Avalanche!

Somewhere, three somewheres as a matter of fact, on the windswept glaciers atop three different unnamed mountains, three brothers brood over the foul misdeeds of their siblings. The silence of their bitter isolation chilled by twenty days of snowfall. Twenty days of loose, treacherous snow suddenly lit by the clear morning sun.

At that same moment, the city of Axius enjoys the daily span of quiet in the pre-dawn hours when even inveterate rabble-rousers slumber and before the earliest risers wake. As the first rays of Eos' light the snow-capped mountains, the few guard sleepily on post say a prayer of thanks. Finally the snow has abated and the light of Helios will warm the capital city once again. But first the light of Helios must cause mischief on the mountain tops. Small tumbles of snow here and there alarm the young among the guard, while the experienced sooth their concerns. The mountains you see are too far distant for small shifts to be of any true concern. But when the whip crack of splitting glaciers assaults the city walls the old grow pale and the young rush to the alarm bells, the ringing of which are drowned by the ground level thunder of an avalanche.

In the days that follow, the scholarly point to their histories and insist the event could have been predicated if only they'd been consulted. An undamaged Axius is proof, say the faithful, that the capital is protected by the gods. The bureaucrats, for they must also have their say, propose a tax in order to send an expedition to the mountains to learn more about avalanches. Only the children derive any joy from the additional snow, and when they return shivering from their play they regale their parents with tall tales of three snow angles so large that they must be gods.