Cosmology

Or, the story of a quarrel between the serpents Is and May.

The Dry World

There was a world long before there were people to look upon it. The Dry World, a barren and empty world, the world that came before. Reigning over that world was the Sun Serpent. Islanders call him the Watcher in the Sky, but the striders know him as Remembrancer. Ever vigilant, he fixes one eye upon the world and the other upon the Veil of Night. His pitiless gaze sears away the vagueness and formlessness of the everchanging otherworlds, leaving only dry earth in its wake.

The Remembrancer’s gift is creation, but his creations are not whole. He cannot forget and he does not know how to yield. Where the gaze of that primeval serpent falls, there cannot be what may: there can only be what is and what was. He does not understand why all he makes is empty and barren, but the Dry World and the Veil of Night are his doing all the same.

And so there was a world, there was a sun. In that world there were, even then, powers. The Old Powers, which the Hewn call the Earthbones - so easily misunderstood and misused. Not good, not evil, but deep and strange and as ancient as the stones themselves. The shadows of creation, they were made when the light first shone. They are an unmaking for every making, an unbinding for every binding, a question for every answer, pooling in the deep places where the Sun Serpent’s eye cannot reach.

The Old Powers should be revered, but they should never have been worshipped.

The First People

It is said that all people were immortal, before the Dry World. They did not know or understand death; they took whatever shape pleased them; and they passed from one place to another as lightly as zephyrs. But curiosity drew them to the Dry World, and its Old Powers. To the limitless, nothing is so tempting as the prospect of constraint.

As is their way, the Old Powers took and they gave in equal measure. They took away immortality from those who touched them; they took away formlessness; they took away lightness. They gave in return two things: the world, and death. And so then there were people in the world.

The Dry World was not kind to people. It was harsh and barren, a pitiless desert that was hostile to the newfound life of its inhabitants. They struggled and strove - and often, they died. Some became desperate and sought the Old Powers once more. They begged the Old Powers to forsake their kindred and save them, and they promised to exalt and esteem the Old Powers above all else.

As is their way, the Old Powers took and they gave in equal measure. From their supplicants, they took away gentleness and kinship. They gave in return two things: power over others, and the terror of losing it. And so then there were tyrants.

The Lament

The Priest-Kings built the First City. Later, after they learned to quarrel and make war, they built the Second City. They invoked the Old Powers and called forth precious things from the earth: water, and greenery, and beautiful jewels. Their cities became rich and glorious, filled with shining towers and verdant gardens. And they kept their promises: they sacrificed to the Old Powers, built them idols and temples, gazed deep and delved deeper still in search of their ultimate source.

The Old Powers, which do not need sacrifices and have no source, were content.

With each prayer and each sacrifice, the darkness of the earth spilled out a little more. Seeping from the caverns and dungeons, it welled up until the cities were drenched in shadows that cloud the mind and bend the heart. The Old Powers are not evil, but if you give them evil they will return it to you, and they were given plenty. Some few climbed from that darkness, preferring the desolation of the Dry World to the horror that crouched now in familiar streets and behind closed faces.

Those who fled into exile knew that there was no salvation to be found below the earth, so they turned their faces to the skies. They prayed to the Sun for succour, but he did not listen. The Watcher in the Sky does not concern himself with what should be or what could be, or with the wishes and dreams of mortals. He cannot.

Even the Sun Serpent must sleep, however. Each night, he swims below the horizon and the Veil of Night comes into view, the otherworlds glimmering as distant stars in the night sky. Desperate, the people turned their cries to the stars instead. Their pleas rippled through the Veil of Night: this time, they were heard by those from whom they had long been sundered.

The Flood

The Moon Serpent was water, wilful and vast, which runs where it pleases. Hearing the cries of mortal creatures and looking upon the dry and barren world which her brother the Sun Serpent had wrought, she took pity upon the Dry World. She defied her brother, even knowing it would be her destruction, and crossed the Veil of Night.

She became incarnate, forsaking her own immortality so that she could bestow the world with the Waters of Life. She was the first to do so, and all the teeming elementals which now inhabit the world would come in her wake. Her pity was not quite kindness, however.

The Moon Serpent brought the oceans with her, ending the Dry World in a cataclysm of surging tides. The First and Second Cities were drowned beneath the waves; their kings perished, or were buried in the deeps along with the Old Powers who did not save them when the apocalypse was nigh.

Many of the mortals who had once cried out to her for salvation also perished in the world-spanning waters - many, but not all. Guided by otherworldly spirits that hearkened to their pleas from beyond the Veil of Night, some few learned to brave the waters. When the waves receded, they would become the islanders. Others, like the merfolk, changed themselves to survive instead. Little of this time is remembered in any record; it is only alluded to in vague and fanciful legends. Of the world that preceded it, there is nothing but a few old rhymes.

Having given all she was, the Moon Serpent left behind her coiled skin in the sky. A vast frigid realm of ice and stone, forever suspended in the space between worlds, it is both her corpse and her mausoleum. It will forever straddle the boundary between the waking world and the otherworlds, a shadow-realm of mirrors and figments, a place of doors and passages.

The Archipelago

The world that survived its parents was not merely our Archipelago; it was a world that was as alive as the Dry World had once been dead. In time, the rift that the Moon Serpent tore in the Veil of Night would be traversed by other spirits, coming to fill the world. Some made the journey in body, entering the world as she had to become mortal and incarnate, and so filling it with strange and magical creatures. Many more came in spirit, inhabiting the world and its living things as the elementals of land and sea.

The last gift the Moon Serpent gave to the world was magic, though it would take many centuries before mortals learned much of its craft. When she pierced the Veil of Night, she changed the Sun Serpent’s hollow word of creation into a song. She left a chorus to which mortals could add their own voices, and a rift by which the infinite possibility of the otherworlds may enter the waking world. Especially by night, and when the Moon is full.

With magic and music, she also gave mortals the power to wreak terrible Dissonance upon the Archipelago. The world was no longer a command pitilessly imposed from above, but a melody willing to be changed by those who call it home - for better or for worse. She bid the mortals to choose their own path and abide by their actions. It remains to be seen whether she erred.