The Rod of the Umot came into my possession by way of a traveling trader who called himself Bix the Stick, who I met at a roadside camp on the way to Angur-Kala. It was near the end of one of the short, hot false summers that sometimes come to the northern Beyond, and I had ridden well into dusk searching for a suitable campsite for myself and for the monitor beast that I had acquired to serve as a mount along the narrow roads of the rocky expanse. Finally, just as I was beginning to consider finding a hollow in the rocks and trying to sleep a few hours in the saddle, I spied a parked wagon and a campfire around the next bend.

Not at all wary of a late-roving traveler, Bix welcomed me into his camp and shared his meal with me, a simple stew of dried meat and root vegetables that was delicious as only a meal after a long day on the trail can be. We spoke as we ate, of our destinations and our reasons for being on the road (he was headed to Norou to trade wine for trinkets, which he thought he could sell for a good price in the lands to the south), and I noticed nothing out of the ordinary until he decided that the fire was getting low, and would need stoking before he retired.

He pulled something out of a pile beside the wagon, and I could see as he placed it on the fire that is was the remains of some sort of animal. The creature was the size of a small dog or a large rubar, with an elongated ovoid body, four squat legs, and scaled skin covered with thin, brittle branches that rustled and broke as he moved the thing around in the coals. When I asked him what it was, he told me it was an umot. When I asked him what an umot was and why he had a pile of dead ones, he laughed, and said that it would be easier to show me than tell me, but that it was too dark to show me tonight. He did, however, nod to my monitor as he was climbing into the bedroll under his wagon, and told me that if it would eat the umot still in the pile, it was welcome to them.

In the morning, the fire had burned down to ashes, the pile of creatures had disappeared (presumably into the monitor’s beak), and as I brushed my mount’s hide and adjusted its saddle Bix retrieved a long rod, a coil of cabling and a battery the size of a man’s head from his wagon. As he connected the rod to the battery using the cables, I admired the device’s construction; the majority of the rod was clearly brass, but a little less than half its length was covered by a sheath of textured ceramic. From the midpoint of the rod, behind the ceramic but forward of the rough leather grip, a set of armatures made of some green-tinted metal extended forward, coming to points that all appeared to be focused at the tip of the rod.

With the cable securely attached, Bix stood and brandished the rod, pointing it out over the road and the rocky expanse beyond. He nodded at me, and said “Here, friend, I promised to show you an umot.” He then did something with the handle on the rod and a creature, much larger than the width of the rod itself, launched out of the end of the rod, bouncing once and rolling over several times before coming to a stop on the dusty road. Bix hooted, saying something about it being a “lively one that time”, and then gestured me over to the creature.

The creature looked somewhat different than the thing I had seen thrown on the fire the previous night. It was still ovoid in shape, but the creature was covered in hand-sized fronds, light and feather-like, that obscured almost the entirety of the creature’s body and legs, and that waved slowly but rhythmically in waves from the blunt end of the creature toward the narrow one. The umot stood still as I bent down to examine it, but as I looked the creature over, I realized that it was moving to assist me before I made any motion myself; when I thought to examine its feet, it raised a paw for me to inspect, and when I thought to check the skin of the creature, and it moved the fronds aside to allow me a clear view.

I asked Bix about this behavior, and he told me that he had been told the umot were “perfectly mentally receptive”, that they could sense the will of other beings so strongly that it overrode any will of their own. In practice, he said, that meant that the umot wanted to do whatever you wanted them to do, for as long as you wanted them to do it.

As we spoke of the creatures’ anatomies and feeding habits (or lack thereof, as Bix claimed he had never located a mouth on the creatures, let alone seen one eat), he aimed the rod in the general direction of the wagon, and produced another twelve of the creatures, most of them falling rather than shooting from the end of the rod. As they emerged, each of the creatures found its feet and then lined up before the wagon, falling into two neat lines a pace apart.

I remember musing about the ethical implications of creatures whose wills were so easily subjugated, but Bix only shrugged as he retrieved a set of belt leather harnesses from the wagon, stating that based on their actions when “given their heads”, they probably weren’t much put out. He gestured back to the creatures, which had fallen out of their neat lines, arranging themselves in pairs and threes and making motions that Bix confirmed were, in fact, copulation, saying that they’d continue to do so whenever he didn’t have any specific task in mind for them.

He also said that while he’d never seen them give birth, he’d seen their population more than double overnight, and that that was why he was careful to “clean them up” after he was done with them. When I asked what he meant by “clean them up”, he stopped belting the umot into their harnesses for a moment, and picked up the rod again, nodding to the one he’d created for me to examine. He pointed the rod at the creature and twisted the handle. Instantly, the creature reacted, jerking and falling to the ground. Its fronds curled up and grew brittle and dark even as I watched, forming the things I had thought of as branches the night before.

We continued talking about the creatures as he stowed the rod back in the wagon and finished belting in the remaining umot. He said that it bothered him a little to kill the things, but that he understood it was necessary; they bred too fast for anything else to be an option, and the rod seemed to be able to produce an unlimited number of them. In fact, he said, the man he’d acquired the rod from, an aeon priest from a clave somewhere in the south, had warned him specifically against bypassing the triggering mechanism and applying current directly to the rod, lest he “bury the world in the scaly little bastards”.

I traveled with Bix all the way to Norou, and before we parted ways I convinced him to take my monitor beast and a number of trinkets I’d collected in trade for the rod. For a time, I, too, used it for travel, and occasionally for food (though umot meat is fairly unappatizing) or for utility (a single umot is nearly ten pounds, so thirty umot in a pile will balance a scale against a three hundred pounds of grain). Once, as an experiment, I even attempted disregarding the older priest’s warning and powering the rod directly; for a moment, before the umot spilled out in a wave and filled my cottage nearly to the rafters, I saw the rod open a rift onto what I can only assume was another world, though all I could see through the portal was a solidly-packed wall of umot fronds.

Today, the rod rests in my umbrella stand, with the broken slug thrower and my walking stick, unused for years. I’ve not picked it up in years, but if you can find a battery for it, child, I believe it still works, and I can show you how to use it if you’d care to learn.