ChildrenOfAkailea

Children Of Akailea

(as told in "The Nature of Poetry", by Fenmere, the Worm)

I should explain who the Children of Akailea are. You know, for those of you who don’t know.

The story is a little different depending on who tells it, and for some reason BoneJackdaw doesn’t like to talk about it so nobody knows exactly what happened but him. But like I said, Akailea’s Art is motherhood, so for a long time for most of the DragonPeople she’s been kind of like a bossy older sister who makes sure that everything is fair for her siblings and looks after those who need it.

Then, one day, GhostOwl’s arrow pierces this hole in the sky and all these Outsiders start pouring in, rogue spirits. And in order to prevent them from gaining vessels with which to live on this world, JadeCrow sets an edict against bearing children. And for a whole year this works. Except that several species die out. And whenever there is a death, one of the Dragon People becomes stuck between lives. We start inhabiting storms and weather systems, or haunting caves and streams and hills, side by side with the new come Outsiders. This becomes a problem, and there is pressure put upon Jade Crow to figure something out fast. But we trust her, and we hang in there while she schemes and plans and prays to our mother, the GreatOne, TheEarth, for a solution.

AkaileaTheWitch, of course, didn’t deal with this very well at all. And this is where the story gets muddled. Some say that she drank from one of the magic lakes of moon tears, created when the sky was torn. Some say that a crow delivered her a message, telling her to bear children. Some say that she was raped in the middle of the night by an Outsider. Some say it was Bone Jackdaw. In any case, she became pregnant, and when she gave birth, she gave birth to the world as we know it today. Her offspring are apparently part Dragon People and part Outsider, and every time one of them gives birth, they create a new spirit, and when they die they leave, never to be seen again. Populations began to rise steeply, and the age of Humanity began.

There’s a lot more to the story than this, but you already know most of it.

Everything from the beginning of the world to the end of it, and all the fiddly messy bits in between.