The Crow and The Wolf

A long time ago, the skies over Mutatio began to darken, blanketing the land for sixteen long years. This darkness had descended before, according to myth, and only when this darkness fell would the caretakers of the underworld surface, intent upon thievery and despair.

 With the birth of each season, the children of Mutatio would take to the fields with their kites to ask the gods what the coming season would bring to their village. These kites were sewn from the golden hair of Akasha, the goddess of creation, who had bestowed upon the grateful people of Mutatio, this gift. From it, their most skillful artisans wove banners of keen brilliance, and the children used the kites to listen to the heavens, for they alone were able to decipher the language of the winds.

The caretakers of the underworld desperately sought the precious thread from the children, for if they gathered it in sufficient quantities, they would be granted an afterlife and achieve release from their bondage and from their endless, dreary toils. Sensing the imminent danger heralded by the darkening days, the people of Mutatio took action to protect their oracle.

Unwilling to allow their holy kites to be defiled, the entire village gathered in the fields on the final day of light and elected to honor their people and their goddess with the gift of the golden thread to be passed on to the earth. They would sacrifice their lives instead.  Every villager pinched an end of thread and unraveled the kites, and as each ran purposefully in a different direction they wove a vast web from the unspooling banners. They sacrificed their most sacred creations in order to thwart the caretakers from defiling their link to the heavens. Just as the last rays of light faded from the sky and the land sunk slowly into deeper modes of gray, they completed their sorrowful work. They feared the thread to be lost, yet as it sunk into the soil it grew in luminosity, until the ground under their feet shimmered from the brilliance of the web they had woven from the sacred thread.

So it was that in the darkest hour when hope was dimmest, there came to the people of Mutatio a measure of salvation; although their land had entered into an eon of night, and although the link that connected them to their most revered deity had been willfully severed to ward of total despair, the web that they had inadvertently woven beneath the soil shone with light that chased away the oppressive gloom and mantled the land in the glow of a golden dusk. the caretakers, stunned at the light suffusing the very ground in which they crawled, were forced to retreat back into the depths.

The communal work and decisions made by the villagers, and their dedication and appreciation for the kind Akasha, had not only brought them together as a community, but it resulted in the warding off the evil caretakers for years to come.