God of Trash

Rhys gripped the intents—all of them. The bricks, the clay, even the shape of the new furnace itself, he held all of them in his mind. His mind trembled, struggling to hold that much information and keep focus, but he forced himself to hold on anyways. If it wasn’t trash from start to finish—trash as the raw material, trash that he was trying to create, trash that held it all together—then it would have been impossible. His mind would have failed, and he would have blacked out, or worse. But it was all trash. Every part of the process was trash, and therefore, related to his path. It came naturally to him, and that made everything just a little bit easier, just enough that he could hold on. His head ached. His temples pounded, and his eyes felt as though someone were piercing them with needles, but he gripped the intents in his mind and refused to let go. They struggled, but his will was greater. No—when it came to trash, his will was the greatest. There was no overcoming his will for trash. His all-encompassing love for trash meant he simply couldn’t be overpowered. If he was going to make trash, with trash, then nothing was going to stop him—least of all the trash itself.

The clay was the first to go. As a raw material, its intent had never been the strongest to begin with, and now that he was forming it into something greater, it quickly fell in line and adapted to his intent. It would become the binding material to hold his furnace together. It would become something greater.

The bricks were harder. They remembered the glory days, the old times and their better lives as a larger, more complete building. They recalled being crudely hacked apart just now, torn asunder for his pitiful, childish construction. They were trash, yes, but they still had pride. They had their past, and they wanted to cling to it, even if he gave them a vision of a new construction.

Rhys pushed back. This wasn’t just a new, trashy construction. This was a new thing to aspire to. Something to become. They’d been trash. Even if they had once been the wall of a grand villa, they’d been reduced to nothing but a pile of bricks lying in the garbage, of no use. True, he admired their tenacity, and he appreciated their pride in what they had once been, but that was in the past. They would never be a wall again. No one else was going to come and pick them up out of the garbage. They either rotted away here, or became part of his new construction. There was no going back to the glory days. No hero who was going to rescue them and make them something grand and beautiful once more. This furnace he was trying to build wasn’t grand. It wasn’t beautiful. But it was something. It was a construction. It was better than lying purposelessly in the trash, forgotten and unused, with nothing relying on them at all.

The bricks hesitated. Their will trembled, and begrudgingly, they gave in. Better to be used and remembered than rot away in iniquity. They had once been something far grander, but they were at least being used now, and this was better than sitting in the hole until they became dirt. Their intent changed, morphing to meet his requirements. No longer did they strive to once more take the form of the manor wall they’d once been. Instead, they worked in harmony with the clay, accepting the form of the furnace Rhys had built. It was a reluctant harmony, one that they joined by force of Rhys’s will alone, but it was harmony nonetheless.

Rhys watched it from outside, noting the pushback against his will even as it gave in. He’d convinced the bricks to take his side, but that was it. They weren’t excited about it. He hadn’t imbued them with new purpose, or inspired them to become something greater. He could still improve this new technique of using Trash Intent to impose his will upon something.

It had been easier with the clothes, even if that one skirt had desperately fought his will. He was more familiar with fabric and clothes, having spent long enough creating costumes back in the day to know the ins and outs of the material and the tricks and techniques to working with it. Intuitively, he’d known how to merge the fabrics together and shape something new. The bricks were different. He was truly an amateur brick-and-mortar worker, and everything in this combination knew it. Unlike with his robes, the end result was shoddy, a first attempt at making something with all the inevitable mistakes and downsides that came along with it. If he had more comprehension of bricks and masonry, he certainly could have created something better that would have pleased the bricks more, and not only that, but he could have more easily convinced them to take new form.

He tucked that tidbit in the back of his mind. He wasn’t aiming to become a master mason, so he’d only bothered to read the bare minimum on masonry. His comprehension was shallow, barely more than a child’s understanding of sticky-thing-plus-rock-equals-house. This, though, proved that there was value in gaining a deeper comprehension even of topics that he had no intention of mastering, if he meant to impose his intent upon the trash, anyways, rather than accepting and enhancing the trash’s own intent. There was little he could do about it, now. Once he began the process, he had to see it to the end or else start over, and he really did only need a shoddy furnace he could manually force together for his purposes. But for future constructions, he should definitely read the books and maybe even seek the advice of experts, if he could find them and convince them to take interest in his trashy constructions. Deeper comprehension would make it easier for him to enforce his intent and help him create greater objects, both.

The fire burned on. Rhys kept one hand on the furnace to keep enforcing his intent over it, so it didn’t lose shape or crack during the cooking process. He knew that what he was doing was kind of stupid and risky, and that unevenly heated clay tended to cook poorly and crack, but this was the easiest, quickest, dirtiest route to the end, and if that didn’t sound like absolute garbage, then he didn’t know what did. The closer he kept to his path, the easier the repair on the trash-cauldron would be, and given how exquisitely difficult that task was going to be, he needed to make it maximally easy on himself.

He'd piled some burnable trash within arm’s reach, and fed that into the fire as the furnace cured. When that ran out, he pulled more trash toward him with Trash Manipulation, and continued feeding the fire. In between feeding the fire, he pulled out the books he’d picked up on forging and continued reading them. He’d intended to just get a quick-and-dirty understanding of forging, but it seemed that comprehension was the one place he couldn’t afford to be trash. Maybe at higher levels, having trash comprehension would allow him to pull off crazy stunts, but he was still too weak to affect reality at that range, which meant it was time to read. He leaned away from the furnace as he read, wary of Az’s wrath. If any soot or dirt got on the books, there would be hell to pay.