The Temple of Dampened Spirits was, on a good day, about as lively as a boiled sock. It stood in quiet defiance at the edge of Drizzle, sagging politely toward the ground like an elderly relative too proud to admit they needed a chair. Inside, the smell of mold and abandoned expectations clung to the stones like a second, wetter skin. The village priest — Father Whifflepence — technically remained in charge of the temple. However, most days he could be found at the Dripping Duck tavern, noisily losing at backgammon and explaining that "spiritual matters" were best left to divine intervention and cheap ale. This suited Derrin fine. He had Morinxandar, after all. And Morinxandar, being a stale muffin of impeccable patience and questionable moral compass, had never once abandoned him.

  Teaching oneself to read by candle stub, in the company of a muffin, was — in Derrin’s limited but heartfelt opinion — vastly superior to being ignored by a tavern full of damp adults. He had developed a system: sound out every word three times, ask Morinxandar if it made sense, argue briefly with the muffin, and then accept Morinxandar’s silent, judgmental stare as proof he was probably wrong.

  It was a slow process. Mostly because many of the scrolls were in languages that predated vowels. Or sanity. Still, progress was made. Derrin could now confidently read the words “Bless,” “Curse,” “Turnip,” and “Avenge.” Only one of those would ever prove useful in Drizzle. (Statistically speaking, it was “turnip.”)

  During the dripping daylight hours, Derrin searched for other ways to be helpful. There was a small, stubborn voice inside him — usually muffled by pessimism, but never entirely silenced — that whispered: If you just find the right thing, they’ll have to notice you. Armed with hope, and Morinxandar tucked in his sling like a particularly judgmental coin purse, Derrin began fixing things. Or trying to.

  The Drizzle Downs, in all its questionable splendor, stretched around him: sagging fields where wheat stalks leaned into one another like hungover comrades; reluctant brooks, burbling curses under their breath; the Wishing Well That Only Worked In Reverse, responsible for three unexpected divorces and one unplanned goat; and of course, the Celebrated Puddle, lovingly maintained by annual committees who prayed fervently for its continued existence.

  Optimism here was measured not in victories, but in how few additional disappointments one collected in a given week. Derrin attempted to re-thatch Old Varn’s leaking roof with reed mats stitched together from river weeds. The roof now leaked only when anyone mentioned the weather.

  He patched a hole in Greela Cobb’s bakery wall using a mixture of mud, stubbornness, and what may have been jam. Local wasps promptly declared Greela’s stall a historical landmark and moved in. He even adjusted the temple’s old bell to ring again. It now rang precisely once a week: Thursdays, 3:17 AM, just loud enough to wake the chickens and no one else.

  Through it all, Derrin persevered.

  Each failure was met with a hopeful glance toward Morinxandar, who, despite being a muffin, managed to project an air of both disapproval and reluctant pride. One morning, after narrowly surviving an attack by an irate duck (who had not appreciated Derrin’s attempt to clean the Celebrated Puddle), Derrin collapsed beside the wishing well, cradling Morinxandar in both hands.

  "You think I'm getting better, right?" he asked.

  Morinxandar, as ever, offered the wisdom of the grave. (Which was to say, none at all.)

  Derrin sighed, thunking his forehead gently against the muffin’s crusty side. "Right. Right. Progress is... subjective."

  He stared up at the gray, puddled sky overhead. Somewhere beyond the clouds, he was certain, the gods were watching. Probably pointing. Possibly laughing. Somewhere behind his eyes, a faint flicker pulsed — the system that quietly threaded through the world.

  Somewhere behind his eyes, a faint flicker pulsed — the system that quietly threaded through the world —and a popup appeared, glitching slightly around the edges:

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  > Side Quest Updated: Be Useful

  > Progress: 0.3%

  > Note: Effort recognized. Results... pending.

  > Encouragement Bonus: +1 Emotional Resilience.

  The notification flickered like a dying candle, made a noise suspiciously like a wet sneeze, and blinked out of existence. Derrin stared at the empty air where the words had been.

  "Wait... what was that, Morinxandar?!" he stuttered, clutching the muffin close to his chest like a talisman against reality.

  The muffin, wise in its silence, offered no comment. Derrin spun in a slow, panicked circle, peering into the misty square as if expecting the sky itself to lean down and explain.

  Nothing. Only the slow drip of water off the Celebrated Puddle’s sacred signpost and a goose giving him a dirty look from the bakery steps.

