#skydemon

The folk that live alone way up in the treacherous peaks are said to know. People sometimes make pilgrimages to their mountains, braving the sheer slopes and misty paths to learn the way to knowledge. They bring food and trinkets. Tools fashioned in the white hot forges of the cities. Useful things that would be difficult to make without us. 

Often, the pilgrims are met with stone, but no human face. The wanderers above the sea of fog are closer to Daystar than any of us. It is not unusual for pilgrims to return blind, or not to return at all, having fallen, dazzled, dashing themselves against the lower peaks; a mass grave.

Even here in the city, those of us that have any knowledge of the way will stare into the Sun as the Moon eclipses her and eventually find ourselves mad with the beauty of it. If you’re lucky, she leaves you aching and half blind for a tenday. If you aren’t, the pilgrims know to take you with them to the fog.

Scholars that get caught in the knowledge of the Sun’s gaze, leave erratic manuscripts of devotion and lust behind them that speak of the true way, the true knowledge. But they seem to reach it too quickly and she burns them away from the inside.

Very rarely, one of the folk from the mountains comes down to aid some dayblind sibling or friend from a past life to make the journey. They wear green glass across their kind eyes - perhaps to help them better see their way through the fog? Either no one has asked them or no one remembers their answers. Some of us have taken to wearing green lenses without really knowing their benefit.

The folk are said to be powerful in ways we don’t understand. A gift from Daystar? Sometimes they show their faces to those that make their way up their perilous mountainsides. Those pilgrims that come back whole are subtly changed. There is some ember - given, shared, taken? A sunmark that glows within them, distancing them from the rest of us.

To pick them out from a crowd, one would have to be skilled with flame, and have studied the way. Only then do the sunmarked shine out as though burning with some inner, ever-exploding light.