[image description: Looking down onto a group of small smooth black stones. The largest is a round flattish stone in the middle of the frame that has a sweet wide face in the shallow debossed heptagon on its surface Text reads, “6, Ka Pohaku, The Small God of Small Rocks”]
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They are the god of getting wedged in the tread of your sneakers, of children’s pockets and New Age bookstores. They are even the god of decorative necklaces filled with tiny water-polished stones and sold at a ridiculous markup to tourists. Hey, it’s a living.
They are a god of secret histories, for every pebble was once sheltered in a mountain’s heart, or carried in the backbone of a glacier, or rose up from the center of the world with the slow pressure of gravity and time. A mountain may live close enough to forever, from the perspective of the smaller, faster-living domains of other gods, but it lives forever in a single place, looking out across a single land, even if the country it belongs to shifts and changes.
Ka Pohaku does not envy the gods of mountains. Those gods receive one version of the world, and they…they receive it all.
Every secret whispered to a skipping stone is theirs to keep. Every story told by a small child on the verge of falling asleep, struggling to keep the bed monsters at bay. Even the proposals of countless hopeful romantics, for what is a diamond if not a small rock?
Every god has two portfolios: that which is spoken, and that which is known. The people can call Ka Pohaku a god of rocks as much as they desire, but the god will always know the truth, and the truth they know is that really, when all is said and done, they are the god of something far finer and more rare.
They are the god of small secrets.
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Artist Lee Moyer (The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, Starstruck) and author Seanan McGuire (Middlegame, Every Heart a Doorway) have joined forces to bring you icons and stories of the small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.
Join in each week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many tiny divinities:
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Lee Moyer 