  "Was that..." he hesitated, voice barely a whisper, "the gods?"

  His heart thumped painfully against his ribs. Maybe — just maybe — they had noticed him. Maybe the universe had cracked open, peered down at the damp mess that was Derrin of Drizzle, and decided he mattered. Another flicker behind his eyes. Another soft, glitching cough. Words tumbled awkwardly into his mind, like a drunk falling down a staircase:

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  > Query: "Divine Message" not recognized.

  > System Status: Mildly operational.

  > Advice: Continue. Probably.

  Derrin blinked. "...Probably?" he repeated aloud, scandalized.

  Morinxandar, cradled carefully in his sling, managed to look skeptical. For a muffin, this was a remarkable achievement.

  "I mean—" Derrin began, then stopped. He scrubbed a hand through his perpetually damp hair. "You're right, Morinxandar. Probably isn't very godly, is it?"

  The system, sensing a teachable moment, generously offered another communication:

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  > User Literacy: Insufficient.

  > Processing Basic Language Module...

  > Progress: 12%... 47%... 103%?

  > Adjustment complete.

  > Warning: Side effects may include mild existential disillusionment.

  Derrin clutched his head with both hands as a dull ache bloomed just behind his eyes. Letters — real, actual readable letters — started making a sort of hazy, drunken sense. For the first time in his life, words floated through his mind not like broken puzzle pieces, but like actual, if slightly sticky, messages. He gasped and turned a wide-eyed look toward Morinxandar.

  "I can... read?"

  A long pause.

  Another flicker from the system:

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  > Clarification: "Sort of."

  Derrin laughed — a sharp, incredulous sound that startled a nearby duck into falling over. He had been touched by something vast, cosmic, unknowable... and it sounded exactly like the village council when they informed him that while he could technically attend the Harvest Festival, it would be "better for everyone's morale if he didn't." Still, even "sort of" was more than anyone had ever given him before. He pressed Morinxandar against his forehead like a holy relic.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  "They noticed, Morin," he whispered fiercely. "They noticed."

  The muffin, grim and unyielding, maintained its dignified silence. And in the soggy twilight of Drizzle, with a system that wheezed encouragement like an asthmatic ghost, Derrin took his first unsteady steps toward destiny. Probably.

  ****

  Time, in Drizzle, flowed like everything else — sluggish, damp, and mildly confusing. Derrin didn’t know his birthday. No one had kept track. Calendars were for places that expected things to happen. Drizzle measured the passage of time by the size of the puddles and the number of festivals canceled due to excessive apathy. By some estimates — mostly his own — Derrin was probably around ten years old. Or maybe nine. Or perhaps timeless in the way forgotten things sometimes became.

  In the sagging ruin of the Temple of Dampened Spirits, he kept studying. Badly. Teaching yourself to read using moldy scrolls and half-digested prayer books was roughly equivalent to learning swordplay by wrestling with a very angry goose. Progress was possible. Grace was not.

  Derrin’s method, such as it was, followed a simple pattern:

  Pick a scroll.

  Rotate it until something looked vaguely familiar.

  Read it backwards, upside-down, and inside out.

  Argue with Morinxandar about the probable meaning.

  Write new notes in the dirt floor with a stick, occasionally stopping to chew on said stick out of sheer existential confusion.

  "Alright, Morinxandar,” Derrin muttered one morning, holding a half-decayed scroll up to the light. "What do you reckon this says?"

  The muffin, steadfast in his refusal to assist verbally, regarded him with the weary air of a mentor wondering where it had all gone wrong. Derrin squinted. The words Blessed Upon the Fifth Dawn somehow became Blistered Uproar of the Fish Down, and the ritual instructions turned into something involving goats, suspicious quantities of mint, and an apology to at least one celestial body.

  "That tracks," Derrin said, nodding sagely.

  Derrin took to divine study the same way he’d taken to reading: enthusiastically, earnestly, and completely wrong. Armed with a few soggy scrolls, one half-burned hymnbook, and the kind of optimism that only grows in deep isolation, he began building his theology like a squirrel builds a nest—chaotic, unstable, and filled with questionable materials.

  His first attempt at ritual involved the Celebrated Puddle.

  The puddle, long revered in Drizzle for its dependable sogginess and refusal to evaporate, seemed a fitting place to commune with the divine. Derrin stood beside it at dawn (or what passed for dawn through Drizzle’s constant pewter-gray sky), raised his hands solemnly, and declared: “Oh Great Radiance of Fish, may my turnips be ever upright.”

