The following tells of one of the gods whose pantheon I find myself in service to. This is not a history; it is a fragment of a myth. Receive it with joy!
They say that the beginning of all things was dark and silent. Though the dark and silence bears another name, and is heir to other stories which we shall not yet repeat, that which fell into it from the place beyond was bright, scaldingly, infinitely bright. It carried light with it, and noise– the noise of a ringing hammer, and a child’s laughter, and the clatter of dice upon a gameboard. From the beginning, this god was a god of Play; and by Play he gambled the universe into existence.
They say he won the cloak off of the back of Darkness, and draped it across all things to make the sky. They say he cut away the Beanstalk that held the ground in place on a dare, and the Mountains crashed together in the deafening boom, and the Languages split as all creatures bit a cleft in their tongues. They say he jumped the Gap, nimble and quick, and brought back the Fire for the race of clay dolls he made once, while he was bored.
His friends call him the Chopper, the Man of Lanterns, the Nimblewit; his enemies call him Frost, the Stingy, the Fool. I know him as the god of play, Laughing Jack, whose gameboard is all the world and whose toybox is the future.
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The Bright-Eyed Sinner's Sanctum 
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