Challenge #02376-F186: So Walks a Spider
Imagine if the Old Pagan gods still walked among us. But the stories from their point of view were slightly different.. and they were only made into gods because of storytellers...
I.E.
Odin: "I started my existence as an ordinary man, and lived a fairly uneventful first life. Then my wife passed and I became lonely so I started to look after all the local lost and orphaned children. The bards started to sing of my generosity far and wide until more and more children started to arrive. That is how I first got the moniker of All-father..." -- Adam In Darwin
I Am. I was. What used to be and what is have become a blur, but on good days, I remember. I was... a story. A cunning rabbit. A smart spider. The spider becomes the rabbit and the rabbit becomes the spider and the trickster once had a name. Once had a mother. Once had a home and a family and a life and...
Call me Peter, for now. That is both the name of a spider and a rabbit, as I recall. It is hard to recall. There have been centuries. Years beyond counting. Years beyond recorded history. Years before the time I was a collection of stories. Years... before they believed in me. Years before they called me Brother Rabbit. Years before they called me the spider man...
I was... I was a clever boy who made... cord. String. Rope, sometimes, out of the long grasses. Coils and coils of it. Strong rope, strong cord, too. I was not strong, but the cords I made were. They could hold great beasts many times my size, I remember... the python. It was sleeping by a log and I made a clever series of knots that tied a lot of its length to the wood. When I ran out of wood, but there was still more python, I found more logs. Three of them, not the number the stories say. No python is that long. I did not bargain it into the trap, of course not. Animals do not talk.
They called me Spider, then, because I was always making threads like the real spiders. It was... it was the first time I made a net. Yes. A set of knots, like a basket, but loose... and people could throw it over the animals we hunted. They laughed and said Spider had caught the biggest catch with his web...
That that was the start of it. That was where it began. Tales of Spider spread far and wide. I became... famous. People knew about me before they knew me. Yet, I was still clever. I remember... tricking someone who knew all the stories about me... that, too, became a story. Spider is tricky. Spider is clever. Spider can think circles around you and can get what he wants...
My body died, as all bodies do... but did you know? The soul cannot move on until their name no longer passes mortal lips. They told stories about me. They used my name. They carried pieces of me in their hearts and minds. What would Spider do? How would Spider get away with this?
The legends grew. I became... what I Am. More than a collection of stories. More than a name. I gained names, and lost them, but they were always me. The clever trickster who spun up webs and caught the unwary, the egotistical, or the outright dangerous.
I Am... more than one memory. I Am... a trickster. A spider. A rabbit. I was... once... a god.
I Am... wandering. My memories come and go. I... gave you a name, but it is not my name. I can't remember what it was... What I do? I still capture them. The wicked. The egotistical. Sometimes, they are the same person. The murderers and the violent and the brutal... all get caught. All get revealed.
I am not what I once was. I can't get them all.
You can help, though. Spread the stories. Believe. Remember and revere...
Anansi, the spider man.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / ElenaShow]
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