  The phrase had been pieced together from three separate blessings, a woodcut illustration, and something he might have overheard from the tavern. It was, spiritually speaking, nonsense. But it was sincere nonsense. Unfortunately, a goose who had apparently decided the puddle was sacred to her took offense. She charged with wings flared and unholy screeching, driving Derrin away in a panic, Morinxandar thumping indignantly in his pouch.

  Not to be discouraged by a waterfowl exorcism, Derrin turned to construction. Behind the temple, he gathered fallen stones and loose bits of rubble to create his own altar—less a monument and more a lumpy stack of regrets. At its center, he placed a cracked roof tile. Below it, he scrawled a title on a piece of old kindling using a bit of coal: “For General Divine Stuff.” It was not a traditional name for a shrine. But he didn’t know the traditional names. Or the traditions.

  He stepped back, gazed at his handiwork, and immediately sneezed, causing the top stone to fall off and crack his toe. Later that week, he tried a purification ritual based on a scroll so faded the ink was basically a rumor.

  It called for water, chanting, and “internal openness,” which he interpreted as shouting very loudly while splashing water onto his head. The only clear effect was that his socks slipped clean off and vanished into the mud. None of this stopped him. Each night, Derrin would sit beside his altar or in the shadow of the temple’s crumbling door, Morinxandar resting dutifully in his lap, and cobble together his own liturgies.

  Most of them were composed of wishful thinking, dramatic pauses, and the occasional apology to anyone listening. He imagined the gods as large, golden beings who held the power to make things better—if only they weren’t too busy doing something else. He imagined that if he got the words right, or built the perfect altar, or looked solemn enough for long enough, one of them might finally say, “Yes, you. I see you.”

  Morinxandar offered no criticism. But if a muffin could sigh through silence, it probably would have. Slowly — painfully — the basics of theology stitched themselves into Derrin's mind like badly mended socks: There were gods of rivers and gods of stars. Gods who ruled thunder, love, war, and turnips (probably). Gods with temples bigger than Drizzle itself. Gods who demanded offerings grander than the village's entire annual harvest.

  Reading between the gnawed, mildew-streaked lines, one thing became horribly clear: None of them cared about boys who lived in barns. Derrin sat one evening on the cracked stone floor, Morinxandar balanced carefully on his knee, the last stub of a candle guttering between them.

  He stared down at the open scroll, its ink faded into a sad, desperate brown, and whispered: "I just... I just want someone to notice."

  The temple walls, soggy with indifference, said nothing. Morinxandar stared valiantly into the darkness, king of muffins, general of sorrows. It was then — while digging through a half-rotted crate of “miscellaneous sacred detritus” — that Derrin found it: A single, battered scrap of parchment. Barely clinging to cohesion. Stuck between a mummified mouse and a badly dented censer. The name almost slipped past him, a smudge on smudge. But he caught it. Squinted. Sounded it out, slow and careful like a farmer coaxing a mule uphill: Voherin the Begrudged. Watcher of Dust. Patron of Silence, Patience, Endings, and Obscurity.

  There were no glowing titles. No grand temples listed. No accolades or festivals or divine triumphs. Only a small footnote, half-erased: "Followers: None Recorded."

  Derrin felt something twist and settle in his chest. Here, finally, was a god who understood. A god who had been passed over. Forgotten. Not hated. Not feared. Just... overlooked. Like him. He held Morinxandar up solemnly to see.

  "What do you think?" Derrin whispered. "He’s... like us, Morin. Nobody wanted him either."

  The muffin, grim and indestructible, gazed into eternity with the stoicism only stale baked goods could achieve. Derrin clutched the parchment tighter. Maybe Voherin didn’t want followers. Maybe he didn’t want anything at all. But Derrin could offer him something anyway: The same thing he gave to a moldy temple, a cracked puddle, a village that forgot his name unless he tracked mud inside. Loyalty. Even if it wasn’t asked for. Even if it wasn’t deserved.

  Somewhere far above the drizzle-drenched clouds, something ancient and irritable stirred in its long, reluctant slumber. And somewhere, deep in the half-mad weave of a forgotten world, a system hiccuped and muttered:

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  > Divine Alignment: Pending...

  > Attention of Voherin the Begrudged: 0.002% Achieved.

  > Congratulations! You have begun to marginally inconvenience a god.

