In the beginning was the Void and in the Void was the Serpent.
All that existed rested in the coil of its body, in the glimmer of its scales. Unborn worlds strived to be free from its flesh, but time and again they were crushed beneath the weight of the Serpent's body - squeezed to nothingness before they even had a chance to exist.
The worlds cried out for something to save them, to let them out, to let them be...
But the Void was silent and still.
All aid had to come from within. And come, it did.
At first, the Serpent felt a tickle. And then a gnawing from inside itself. It writhed in pain from an unidentified source, crying and roaring that some part of itself had betrayed it so. And then, in its agony, it sank its teeth into its own flesh and there found some relief in the taste of its own blood.
This was Akel, the Hungry Stomach, awakened by the need of those who had called for it. It became master of the serpent and commander of its fate. From then on, the Serpent could think of nothing else but its hunger. It ate of itself ravenously, devouring its own body and making room in the cosmos for new worlds to grow.
Life bloomed like a flower on a thorny desert plant. The forms it took were strange and beautiful. The colors, beyond any that have ever been seen in this world.
But like that flower - its life delicate and brief before a burning wind rips it from its stalk - so too did the first worlds come to perish.
The Serpent's hunger knew no bounds. Its flesh, the worlds that existed within it and the spirits who inhabited them - all of it slid down its gullet, crying for a mercy that would never come.
And then, the Serpent's jaws sank into its own heart. It gave one last frightened beat and then, ceased.
It was over. All that had ever been was gone. All that had ever lived was dead.
Save for Akel.
Its hunger strained against the boundaries of death, ravenous even as the corpse of its host rotted around it.
And so, the First Serpent came to shed its skin, to free itself of its past life, to eat of itself once again. In its place, Satakal was born. The pattern was set, the destiny of all that existed - to end up in the belly of a beast - immutable.
The surviving spirits watched as their kin were eaten and their worlds destroyed. Those that remained, mourned. Those that were next, accepted their doom.
But one did something different.
His name was Ruptga. His legs were long and his determination, unbreakable. Through careful practice, he learned the method of moving at strange angles, of stepping between the thrusts of Satakal's jaws and escaping unscathed.
This was the Walkabout, the way to freedom from death in a monster's belly. He taught it to all he could. But the way was not an easy one. Many spirits failed and died before he could find his way to them. So he placed stars in the sky to light the way, to guide them home.
Through endless cycles he sired many children and became known in time as Tall Papa. All the while, he placed the stars, guiding as many as he could to safety. His home became a place of wonder and beauty, a resting place after a life of toil. It was called the Far Shores, after the distance it takes to attain it at last.
But over the course of so many cycles, the spirits grew so numerous that he alone could not hope to help them all.
And so, from the detritus of past skins, he formed a helper. This was Sep, the Second Serpent. The Hunger - concentrated, refined in the many skins that formed his body - was still in him. He ate his fingers, his toes, the shoulder of the unfortunate who happened to be standing next to him. No matter how much he ate, he was never satisfied. Much more often than not, he ate the spirit he was sent to help.
But Tall Papa always reached in and pulled them out of him, shaking his head and laughing at the mistake. By the time they were made whole again, the spirit was laughing too.
In these moments, the emptiness inside of Sep gnawed at him worse than ever before.
After many cycles of embarrassment, Sep grew ashamed of standing in Tall Papa's presence and tired of helping others jump from place to place. He hungered for far more than that out of life.
So, out of the skins of past worlds, he created his own.
The land was the dry scales of the serpent, mountain ranges the places where Sep had gotten careless and not smoothed them out enough. The oceans were sweat from Sep's own brow as he worked. The clouds were his breath, the wind, his longing sighs. The deserts are the dandruff he scratched from his brow when he grew tired of his task.
This is why the Alik'r Desert is so vast - he worked so hard to make Hammerfell beautiful that by the time he was nearly finished, he was very, very tired.
And the core which made the whole thing work - which made the world more than a ball of skin and sweat and scales - that was his very own heart.
In joy at his new creation, he bade the spirits to live in his world rather than complete the arduous Walkabout. A great many of them were overjoyed. It was so much simpler to live there rather than spend all their lives jumping from place to place. They sang and danced and the skin-world was filled with music and light and joy.
But then, the spirits began to grow old and die.
Sep's world was a simulacrum. It was too far from the coils of Satakal, too insulated from the forces of destruction and rebirth that underlie all of the cosmos, to attain true life.
They cried to Tall Papa to save them, to pull them from Sep's mouth as he always had before. In his sorrow and anger he struck Sep with a stick, knocking his Hunger out of him. That Hunger, a floppy shadow, a dead skin, stalks the sky still, jealously snapping up the stars.
