(no subject)
Setting: The island of Ligander on the moon Diethon of the planet Centrum. It is a place of sandy beaches and cool rainforest mists, of clear trickling streams leading into aquamarine lagoons and parched volcanic rocks crumbling into volcanic soil. A place almost nobody knows about, and the inhabitants like to keep it that way. When the people of Ligander aren’t frightening intruders away or shooting at outsiders, they do what normal Diethonians do-eat, work, and worship the gods. Ligander is unusual in that the people believe the gods rotate periodically into and out of the position of Head God. Other islands agree that they strongly disagree with this heretical notion, so Ligander needed to learn to avoid religious wars at all times.
Ligander is also unusual in that it is an island of small villages, not of cities. The people of the island are mostly descended from a small group of religious exiles, and Ligandeers rarely take in the people who stumble into its shores. However, each village in Ligander is actually two. Aboveground, the people live in wooden houses with beaded curtains for doorways. Beads are stringed onto long, thin cords; each beaded cord is hung in a row from the top of the doorway. Each type of bead is said to protect from a different kind of demon: the elongated beads protects against sickness demons, spherical beads ward away soul-stealers, et cetera. Although this doorway is very attractive, it does not protect very well against physical enemies. To protect from war and natural disasters, each house has a hidden trap door leading into a vast network of caves underground. The caverns of Ligander have been carved over the years to look less like rough limestone throats full of sharp stalactite and stalagmite teeth, and more like smooth street-tunnels bordering mirror-like pools. Bioluminescent microbes illuminate the cave walls and rooms carved into the rock; when Ligandeers occupy the cavern system, burning torches provide additional light. Various blind fish, mollusks, and crustaceans represent the main form of sustenance for the jaynari underground.
Nice setting. Where are the characters? Maybe there’s a young girl - no, that’s too cliché. Perhaps it’s a woman. An old woman, an old woman who is in her little above-house cleaning obsessively trying to get all the dirt and sweat and stink of tired feet off the wool rug, is being relentlessly bombarded with questions by her granddaughter who has learned to speak relatively recently.
“Granny, why is the sky blue?”
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“Granny, why is the sky blue?”
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“Granny, please pay attention to meeeeeeeee!”
A sigh. “I’m working, but I’ll tell you if it will keep you quiet.”
“I will! I will!”
“Alright. Before Shino poured colors into the sky, the heavens were black as a priestess’ eyes, except for the golden-white sun and the golden-brown centrum. So Shino said to hirself, ‘I will make the sky a color as fiery as the sun, so that they will look warm and beautiful together.’ So Shino flooded the great expanse of sky with burning red and gold light.
“But the people on earth did not like the red sky. The sky’s fiery light made the sun far more scorching than it is now. Plants shriveled in the heat, animals died of thirst, and jaynari struggled to survive. The only gods happy with Shino’s decision other than Shino himself were the fire gods, because the flaming sky increased their power.
“The head priest of the island of Shino prayed to the god of light to change the sky back to its original black, but Shino did not listen. The head priest of the island of Rossz Trefa prayed to the island’s patron goddess to steal the light out of the sky so that the people would not burn to death, but the goddess merely cackled and said, ‘I like the heat that Shino has given us. If you want to change the status quo so badly, why don’t you go do it? I’d be interesting. I’d like to see you try.’ So the head priest sent a young boy from the village to set things right. The boy’s name was Kino.
“The young boy had to get to the top of the sky, but he could not climb the mountains to get there because the burning sky had caught them on fire. He saw several large birds flying around, so Kino climbed up a tree and picked one of the tree’s fruit. ‘Oi, bird! I’ll give you this fruit if you come and talk to me.’ A large silver bird soared above Kino’s head and thought to itself that the young boy would make a nice tasty dinner, and swooped down to grab the boy in its talons. Kino, scared for his life, threw the fruit at the bird to knock it out. Although the fruit missed, it distracted the bird long enough for the young boy to jump on the bird’s back. ‘Get off of me!’ the bird yelled at Kino. ‘How am I supposed to eat you now?’ The boy replied, ‘Oi, bird! I’ll get off of you if you fly me to the top of the sky where the gods live.’ The bird, unable to successfully get the boy off its back, realized it had no choice but to begrudgingly do as told. So the bird flew up to the top of the sky and dropped Kino off on a storm cloud.”