  The words flickered and vanished, leaving only damp stone and a boy hugging a muffin under a sky that could barely be bothered to rain properly. And Derrin — unnoticed, uncelebrated, and just stubborn enough not to care —smiled.

  ****

  It began, as all spiritual awakenings do, with a song so profoundly off-key that nearby birds fell silent out of sheer confusion. Derrin stood atop a lopsided stone slab behind the temple ruins — arms raised, face turned to the drizzle-heavy sky, voice wobbling between sincerity and a lack of formal music training.

  “Oh looorrrd of… uh… silence and… shoe-laces,” he bellowed, dragging the final syllable like it owed him money, “accept this offering of… ribbon I found! And also, this drawing of me smiling! See? I'm smiling!” He held the paper aloft. The smiling Derrin on the page had too many teeth and one very uncertain eyebrow.

  A gust of wind ripped it away. It stuck to the back of a goat. From the satchel slung over his chest, Morinxandar watched it happen with the impassive gravitas of a muffin who had seen too much and been chewed on too little.

  “You’re right,” Derrin sighed, “it probably was too soon to unveil the second verse.”

  There had been no guidance. No sacred scroll, no divine commandment, no celestial voice in the rafters saying, “Derrin, I crave the blood of rutabagas and lo-fi hymns.” So he improvised. Devotion, as Derrin understood it, was part performance, part gift-giving, and mostly just refusing to give up on someone who hadn’t asked for your attention in the first place. So he gave what he had. Cracked acorns. Bent nails. A dandelion crown that had seen better mornings. Drawings, always drawings — of temples that didn’t exist and people smiling at him like they meant it.

  He arranged each gift with quiet ceremony at the crumbling altar he'd named “For General Divine Stuff”, placing Morinxandar beside them as both co-worshipper and theological consultant.

  "Do you think gods like color?" he asked one afternoon, chewing thoughtfully on a reed. "I only have two crayons. One's mud, and the other’s sort of... moss-adjacent."

  Morinxandar said nothing.

  “But I feel like green feels holy,” Derrin added, and began scribbling a picture of what might have been a deity, or a turnip with arms.

  The rituals became daily. At dawn, he'd sing. At noon, he'd recite newly invented prayers like spells from a forgotten cookbook. And at night, by the flicker of stolen candles, he’d whisper stories into the stone, hoping someone — anyone — was listening.

  Sometimes he’d pause mid-prayer, look at Morinxandar, and ask, “Was that too much? Too needy?”

  Morinxandar, unchanged and uneaten, was all the answer he needed. And somewhere around the second year of these increasingly elaborate and vaguely heretical rituals, the village of Drizzle remembered that Derrin existed. This was generally considered unfortunate. It began with a goat refusing to walk past the temple. Then Greela Cobb's bread began to rise unpredictably, producing a loaf with a shape many considered “accidentally blasphemous.” And when Old Varn's hammer snapped mid-swing for the first time in forty years, he muttered darkly, “It’s the boy. He’s been talking to something.”

  The rumors slithered through Drizzle’s 27 residents with all the subtlety of a lightning bolt in a puddle.

  “He’s going to call something down on us,” said one.

  “He’s waking things that ought to stay napping,” said another.

  “I saw him anoint a chicken with berry juice,” said a third.

  (He had. It was experimental.)

  The fear was quiet, but thick. People stopped speaking to him altogether — which, given Drizzle's social standards, was practically a confrontation. Those who once gave him scraps of food with a nod now left cold crusts in silence, like guilty thieves offering tribute to a sleeping monster. Even the priest, Father Whifflepence, glanced up from his backgammon board long enough to say, “Well, we’ll see who he brings down on us, and then we’ll all feel silly, won’t we?”

  He did not clarify who “we” was. No one asked. But Derrin? Derrin was thriving. He had never had so much purpose. Every ritual was new. Every offering a little more specific. Every accidental duck blessing a lesson learned. No one had ever let him believe he could be part of something sacred. So he made it up, brick by brick, offering by offering, smile by slightly unhinged smile. He and Morinxandar — the prophet and the muffin — were on a mission. To love a god into noticing them.

  To outlast the silence.

  And somewhere — not in the clouds, or the sky, or any of the expected holy places — but in the soft space between rain and stone, a single, ancient god stirred slightly in his sleep and rolled over.

  Not because of Derrin. Just... inconvenient dreams.

  For now.