![]() While Brutha, Vorbis, and Om are in the desert, the Tyrant of Ephebe manages to regain control of the city and contacts other nations who have been troubled by Omnia's imperialistic ambitions. ![]() Realising his 'mortality' and how important his believers are to him, Om begins to care about them for the first time. Trekking home to Omnia with a catatonic Vorbis, they encounter ruined temples dedicated to long-dead, long-forgotten gods, the faint ghost-like small gods yearning to be believed in to become powerful, the small-god-worshipping anchorite St Ungulant, and the human cost of Vorbis's plan of leaving caches of water in the desert to attack Ephebe. Completely unrelated to the story, the Librarian of the Unseen University travels through L-Space to rescue several of the abandoned scrolls.įleeing the ensuing struggle in Urn's steam-powered boat, which is destroyed as the price for an earlier deal made between Om and the Sea Queen, Brutha and Om end up washed up on the desert coast. Ordered by Vorbis to burn down the Library, Brutha memorizes many scrolls in order to protect Ephebian knowledge as Didactylos sets fire to the building to stop Vorbis reading its scrolls. However, seemingly conceding his previous views about the shape of the world and willing to write a retraction extolling Omnian interpretations, Didactylos escapes after hitting Vorbis with his lantern. Because of his authorship of De Chelonian Mobile ( The Turtle Moves), which contradicts Omnian dogma about the shape of the Discworld, Didactylos is brought before Vorbis to face reprisal. After learning that Vorbis had facilitated the death of the missionary Brother Murduck to cover up his being mocked by Ephebian citizenry and to provide a casus belli for war against Ephebe, Brutha uses his memory to reluctantly aid an Omnian raid through the Labyrinth guarding the Tyrant's palace. All others either just fear the Quisition's wrath or go along with the church out of habit. With the help of Ephebe's Great Library, and the philosophers Didactylos and his nephew Urn, Om learns that Brutha is his only genuine believer. This begins to change after Brutha discovers Ephebe's philosophers the idea of people entertaining ideas they are not certain they believe or even understand, let alone starting fistfights over them, is an entirely new concept to him. However, Brutha is also considered unintelligent, since he never learned to read, and rarely thinks for himself. Om has a hard time convincing the boy of his godliness, as Brutha is convinced that Om can do anything he wants, and would not want to appear as a tortoise.īrutha is gifted with an eidetic memory and is therefore chosen by Vorbis, the head of the Quisition, to accompany him on a diplomatic mission to Ephebe as his secretary. In the gardens of Omnia's capital of Kom, he addresses the novice Brutha, the only one able to hear his voice. He is surprised, however, when he finds himself in the body of a tortoise, stripped of his divine powers, except for the ability to singe eyebrows with tiny thunderbolts. The Great God Om tries to manifest himself once more in the world, as the time of his Eighth Prophet is nigh. In Omnian tradition there is a new Prophet every two hundred years. Om was once a Small God, but managed to speak to a shepherd, gained believers (despite the shepherd being stoned to death) and took over from Ur-Gilash as the God of what became Omnia. Omnians believe in a single god, Om, though the Discworld has many gods, including the billions of Small Gods who exist as points of desire searching for believers. The Discworld is flat and is orbited by its sun, but Omnian doctrine says that the world is round and orbits the sun. Omnia is a theocracy based on the Seven Books of the Prophets of Om. In the process, it satirises religious institutions, people, and practices, and the role of religion in political life. It tells the origin of the god Om, and his relations with his prophet, the reformer Brutha. Small Gods is the thirteenth of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, published in 1992.
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