Poetry Monday

My first book, which is sitting, lost in a slush pile, is a fantasy full of magic and pirates and mad gods and adventure, and while working on it as well as the beginning of the second book, I started working on more of the back story. I also started writing the myths and legends that frame the world view of these people. Here is one of them. I hope you enjoy it.

In the beginning came words: Names. People names, place names, thing names. Names for the animals and plants the people knew and saw and discovered. But the people remembered the elements. Some people remembered the earth that formed them and they named the trees and the grasses and the animals of the plains. Others remembered the water that shaped them and they named the fish in the seas, the shape the water took as it flowed down the mountains and over the plains and into the endless sea. Those that remembered the air that inspired them named the birds that flew and the plants that grew in the high places. Those that remembered the spark that lived in their hearts gave names to those creatures that lived in and around fire, as well as the emotions given to them by their own spark.

The names they gave the plants and animals around them also shaped the thoughts of the first people, and this made some people nervous, particularly those who did not have the drive to name or to explore or to discover. Life was as close to perfect as it could get in those days, people still disagreed but there was no enmity or hatred or violence.

And those days would come crashing to an end.

Toba, son of Nami and Maré, was insanely jealous of the people, and of anything that stole Maré’s attention from him, for he thought that she should be all his. She, of course, did not agree with him and insisted on paying attention to her mate (Nami), her other children (Eala, Shala, and Inish: Toba’s brother and sisters), as well as those people she and Nami had created. Toba got so jealous that he blew his top, and his temper tantrum caused a volcano in the southern sea to obliterate itself. Smoke and ash were blown into the atmosphere so far and wide that the sky looked like flames, the stars were blotted out at night, and for the first time the people felt the breath of frost on the air.

Time past, the moon waxed and waned, but the breath of frost never left, instead it got colder and colder. Snow fell, the rivers and streams froze, and the people learned to built huts, and smoke fish, and build small fires to warm those huts. The snow continued to fall until, when the spring came, in the high places of their world the snow did not melt, but changed. As the snow continued to fall, the snow became ice, became glacier, until rivers of ice inched their way down from the high places, gouging the land as they passed.

Nami and Maré knew that if their people were to survive, they would have to separate: that they were too numerous for one area of land to support. They divided their people into twelve groups and led them off to their own patches of ice-free land. Travel was hard between these groups, but the adventurous, the discoverers, the explorers, and the descendants of those who had named the things and people in their world made the trips and kept the twelve tribes aware of each other and passed news. They also brought youngsters from one tribe to another, allowing the children of the different tribes to meet and marry, promoting peace between the tribes and preventing inbreeding.

Those who traveled between the tribes also remembered the elements: those who remembered the earth that nourished them, they became the scholars and historians, writing of what life was like before the snows fell and why it started; those who remembered the water became the navigators who led them safely over the rivers of ice to the other tribes; those who remembered the air learned to send their thoughts to others; and those whose hearts remembered the fires that warmed them all became the poets, the storytellers.

The Bards.