#ice!

In the time before the foundation of the Pentapolis, when all cities on Diyar were ruled by their separate kings and monarchs, there lived two siblings*, a boy and a girl.

The girl was henosis-fated and the boy was not, but both were stricken with deep and intense starvations. The boy rebelled against the slightest thing, painting with a brush too dark for a child his age. He Changed all that he saw, sometimes building and sometimes destroying, but never being satisfied with his work. The girl was afflicted with similar starvations. She thrived in court and study, building a deep knowledge and attachment to every person she knew. But with every friend she made, the lonelier she felt. With every secret she learned, the more she found herself in the dark. These were the signs of true and potent Hunger, and the siblings’ guardianship knew they must feed them.

The girl was sent to a shrine on a lonely island to the North to live with a widow much older and deafer than she. She was barred from speaking with others her age, and while the shrine was filled with books, they were written in languages she could never learn and coded so thickly it would take a lifetime to understand. 

By the time the girl left that place, now a woman of twenty-four her thirst for silk and need for pearl were so profound that she could taste the connections between all things and smell the outcome of rolled dice. 

No one knows where the boy was sent nor how long he spent there** but by the time he returned to society his skin radiated a disgusting heat and shined like burnished brass. The ground he walked upon turned to glass beneath his left foot and wood beneath his right. His face was a burnt and shifting mess of flesh that looked at once like your father, your brother, and you.

The two didn’t meet again for a long time, so caught up were they in their new lots in life. The girl returned to her childhood home and ruled as a benevolent and wise matriarch for many years. The boy only returned home once, in the middle of the dry season thirty-five years from his birth. He did not come for reunion, nor did he seek favors. He returned sword-in-hand to deepen the hunger he already felt. He returned to Change.

The ensuing conflict was vague and incomprehensible. The boy became she and the girl became he then both changed back but were someone new. Their hands were tied to blades that should not exist and exchanged 1000 blows in three strikes. 

By the end of things the Silkmoon eclipsed the Nacremoon in the noontime sky, casting the well-trod waste in sickly pearlescent light. The girl was covered in wounds shallowed by probability and riddled with holes in organs that were rewired so that they weren’t needed to keep her alive.

Her foe was covered in scars of cauterized gold and dried blood. His rage smoked off of him in thick clouds that cracked with thunder at their ends. The air around him pounded with the drums of revolution, but his heart beat a different tune. An unpredictable improvised thing that could hardly be called a rhythm.

It was clear to both of them that a fight continued would lead only to mutual oblivion: a Change that suited only one of the opponents. The desperate girl reached inside herself to her unquenched loneliness and impossible naivety and found a solution that could not but must happen. With arms-unreal the girl grabbed the tether that tied the boy to the Sun. It was thick and rough like sailor’s rope, far thicker than her own ties to the moons behind her. With immense effort in an infinite moment she stretched the thing out, thinning the line as far as she could, until the thing was little more than a hair. Then she cut it. 

It is not possible to destroy Connection, but possibility was behind her. So hungry was the girl that she could burn all the coral in the world, altering the chances of a clean cut to the point that impossible became improbable then improbable became inevitable. The resulting cut was a messy thing, as breaks in reality tend to be. The boy at once stopped, keeping a position longer than he had since before his creation. His tether was gone and with it went all possibility of change. He was and is sterility-not-Saline. His unbearable heat changed to an impossible stone-cold. The world froze within him and around him and snow fell for the first and only time on the isle of Diyar.

*In some versions of the tale the two are betrothed, father and daughter, or cousins