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Saint Of Error

The body of the Saint of Error receives millions of visitors each year, some crossing truly unfathomable distances on their pilgrimage to the holy site.

Across seas of What-Could-Be and oceans of Never-Conceived, pilgrims make their journey.

Some, increasingly, are people.

And it is the people who, unique among the faithful, offer names in tribute. It was people who named it the Saint of Error—and gave it innumerable other names besides, alongside yet more titles that spill from their lips while they offer rapturous devotion.

The moths which alight briefly upon the body do not attempt to cage the Saint in language.

No caress of spores carries any weight of expectation from distant fruiting colonies.

It is only the people who crave to negotiate an understanding of what they encounter.

It is a mistake to try, of course, and the Saint of Error nurtures something like love for those who persist in such foolishness. In attempting to cast chains of rationality around it, these lost fools only bind themselves closer to it.

They kneel at the husk of the great leviathan and pray into its gaping mouth.

The mouth itself has little significance to the Saint, it must be said. It happens to have been the first feature discovered along the body’s length that struck people as significant.

There are the legs, of course, and several other mouths, and even other features besides, but the rotting bulk stretches far beyond the conceptual horizon of what any person has discovered, and nothing like a head has been found.

So people approach this mouth.

The wisest know to expect no great gifts in exchange for their supplication, but many precious fools waste themselves in hopes that wetting the Saint’s lips with the prayers they wring from themselves will earn its favor.

Such ephemeral offerings soak into the dessicated body without leaving a trace. The Saint’s body does not require or acknowledge them, but the Saint itself occasionally takes notice.

From its unseen perch on the throne of its decaying body, it grasps one of its body’s many legs and puppets the limb into a caress that scrapes across the worshipper’s head.

People invent so very many stories about what such a twitch of the legs means.

When their time here ends, the people who make the pilgrimage—filled with awe at having witnessed the corpse that they mistake for the Saint itself—dry their eyes and depart from the Saint’s resting place.

The people go home and tell their stories of the thing they fundamentally cannot understand in words that fail to convey the truth any better than lies.

Perhaps it is a waste of time to try, but that is exactly the kind of mistake the Saint encourages.