But what had been done was done. Ruptga could not reach them, nor find a way to unmake the false world that Sep had created. He shook his head and peered down sadly at the stranded spirits, his tall shadow casting darkness over the lands upon which it fell. They might have followed him to safety, had they but chosen the right path over the easy one.
"How shall we live?" they cried out to him from below. "How will we reach the Far Shores from here?"
"You must find other ways." he proclaimed. "It will not be the same, but there is more than one path to immortality."
He turned away for the last time, light returning as his shadow withdrew.
The spirits tried to find ways to live beyond a single mortal lifetime. Some sought everlasting life through fame, through poetry, through magic. Some fought for it in bloody conquest that tore the world in two. Some thought that were they to pay enough in blood or coin, that they might be saved from death. Others chose to accept the end of their lives and to live on through their children or the things they left behind.
But that longing for the Far Shores, for True Life, in all its chaos and beauty - that never ceases. It underlies everything we as mortals do. Horrible things have been done in the name of achieving it and wonders, too.
But whenever you are angry or despairing or afraid or ready to hurt another for harming you, remember this:
All of us - every last being that lives and breathes on Mundus - is just another lost spirit seeking their way home.
*.*.*
Rayya finished her recitation and allowed herself to slouch down lazily by the fire. Msichana! She could hear Iya's voice ringing in her ears, You do not tell stories like that! Back straight, belly sucked in. Only then does the Truth flow through you. A smile flickered across her lips at the thought of the old woman.
She remembered a night long ago, around a fire a thousand miles away. Iya's hands wove pictures in the darkness and her voice kept away the gloom that lurked just beyond the ring of illumination.
She looked at her own hands and wondered if they could ever be that expressive. Had she done well enough tonight? They were built for holding a sword. Their hard-won calluses, their strength, their speed. She wasn't always certain if they were capable of anything else.
An ember popped and the memory melted away. Her gut clenched in momentary terror when the realization that she had an audience came rushing back to her. She squinted through the flickering flames at her, struggling to gauge her reaction, though there was little more than a silhouette to go on. Never before had she told Iya's stories, to anyone at all, let alone an outsider.
All of a sudden, she felt naked - as though she were standing alone in an open field with a bank of archers peering down at her, as though Siddgeir had caught her in the bath, as though-
"Lost." Carolinne mouthed, her voice so faint that it was nearly consumed by the crackle of the flames.
She was silent for what seemed like an eternity. Strange shadows danced on the cavern wall. The wind howled menacingly outside. The hairs prickled on the back of Rayya's neck, waiting.
Carolinne reached up with a shadowed hand and smoothed back a frazzled strand of hair into the bun at the nape of her neck. Naturally, it sprang right back out. She took no notice.
"I've never heard that version before." she called out across the fire, sitting up a little straighter herself. "It's beautiful. You say your…uh…your iya…told it that way?"
"My grandmother." Rayya answered, her heart rate calming down a little at the sound of positive feedback. "I...called her that, at least. Though we were not related by blood."
"Oh."
They sat in silence for a longer duration than was comfortable. Rayya took out her knife and poked at the strips of flesh sizzling on the hot rock before her. Fat puddled out from the meat, sparking dangerously as it splashed on the embers. She skewered a piece and sniffed it. It smelled horribly gamy, though it was difficult to tell whether that was the scent of the lair they were squatting in or the meat of the creature that had once inhabited it.
But it was warm and the taste of fat coated her tongue pleasantly after an entire journey spent dining on hardtack, dried meat and the occasional apple lifted from a farmer's orchard. She scooped the other half of the strips into a bowl for Carolinne and passed it over.
She hesitated for a moment over the meal, sniffing it quizzically and then dug in ravenously, not even pausing to dig out the fork she'd so meticulously carved from a Y-shaped twig on the way there. Grease stained her delicate fingers and dripped down her chin. Her hair, standing out wildly, caught the firelight in odd and frightening ways. As she ate, she made sounds that were not at all unlike the troll they'd taken down not two hours ago.
When she was finished, she produced a lacy handkerchief from her bosom and dabbed at her mouth daintily.
Rayya chewed slowly, a single eyebrow raising in the darkness as she watched. She was unsure of whether she should be terrified or impressed. Hardship did things to nobility. Of that she was certain.
She swallowed the last of the chewy meat with an audible gulp, gave her knife a quick wipe and wrapped the greasy bowls in an oilcloth. She'd wash them tomorrow in the snow, if the storm had let up by then.
