Tear Jerker / Small Gods

• The meeting with Ephebe's Tyrant, particularly:
  Vorbis: Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave.
  Tyrant: So I understand. I imagine that fish have no word for water.
• Brutha's speech on death:
  Simony: We died for lies, for centuries we died for lies. Now we've got a truth to die for!
  Brutha: No. Men should die for lies. But the truth is too precious to die for.
• Brutha's death (of extreme old age), where he meets Death at the beginning of the desert crossing, then discovers that Tautological Templar Vorbis has spent the entire hundred years since his own death^note though, as Death notes, time is different there. More personal. A hundred years can pass like infinity. cowering there, too afraid to move or pass on, trapped in an Ironic Hell entirely fitting his vile deeds. Even Death offers the opinion that he's getting what he deserves. But Brutha feels otherwise, taking his enemy's hand to guide him across the last desert.
  Brutha: Yes. He's Vorbis. But I'm me.
  • Also a Crowning Moment of Awesome: one thing everyone agrees about Vorbis is that his superpower — the real evil that he commits — is that he makes other people become like him. Most other people, apparently... but not Brutha.
    • Ah, but he did make Brutha more like him. For all his faults, Vorbis possessed many of the Evil Virtues. His time with Vorbis turned the humble and fairly simple Brutha into an enlightened and charismatic leader who changed the world.
• All the prayers offered up in the Place by the villagers, who have genuine sorrows to voice, yet can't obtain any relief from them. Not only do they not genuinely believe there's anyone listening, but Om hadn't actually been able to hear the words until he became a tortoise, and he can't help them once he is one.
• General Fi'irt's Despair Event Horizon, as the campaign to attack Ephebe goes underway, and another member of La Résistance who knows his name is being tortured by the inquisitors. He wonders if he's ever prayed to Om, as he can't remember anymore after all of the war he's waged in the name of the church. He believes firmly in the the cause of the resistance, yet has enough religion left to fear that it's damning his soul regardless. And then he ends up dead at the hands of the Inquisitors himself, although he at least gets a happy-ish ending when he appears before Death and feels good enough about himself to cross the desert.
• After spending most of the book being a Jerkass in the way only a Discworld god can manage, Om regains his power...and directly afterward, heads for Cori Celesti to stop a war threatening Omnia, and more specifically Brutha, his new Prophet. He finds the other gods playing dice with the lives of their believers, and with his newly-gained perspective (and quite a lot of very convinced believers on his side now), Om beats the tar out of 80% of the Discworld pantheon single-handed, then strong-arms each of them into simultaneously delivering the following message to their own believers on the battlefield:
  I. This Is Not A Game.
  II. Here And Now, You Are Alive.
• The Small God whom Om speaks to in the desert. All it can do is to recite a disjointed Madness Mantra about its former glory, but it no longer knows its own name. And Om would have ended up exactly like it, if not for Brutha.
  • It's implied that all gods end up like this. Forgotten forever, but remembering - and driven away from any new sources of belief by the envious proto-gods. Mortals have it easy.
• How Om finally persuaded Brutha that he really was Om. Brutha believes that Om watches everything, and Om remembers a summer day when Brutha told his grandmother that he wished she was dead. Oddly poignant.

---