The Life of Bill Blithe

β Let us take a short detour from the events at hand to examine a fascinating individual while we still have him in our sight. 

Some say Bill Blithly’s life truly began when he fell into the pit trap. It was the classic sort with the spikes jutting up and rotted corpses at the bottom that bands of goblins stop by and pilfer every so often.

When Bill fell into the trap the lucky soul miraculously missed impalement upon any of the spikes. Taking advantage of his good fortune, Bill looted the corpses of the less fortunate in the pit and came upon a pouch of spongy, white beads. 

To the average observer these would have seemed nothing more than protective padding for storing gems, but Bill had spent a while as a part-time adventurer in his youth. He’d heard of the fabled celestial seeds. In fact, he was even lucky enough to have eaten a small amount of celestial leaf when on the brink of death once. Bill pulled himself from the pit, sold three of his goats to buy one single book related to growing celestial plants, then took his two remaining goats and moved to a new region where no one would know him.

Competition over these plants is deadly, as the leaf of the celestial plant is the most treasured and potent healing herb ever discovered. There are countless books dedicated to cultivating and harvesting celestial plants, most of which are utter moonshine (the plant is so hard to find, few sources exist containing reliable information relating to it’s cultivation.)  The untrustworthy characters who are liable to sell these misleading books frequently include a small chapter near the end about the seemingly unrelated process of fermenting excessively potent moonshine using easy to find ingredients and coordinating its concoction with the lunar cycles of Trillium. This small section is remarkably reliable and gives people a reason not to be so upset that the rest of the book is pure nonsense. It also provides a semi-lucrative backup plan should they be lucky enough to wake from a drunken stupor to discover their celestial seeds have been stolen.

The major problem with the plant, aside from surviving its possession, is how incredibly difficult it is to grow. Supposedly it must be planted when one of the suns is eclipsing the other and there are at least six moons in the sky, one of which must be Caelestibus. During cultivation it must be regularly watered with blood, and fertilized with zed, even then it takes upward of a year to grow – at least according to the unreliable texts sold by seedy-looking individuals who would happily buy the seeds off anyone not invested enough in the effort.

After wandering for weeks, Bill stumbled upon the perfect clearing to plant the seeds. It was well off any path, days from any cities, and had a small civilization of pipsies at its heart. He struck a deal with the pipsies and together they embarked upon a complex journey to grow Bill’s fortune. 

The pipsies planted their special zephad absorbent mushrooms in pockets around the roots of the celestial plants to draw zephad down through the soil. Bill regularly bled his two remaining goats to feed the plants; besides the daily bloodletting they were the happiest, healthiest goats they could be (for improved blood quality of course.) And Bill spent his every waking moment nourishing his prized possessions.

Through nearly two years of monotonous, day after toilsome, drudgery-filled day, devoted single-mindedly to the cultivation of these precious plants, Bill never made moonshine, abstaining entirely from any drink that would dull his senses (despite the fact that his book had an impressively thorough chapter on moonshine.) He kept his head clear so as to tend to and protect his investment, an investment that was taking exceptionally long to grow by his estimation.

As he watched the earth churn to bloody mud just days after he’d seen the first budding stock of his fortune peek from the soil, all the dreams he had nurtured and grown over the past several years were rapidly replaced by an overwhelming craving for some very, very strong moonshine. Bill was utterly at a loss. He didn’t even know where his goats had run off to.

After pulling himself away from the bloodbath, Bill would abandon his dreams of the celestial plants and wander Zilla in a drunken blur for a year before finally throwing himself into the very same pit trap that had started the whole thing. This time, very precisely and intentionally, not missing three spikes at the bottom.

The pipsies never returned to the meadow; they never got the chance. Their adventures upon the headless corpse are too vast to detail here, but in short, they underestimated, and misunderstood the effect that nibbling on the celestial root had on their magic. The wee folk didn’t have near the control that they had anticipated over their new creation. The corpse was as much alive as any newborn pip and it took to the world with gusto.

Over the weeks and months following the exposure to vast quantities of both blood and zed during the battle, and with the pipsies no longer nibbling their roots, the plants that had hitherto struggled to survive inches below the earth would explode into life. The celestials grew and stretched further across the meadow than should have been possible, in no small part because of the soil churning from the troops and the preliminary pruning the pipsies had given the roots. Off the roads and far from civilization, the plants flourished in solitude for a full year.

  At the exact moment that a suicidal Bill calculated his trajectory onto the spikes for maximum efficiency, another lucky soul – a destitute gnome who, at the time, was convinced that she was down on her luck – stumbled upon the plants and sold them, becoming tremendously wealthy.

Several months later a recovering Bill Blithly (who, as far as he was aware, had miraculously and frustratingly avoided any fatal wounds when he’d leapt upon the spikes) traded some of his fantastic moonshine for a bit of celestial plant to aid him in his grueling, agonizing recovery. Unbeknownst to him, the celestial plant he bartered for was of the very crop that he himself had planted. It immediately healed internal wounds that would have killed him soon after in a fantastically painful way. 

The fortune-seeker he traded with loved the moonshine so much that she invested her life savings into opening a pub with Bill. They named it Celestial Spices.

After only a few short years their pub reached such notoriety and popularity that people would travel hundreds of footfalls to visit. Bill Blithly became quite rich and famous in the end, in part for his excellent moonshine and the exotic varieties of teas and grinds he’d learned to make while guarding his plants. Even more than the moonshine, he profited off his exceptional moon pies, made with a recipe passed down to him from his mother (this recipe had nothing to do with the cycles of the moons.)

Zeno would have loved the Story of Bill Blithly’s life, it is a great example of a primary ideal Zeno often preached relating to misfortune: Misfortune will befall each and every person, it is an inherent law of a zephonic universe. But in the continuity of life and chance, no misfortune is purely itself. As Zeno was fond of saying “Things can be many things, and nearly always are. A ‘misfortune’ we encounter may be one small piece of a much larger fortune we collect, or vice versa.” For this reason, he stressed that it is vital that we never be overly firm in our interpretation of any given happening as we float on, drawn ever forward on the rivers of life.