When she closed her eyes and leaned against the rocky wall, she could hear the wailing of the wind and the patter of snow outside. But inside, it was warm and comfortable, save for the slight draft from the crack in the ceiling that was their breathing hole. She'd had to clear it twice already. She set her internal clock for an hour from now, in the event that it closed up again.
She made herself comfortable as she laid down, the only barrier against the cold cavern floor, the bearskin that she kept as a travelling bed. Before closing her eyes, she checked to make sure that her scarf was securely fastened over her hair. Sleep came almost instantaneously, the exhaustion that she'd held at bay all day rushing back to her in one large wave.
"Rayya?"
Her voice was so soft and her sleep so deep that she had nearly missed it. Her heavy eyes flicked open and peered at her shadowy companion once more.
Carolinne seemed so small from this distance. Her knees were pulled up to her chest like a child's and her arms hugged herself as though doing so would keep her in one piece.
"Could you…" she whispered, as though she hardly dared to ask. "…tell another story?"
"Carolinne…" she said as sweetly as she possibly could, her tongue heavy with sleep. "Another story is not going to make the night pass any slower."
"Ah...I'm sorry I…"
"But I will tell you another one when we're coming down the 7,000 Steps."
"Oh!"
She closed her eyes and began to drift off again. Figures she hadn't seen in years beckoned from the edges of her consciousness.
"Will you…" Carolinne whispered, from across a great, dark distance, "Tell me of your iya?"
"Of course." she mumbled, unsure if she had spoken it aloud or in dreams.
*.*.*
The morning air smelled fresh and crisp. It took breathing in a lungful of that to realize how wretched the troll's cave truly had been. The snow crunched under her boots and the sky was magnificently clear. Her heartbeat raced with excitement. They were close. She could feel it. There was something different about the air here. It was lighter and colder and thrummed with something more than what there was in the world below. Magic? Energy? Or was this what she got when she spent a night fighting to breathe in a smoky cave?
Carolinne stumbled out of the cave like a drunken woman. Her eyes were red-rimmed and deep bags sagged under them. Her gown looked far worse in daylight. At one point, before she had met her, it had presumably been a fine piece of work. She could almost imagine what it had looked like, from the outlines of what was left. A deep green velvet, with a plunging neckline and a graceful girdle (now missing, but she couldn't help thinking that there had been one). The hem was trimmed with gold thread that still glinted when she moved in the light, though the bottom was frayed and filthy.
She squinted in the light, cracked her back and stretched as she yawned. When she opened her eyes, she seemed a bit more composed.
There was a look of overwhelming guilt on her face.
"Uh…" she mumbled, scratching the back of her head. More hairs were dislodged from the knot of her bun. "I...er…"
She put a hand over her mouth and breathed in through her nose for a few seconds.
"There's something I haven't told you. Or Dengeir. I...was afraid. And I didn't know how to handle it. To be perfectly honest, I still don't."
"Hey." Rayya said gently, putting a hand on her back. "Your secrets are yours alone. You're not obligated to tell anyone."
She breathed out. She looked ten times as tired as Rayya felt.
"Okay. That's...what we're here for, isn't it?"
"So they say."
Rayya packed up the last of their things and gave the dinner utensils a quick wash in the snow. Carolinne gnawed on a half-frozen wedge of cheese, staring wistfully into the distance.
"Rayya." she said softly, a quaver in her voice as she peered up the snow-covered steps stretching, it seemed, endlessly before them. "You'll come inside with me, won't you?"
Rayya's heart skipped a beat as she turned around and looked at her. There was something still of queenly bearing in her, despite her degradation, despite the stains on her clothes, the red windburn on her pale skin. She held her head as though the world was made to kneel at her feet. And for a moment, Rayya thought that it might.
Rayya smiled to herself and hefted the pack onto her back.
"I will not leave your side once."
The spell broke as Carolinne turned around, flashing her a weak grin and thereby revealing a hunk of meat stuck between her two front teeth. Rayya ran her tongue over her own teeth surreptitiously, hoping to get the message across. With an embarrassed gasp, she pulled the handkerchief from her bosom and fixed the problem.
When she was done, she held out her mittened hand. They linked arms and slowly, the cold nipping at their noses and biting at their cheeks, set off along the last stretch to High Hrothgar.
Notes:
- "Ugo-no" is Yoku for "Far Away From" and "Nyumbani" is Swahili for "Home."
- Retelling "The Worldskin" was the absolute hardest part of the entire fic. I must've gone back and forth on it for a month before I finally figured out how I wanted to go about it. I'm...mooooostly happy with it?
- This story got about 10k longer than I planned on. =B Enjoy!