The Color of Magic

Great A’Tuin swims though the void with four elephants on his shell and the disc of the world resting on their shoulders. All around the edge of the Disc, the seas spill in an endless Rimfall, and above the mists hangs the Rimbow, the eight-colored rainbow that circles the world. The eighth color is octarine, the mother-color that gives birth to all the others.

At the Hub, Dunmanifestin, the realm of the gods rests on a spire of green ice. The gods are playing a game on a carved map of the Discworld. Two of the game pieces look like Bravd and the Weasel. Others resemble other heroes.

The players are Blind Io (of the many eyes), Fate, The Lady (Luck), Zephyrus, the god of slight breezes, and Offler, the crocodile god. The Lady produces her last two reserve pieces: Rincewind and Twoflower. She rolls the dice.

Rincewind and Twoflower are halfway to Quirm. Rincewind has come to rather like Twoflower. Rincewind is trying to explain that magic was once wild, but has been tamed and made to obey laws like the Conservation of Reality. Rincewind, dejected by the illogical nature of the world and in strong favor of organization and mathematics, has to admit that it is “all very well going on about pure logic […], but the plain fact of the matter [is] that the Disc [is] manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods [have] a habit of going around to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows” (82-83).