now. During the outlaw days of Gorgik the Liberator, when his rebellion was at its most violent, while Gorgik was a hero to many, he was a villain to many others. In an age and a nation where there is no media, numerous people have taken to pretending they are Gorgik the Liberator, some for good and some for evil, for their own ends. In “Fog and Granite” Clodon does exactly this. “Rumor and Desire” shows a set of mosaic pieces from Clodon’s life before he decided to take on the Liberator’s identity in order to be a more effective highway bandit. As Delany writes in the voice of "K. Leslie Steiner", in the introduction to the entire project (“Return... a preface”, in Tales of Nevèrÿon), the eleventh and final written story, “The Tale of Rumor and Desire”: "The Tale of Gorgik" While the events of “Rumor and Desire” take place during, or just after, the events of Neveryóna (whose main character is a fifteen-year-old girl, Pryn, who runs away from her village to start traveling around Nevèrÿon, and who, for the first third of the novel, falls in with Gorgik’s revolutionary activities when its efforts are centered in Kolhari itself), it has always been published at the end, before a recapitulation of the very first story, "The Tale of Gorgik". Notes References 1987 short story collections Fantasy short story collections Short story collections by Samuel Delany American novellas Arbor House books Fiction set in prehistory