“Granny, this story is boring. Nothing’s happening!”
The grandmother, sighing, continues to violently scrub the rug with lard soap and water. “My dear, these myths are important. Everyone knows them, even those accursed barbarians from other islands know them. I don’t care if you think it’s boring, you have to listen anyways. ”
The little girl pouting and trying her hardest to pretend her grandmother isn’t there, looks down at her ragdolls and wooden animals and plays with them belligerently. She will ignore her grandmother. She will, she will, she will. The story is BORING and nothing can change that, not its being true or important or anything. That just makes it more boring. Her toys are much more interesting than anything her grandmother ever says. So she makes up her own story, where the eagle just eats the boy because eagles aren’t anywhere near as stupid as the one in the myth. Her bird fights a giant jaynari baby named Gogolgamek, a giant baby that eats people and animals and stomps through the city. The bird grabs a giant flying sword and battles with the giant evil baby and stabs it in the eye and wins, but then the dying baby monster grabs the bird and eats it. And then the explosion does…something. That game’s old now, so she picks up her space-whale figurine and has it crash into the centrum (also known as the pillow from her bed) so that it can be a whale priestess who blesses squid. She sees that her grandmother is unhappy with her lack of interest in old myths, but she doesn’t want to listen to rambling on and on about a story where nothing acts like it really does, where eagles talk and are stupid and children get to go on fantastic adventures without their parents pitching a fit or getting killed by wild animals and where trickster gods are too lazy to do any tricksting. Trickstering. Trickstererzing. However it’s said. Anyways, she doesn’t want to listen to the sky myth.
The grandmother continues to wash her rug fastidiously. Frustration with the refusal of the stench and sweat to leave her rug, her new rug that she got only ten days ago, causes her to abuse the rug. Scrub harder, scrub harder, little bits of the rug come off into wet lint and soaking false dustbunnies, why will the smell not leave. She periodically washes her hands in the bucket of water next to her to get the smell of feet and the feel of filth off her hands. She comes much closer to getting it off her hands than off her rug. More frustration. More anger. More violent washing. Scrubscrubscrub.
There’s only so much that the little girl can do with her toys by herself before she wants to do something else. She’d like to go outside, but it’s raining now and her grandmother says she’ll get sick if she leaves the house in such weather. Not only that, if the thunder gets really loud, they’ll have to go underground where there aren’t any trees or waterfalls or stuff. She would ask for a myth about the rain god or why rain clouds are darker than normal ones, but right now she feels like her granny is just bad at telling any story about anyone other than herself. Granny can’t make the Devinelle, Makers of Worlds and Protectors of Diethon, sound vaguely exciting, but she can make an ordinary trip to the market sound like a really smart joke.
“Granny, can you tell me about when you were a little girl?”
“You already asked for one story. You can’t ask for a new story until we finish the old one. Do you want to finish the sky myth?”
“No. ”
The little girl again pouts at this, slouching over and yawning in a charmingly half-faked fashion. “But you’re always so funny when you talk about you being my age! I can’t make anything sound funny when I tell other kids about stuff! I tell them about you and it all comes out bad!” She doesn’t like this. It’s not FAIR. If she doesn’t listen to the stupid myth with the stupid eagles and boring boy who should have been dead already and the stupid gods who definitely aren’t that stupid according to the priests, she won’t get to hear one of Granny’s funny stories ever again? She doesn’t like that idea. Granny’s stories make life life for her, like sunshine and friends and water and food and toys. “Pleeeease, Granny, please tell me the stooooooreeeeeeeeey.” She starts crying tears that are only vaguely crocodilian. Mostly, she’s just terrified of never hearing Granny’s warm, strange, scary, funny stories about the time baby animals ate the house, or her great-aunt found gold coins and bones in a bright pink pirate’s chest in the woods. She’s even scared of never hearing about the Great Flurgle Incident ever again. It’s not fair!
Of course, the grandmother realizes that narratives are like food. Some yarns we want to hear, like the foods that we gulp down greedily because they taste so good. Other tales we do not want to hear, stories that are often either dull and dry or agonizing and terrifying; far too often they are also true. Those are like vegetables, and no child wants to eat them. However, the grandmother doesn’t think this at the moment the little girl begs for a dessert anecdote without any vegetable myth. No, she is still scrubbing away at the rug. What’s this? Still the faint scent of feet lingers? Perhaps she should wash the rug in the town washing-pond… no, it’s raining. How could she forget that? The sky is still overcast and loudly pouring. A loud clash of thunder. LOUDER.
