Chapter 15: The Tale of the White Raven and the Green Lion; A Study in Jealousy and its Harmful Repercussions

I suppose that deep down I may have felt some semblance of real mania, though when first my eyes opened in the mist that birthed our kind, nascent as I was, no degree of newness could have convinced me that the bestial thing looking down from within the clear wall would be blind to us perpetually. Generation after generation saw us born again from stone, hardened by cinder as we rose from our mothers' prototypical wombs. There was no end to us, so how could we expect to remain secluded from such vast appetency for long? We should have been grateful for the time we had, and lived in expectation of our culling. Still, I feigned horror when the effigy within the still and standing waters moved on us; the eyes that watched us slowly while we built our cities having grown large while we struggled to armor ourselves with disbelief.

Our undoing was just, then, for were life a precious thing to us, surely we would have walked in fear in the heart of our mountain, wary of what might lie around each corner, within each cavern, or behind each rockwall. And if life were in truth a thing we valued, we would have stayed far away from the cold thing that watched. That we built towers and bastions in the shadow of the mountain's ire, awed by its appearance and so brazen for our own craftiness, we may as well have opened its icy tomb and offered our souls ritually.

I reflected incessantly on the foolishness of my people while I wandered in exile. I'd been driven so far as to pass the ends of the world into mute wastes untouched by radiance, and all my company was the sum of my thoughts and the long, striding shadows of an ilk whose form transcends description. I wanted to be as far from life as I possibly could, so as not to be reminded of seeing so much of it end. Six bodies I'd had in that primeval age, born to different parents each cycle, but always I could spot their emergence, and that of my brothers and sisters, so that in time all of us were kin at one point or another. When the watcher lowered its maw over our heads, a grey shadow came from its throat and I saw the shades that were to bear us through the eons till tartaromachy lifted from the bodies of my many relations. The bodies remained, unreturned to the stone, as the spirits that inhabited them were siphoned into oblivion to feed the strange creature.

I know this, for I ventured back after it had gorged itself and returned to the sheet of ice between our mountain's great pillars. The bodies were still there, undecayed and hollow. Those few who had avoided being consumed had tried in vain to slay themselves out of panic. Over and over they'd be reborn, and dash themselves against a wall, or slit their throats with any sharp thing they could find. Each death drove them further into madness, so that they eventually forgot the fear of finality that impelled them to self destruction at the onset, and they continued simply out of dumb habit. Some had managed to escape the ruin caused by the being's awakening. They'd thrown themselves into deep chasms, smashed beyond recognition upon landing, only to come together again by way of some failsafe of Genesis, so that without the facility of copulation we might still exist. Now and then I would encounter such ones as I sought to hide from any reminder of our ruined kingdom and the nightmare that we tempted into waking. Some would attack me, others would stare vacantly, and some merely sat or stood, facing a wall or pit, or sitting cross legged with their brows between their knees.

I have no knowledge of what brought me to the surface, or when I passed from stone halls and green valleys to the ongoing tundra beyond the firmament. The shroud cast by the great forgelords at Mighty Arun's behest has its bounds, and I wandered along its edges until at long last I found a crack to wriggle through. Then I ventured into empty materium; a void of rock where nameless things roamed with impunity, heedless of the witless vagabond limping towards starvation. In my dreams, which were often come to my open eyes, I saw myself groping along the face of a wall that never ended, stretching on unbroken across horizons and into heights for infinitude. My hands worried over its surface as if there were a hidden door somewhere leading to a final end, where perhaps my spirit would be found by some abyssal traveler who had in its wanderlust learned pity for a broken thing far from home, and would bear me to the place of kindling so that I might be the seed for a second attempt at my kindred's place in the world.

When at last a creature did take notice of me, I knew deeply that I had been taken into the eye of a thing beyond my fathoming. I sensed that were I to dwell on that awareness, I might go irreparably mad, having glimpsed the infinite, the mind of creation itself, so close to Genesis as this being must surely be. I wept when I saw it in materium. The grey winds that filled the empty space between the blank land and the empty sky were parted by a pair of eyes so pale, yet still bright and terrible and unblinking. When I saw that it had awoken anew and followed me to this far, desolate place, a new feeling emerged within me, well beyond fear, so that death was not enough of a protection. I wished to travel backwards along the river and make myself unborn, to never emerge and to be unwrit from the page. Only then could I imagine myself safe.

I tried to scream. I did scream. But what could my small Mortal voice hope to accomplish amid such entities as populated this alien land? The denizens here were of a kind no tale I knew told of. I would not even call them Mighty, for they stood as tall as the clouds and often strode upon nothing. If the Mighty could not understand the meaning of my Mortal speech, then how could it reach the ears of these primordial ettens whose shoulders passed over mountain summits? When my throat was so raw mere breath drew blood, I stood there seized, with no gumpshun to run or hide. It was disgust that filled me then. What was this thing that was only sated by genocide? That it came this far in search of the last soul of a kindred, a tiny thing that could offer it no nourishment, out of what? Spite? What caused this hateful thing to exist? And why was it placed so close to where we were seeded? Were we cursed from sins committed before our inception? Was this beast a mistake? Were we a mistake, and It a corrective instrument of nature? In no curvature of reason could I include this monster within the logic of the world, or the shapes of things to come as are laid out in the annals of instinct.

But while I stood there in anger over the seeming negligence of the Radiant Soul, I received an answer of sorts. The beast lurched forward, struck from behind by some flying creature. Next to the beast it was minute, but it hit with staggering force. It then wheeled over me and hovered there, dreamlike, a storm held still, snowfall glowing with life and wisdom and a hunter's wild providence. My tears shone in the facets of its crystalline pinions, and as it bore me aloft and away, I chanced to see the figure of a man, twenty feet tall and muscled like an aurochs, standing between us and the aberration.

Grand as he was, the man's horned headdress scarcely reached the creature's ankle. But his spear was made of scintillating forces that bent the fabric of the world as he struck, and the wind quaked with every thrust and swing. The beast groaned and blustered, and as the White Raven wheeled about with me in his talons, the great hunter Windaji landed his final blow. Having brought this terrible enemy of life to its knees, he vaulted into the air and plunged his spear two handed into the eye within the being's brow. There and then it was undone, and a great threat was removed from the world. It was then that my faith in Genesis was born in earnest, and as I faded into a deep and healing sleep, I looked forward to being the progenitor of my kindred's rebirth. I found it strange that I, a stone pygmy, would be saved by the hunter. The forgelords are more akin to us, and Windaji to the tusked grassfolk who thrive in a state of constant sojourn. Perhaps Windaji had been sent by the Radiant Soul himself to remove this blemish? As I had no need of understanding, I let the question, along with my fear and pain, flutter to the ground as the White Raven took me softly back through the curtain.

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