“Well, her name’s not important. Taras appeared to her in the form of a three-hundred-pound tortoise and propositioned her. Gods were always doing strange things back in those days. A right kinky lot, if you ask me. But like any good lass, this girl grabbed the nearest hammer and cracked that tortoise on the back. Split Taras’s shell right in two. Did I mention she was a dwarven girl?”

He hadn’t, but Jig wasn’t terribly surprised. He had only met one dwarf in his life, but he could imagine Darnak doing something like that. As for the rest of the story, Jig tried not to think about it. He didn’t know much about mating rituals, but he did know that all this changing into tortoises and other shapeshifting was a bit peculiar. Though maybe this explained why surface-dwellers were so fascinated by religion.

“Anyway, out sprang Abriana the Gray in a flash of thunder. She was twin to Wodock the Black, God of the Deep Ocean.”

“If they were twins, did he come out of the tortoise too?” Jig asked, trying to keep up.

“Nah. He came later. Had something to do with a mortal who fell in love with an acorn.” Darnak frowned. “Human, naturally. Wouldn’t catch a dwarf pining over an acorn.” He burst into laughter and punched Jig on the arm. “Pining. Get it?”

Jig got back up and rubbed his arm. He didn’t get the joke, and he didn’t want to. His arm hurt, his head hurt, and he still hadn’t learned anything useful. Over nine hundred gods. How was Jig to choose which one would be best suited for him? All he knew was that he didn’t want any god who turned into an acorn or a turtle to have sex, fell in love with a campfire, trapped mortals with bits of dandelion fluff, or any of this other nonsense. Which seemed to eliminate almost all of those nine hundred gods. “Are there gods for goblins?”

Darnak snorted. “Nah. Gods aren’t much for the dark races—goblins, orcs, ogres, kobolds, and the like.”

The dark races. Jig liked the sound of that. Intimidating and mysterious. But it didn’t help his problem.

He listened with one ear as Darnak droned on and on. The dwarf must have studied for years to memorize all of this information. He knew the stories of origin for almost every god. How he managed to keep the divine family trees straight in his head was beyond Jig. Or perhaps family vines would be a better term for the way the relationships twisted and intertwined and looped back on themselves, as gods mated with their mothers’ sisters, and so on. Jig twisted his ears, trying to filter out the worst of it.