Every Ligander islander knows what to do when thunder sounds so dangerously close to the village. The little girl runs to move a squat table, uncovers the manhole below, then grabs a hooked wand off the table. The grandmother is nowhere near as swift as the girl when they climb down the tunnel, but she is still speedy and nimble for a jaynari her age, her frail feet and hands somehow never failing to grab the rope ladder’s rungs. But just then the old woman slips
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(The little girl worries about what will happen to her granny. She doesn’t always like Granny, because her granny’s a little stricter than other grandparents, but she doesn’t want her granny to die. She never wanted that! She apologizes to all the gods for being mad at her granny, and for calling their myths stupid, and asks them to forgive her and please just let her have her granny if she doesn’t have her granny there are so many stories she will never ever hear from absolutely anyone because some stories only her granny knows and her granny’s special even if she is oddly strict and fusses too much over things like rugs that are only slightly stinky please please gods don’t make me cry PLEASE I WILL PRAY TO YOU and run over please let me save Granny please please she’s old and tiny like old people sometimes are she’s bigger than me but at least let me try to keep her from getting broken on the cave floor like a glass I’ll save you Granny I’m reaching out my hands)
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and her granddaughter catches the fall.
After the girl and the grandmother go through the caves to their little pocket carved into the faintly glowing green cave walls, the little girl hugs her grandmother a million times. She wants to make up to Granny, she needs to make up to Granny. They’re eating cavefish soup for dinner at the stone table in the stone hole in the wall when the little girl asks thinks maybe, maybe, she should listen to the rest of the myth about how the sky became blue.
“Granny, I know it’s kind of late to be asking this, but can you continue the myth you were telling me?”
The grandmother sips her soup and smiles, eyes closed. After swallowing the broth and fish, she opens her mouth. “I was wondering when you’d ask that. Very well then. We left off after the bird flew Kino to the sky and dropped him off on a cloud, correct?”
“Yup.”
“All right. So, Kino went around the cloud looking for the jars of colored light that Shino used to paint the sky. Kino looked everywhere and everywhere for black paint, but Shino had none because black is the color of darkness and shadows, never a color of light. He did not know that. ‘Oi! If I can’t return the color of the sky to what it was before it was painted, I’ll just have to find the coldest color Shino has and splash that over the red and yellow sky-paint.’ So Kino looked around for Shino’s other buckets of paint light. He knew definitely not to use the red paint when he found it. He definitely knew not to use the yellow paint when he found it. He worried that the violet and green paints were also too warm. Then he came across a jar of blue paint. Blue! The color of shadows on untouched mountain snow. The color of deep water in the ocean. The color of freezing, the color of wetness, the color of things that are not sweltering hot. ‘This will put out the sky’s fire!’ So Kino poured the blue light over the red and yellow light until the sky was completely covered in blue except for the sun and centrum.
“Rossz Trefa was so pleased by Kino’s cleverness that she forgot to be angry at him for taking away some of her power. ‘You are so good at these things!’ she said. ‘Especially for a mere human! Let me take you as a disciple. I will teach you everything I know.’ She then told Shino that because her disciple had undone his work, she should be the next head god. When the light god protested that the work of an apprentice cannot be used to take the god-throne away from hir, and poured some red and yellow paint over the pure blue canvas, the trickster goddess stole all the light out of the sky. “I win,” said Rossz Trefa, smirking at the light god. Shino poured the red and yellow light back onto the sky in retaliation, but Kino swiftly poured the blue paint over it.”
“Oh, I get it!” the little girl yelled. “Day, sunset, night, sunrise, day!”
“Exactly. Every morning, Shino slowly and painstakingly paints a red and yellow sky, but Kino paints over it in blue. Shino tries to paint over it again every evening, but Rossz Trefa steals light from the top of the sky and reaches his way to the bottom until it’s completely dark. Because Shino is fighting against two tricksters, he can never come as close to winning as they can. That’s why most of the time it’s either day or night, not sunrise or sunset.”
“Granny, I like the way the story ends. The first parts were boring, though.”
The grandmother laughs. “The beginning is the hardest part to make interesting.”