[image description: An extravagantly-colored soft-bodied, marine mollusc twirls in a sea of beautiful blue. Text reads, “84, NAKED GILL ~ the small god of NUDIBRANCHS”]

Comes a god who needs no introduction, but will probably get one anyway, since most people looking upon his glory for the first time react either with uproarious laughter or with an in-drawn breath and the querulous demand, “What the hell is that?”

Gil doesn’t care.  Gil’s church encompasses the only known marine animal to be capable of photosynthesis.  The opinions of a few dry bipeds matter about as much to him as the opinions of a clam, and everyone with any sense knows that clams don’t have good opinions about anything, except for maybe sand.

Gil knows exactly what he is.  Gil is the small god of hidden potentials and beautiful things, the theater kid forced to hide his sequins before the gaze of a disapproving father, the gifted carpenter who can’t own her own hammer without her older brothers taking it away.  Gil sees beneath the masks and the draperies people use to hide themselves, and he knows what’s really there.  And he loves it.  Every misfit, every malcontent, he sees them all and loves them all and hopes they will all, eventually, be allowed to find their own way home.

And when the people who would keep his faithful small make their own frightened voices large and demand, “What the hell is that?”, Gil is more than happy to remind them that the law of tooth and claw looms largely in the sea, and even the nudibranch—pretty painted princess of the benthic that it is—is a fierce predator in its own right, capable of swallowing creatures larger than itself entirely down in a single gulp.  Gil will keep, protect, and defend what’s his, and if some of those same dry bipeds have a problem with it, well.

That’s their problem, isn’t it?

Join Lee Moyer (Icon) and Seanan McGuire (Story) Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for a guide to the many small deities who manage our modern world, from the God of Social Distancing to the God of Finding a Parking Space.

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