Xêvioso and the other Vodun are powerful enough to change their size at will, but I try to meet him as he is. I have the power, so when I visit him on his personal island that floats above the billowing Essence clouds of his Disc, I enchant my body to grow an additional five feet to stand just below eye level when I greet him.
The best vantage of his Disc is visible from his island, you can walk around the perimeter and look down at the entirety of everything on the surface, even the edges at their overlap with neighboring discs. It is an aleph, an optical trick–all discs of the Fonlands are so large that they dwarf the galaxies of my home universe and they are impossible to behold in their entirety as one can from Xevioso’s floating island that he occupies alone, unless he is entertaining his siblings for Smiting. Xevioso’s island is also something of an optical trick; when I sat with him at his Smiting table, the island seemed to shrink, like it was just the earth that contained the table and our seats, but when I walked away from him, the island expanded to fill out with earth and foliage to accommodate the distance.
“The Fonlands is a being,” Xêvisoso explained to me. “It isn’t my magic that creates the aleph, I merely hover in it. I imagine it has something to do with the column of Divine Essence, it must bend reality with the force of its currents down from the Lofted Disc. The Discs of the Fonlands together form an empathetic organism that is conscious of us pests on its back, and it accommodates us because it feels for us. The Fonlands made me a Vodun and it wanted me to have this watch over everything below, otherwise I would not have it, or I would have to tame the lands into submission and that would be a great effort.”
In my time in the Fonlands, I have grown to better understand what Xêvisoso was explaining. There have been plenty of times that I have wandered off the familiar path deep within Sakpata’s caves, completely lost and starting to panic that I would never find the Smiting Chamber again, but I encountered a new corner of the caves that provided a new route back to the familiar or I encountered some Fonlander who took me back. I have never been truly lost in the Fonlands.
I have come to enjoy a good game of Smiting, though I enjoy the Vodun rules less than the other variations that I’ve encountered over the years. The Bludonian version is my favorite, but it requires four players, and I had yet to play Smiting with the other Vodun when I played Xêvisoso that first time. It was just the two of us on the island hovering over the disc.
“I must warn you,” he said in his alto voice that vibrated the space between us, “my first deck was a formidable one. It was designed when Gu and I were at our most competitive, young and aggressive. The Fonlanders of this deck were chosen from the first Idols of my Disc and they are very powerful, laced with gold, capable of clashing with Gu’s metals.”
Of course I’d done my research. After the Vodun arrived to the Smiting Chamber where many beings of the multiverse had gathered to discuss the concerns about the Pito and the annihilation of entire universes, we decided to map out effective strategies using Smiting Decks, and to better understand the greatest resources at our disposal, I decided to familiarize myself with the first Smiting Decks of Xêvisoso, Gu, Lêgba and Jo. These are the decks that created the game and they are the most coveted sets because of the rarity and effectiveness of the decks. More importantly, these decks represented the ancient powers of the Fonlands, beings of immense age and arcane wisdom that combined to rival the awesome power of the Vodun who presided over their Disc. We knew that we needed vast and powerful armies to combat the Pito. We decided to use the Smiting Chamber to produce new cards of powerful beings identified across the multiverse and I brought an enchanted deck of these beings to challenge the Vodun’s first decks in order to test their mettle. It was a good opportunity to learn more about the discs and about the decks.
The tradition of each Smiting set being a game in itself in addition to being a deck that can be played in Smiting started with the first four decks. Xêvisoso’s first deck is the deck of Peace.
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