but just an absence; dead but still alive. What Orthos met was the fragment of that being, a slight film of life that had been unwillingly nourished by nihilistic cults inspired by Stillness’s own inglorious pursuits. Cosmic ironies play themselves out in literary ways, and so the very devoted iconoclasts who revered Stillness's life achievements, in the end, built lonely monuments to him in the wastes of world. Monuments that would secure his inability to escape. This vestige was a most ironic aftermath of Stillness’s own will – nothing but a psionic anamoly in the elemental ether. Yet this anamoly, this little sick flame could only putrefy, forever unable to snuff itself out completely. Stillness had long ago gone mad.
But, as horribly incomplete as they were, Stillness's powers were nevertheless staggering, and that is what Orthos sought. He failed in the end. How the confrontation occurred, we may never know for sure. Here VVybulder writes in his typical heathen dialect about Orthos’s defeat:
Haytful vvill to nuffin
strikt and stiffed lyk a vvalle
rot and blacken da cuffin
“Iyam nuffin!”
Orfos smylede and den he felle.
So much for the smile, but a fitting end for this episode in the binder mage’s tale! Dehydrated, cold, and hungry it would have been long trip home for Orthos, and he would have had a long time to consider his options for his critical second encounter with Stillness, which I record in volume IV.
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