On the Dragon and the Heartland
The Dragon is the spirit of the Dreaming. Through his Dreaming, he creates the world, and inhabits it as vital force. The Dragon sleeps for thousands of years, and while he sleeps, his spirit is suffused in the rivers and the rain cycle, the ecosystems, and the blood of the animals. His body can be seen in the night sky as a vast river of stars, and where his eye looks, there fate moves. All the spirits of earth and heaven are part of his body.
But there is danger to the Dragon in cutting off his Shadow.
Since his resurrection, the Dragon has forgotten that he once ate Shadows. He must be reminded of this knowledge, for his Shadow has gained agency, and set up a false court. The royal child, Ymer, fell captive in the Black Fort, and there taught herself the art of combusting Shadows, using them as matter for producing Light. The Interloper, too, that traveller from foreign regions, brings stories with forgotten truths, which he learned during his time in the great library of the Dreaming: stories, namely, concerning the ancient Dragon Ammum, who digested Shadows, and out of whom emerged the Skead, who is called Skotomaguch: King of Shadows. The Shadow is the brother of the Dragon, and came from his body.
But Ammum does not remember all his incarnations, for Skotomaguch steals his memory while he sleeps. This is to be expected, since the Shadow's chief power is deception, or the manipulation of ignorance; though by now, its powers include the corruption of the spirits, by which their power is assimilated to its own; and the command of the ghost army it stirred up in Temorast, that legendary city of kurgans in the Silent Land. The ghost army has already swept through the Songlands, desecrating holy sites.
The Dragon had not yet been illuminated when Skotomaguch breached the wall of flame and entered Kheredeth, which is called the Heartland of the Dreaming, the Place of Hope. If he had, that wall would have been impenetrable, since the flames are the very living force of the Dragon's own spirit, in part sequestered by the dark being.
A cruel and bitter winter falls over all the regions of the land of Kheredeth, spreading from the South to the North. It freezes the scrying-pools in the court of the Queen in the East; it blocks up the roads and mountain passes, isolating the King's court in the West. The Land of Hope becomes hostile, arduous, beset with wicked and cruel creatures. And all this while, secretly under the hills of Bethun Doun, a false and parasitic heart is growing and entangling itself in the manner of a noxious weed with the true and authentic heart of the land.
Gilunaum was the god of the Sun, and was long since split in twain, warring against his own shadow, and thus was the royal court sundered in the City of the Sun. The temples of that city were sacked and laid waste, and the lesser gods all fled; even Migothach, the shadow-healer and snake-whisperer, vanished. After the sacking of his temple, Migothach has not yet surfaced; and there lurks on the fringes of the Wilderness, somewhere in hiding, a cunning and enigmatic sorceress, Mauvaine, who bears her terrible weapon of blood-iron, Heartrend, crafted in a far land.
The Dragon, finding his power increasingly ineffectual, confines himself to the only mountain in the North which still repels the ice and snow. Thence he attempts to drive back the ill winter, yet still it spreads. How quickly things may change.
The nature of the Dreaming is ethereal, as a vapor: lands and regions are not connected geographically, but symbolically. Therefore, the winter of Kheredeth has brought into alignment different regions of the great Wilderness on its fringes; namely, winter regions, vast and ancient and terrible; such places as have never seen spring, and never learned nor taught the tenderness that can nourish green leaves.
It is from such a place Mauvaine comes. She intends to do justice with Heartrend, but a hard justice. She believes that a heart, though it gives life, is a vulnerability. Such lands as her own; unchanging, heartless lands; brook no vulnerability whatever. Any life at all in such lands is hard-won, and a true life, and the land itself can never be destroyed, can never die, though it never truly lives. Moreover she knows that, left alone, the parasitic heart will destroy and possess all of Kheredeth. At least if the true heart is destroyed, there is nothing to parasitise, and none may possess the land. It will become a harsh and bitter winter land for all time, never again seeing spring. Kheredeth is better heartless than infected by Shadow; so saith Mauvaine.
As with Migothach, and Gilunaum, and the fathers of the tribes, Mauvaine was called to Kheredeth by a song. But unlike the others, the song that she heard was not of wild, blazing hope, but one of labouring under sickness, of chills and fever, of sluggish blood.
Heartrend, her weapon, was long ago made, and has powers, one may say, both of light and of darkness. The iron from which it was made was drawn from the blood of the many people she has killed: her former captors. For, she hails from a land called Sekerpeth, from among the people of the city of Kieldom, which is called the House of the Sky. There, the people held her long in chains, forgetting that she was older than their Sky-Father. Mauvaine is not her true name, not her oldest name. She comes to Kheredeth in guise of sorceress, but in those high wildernesses in which she wandered, she wore a different guise, and a different name. For she is a goddess, great and terrible, first enslaved and then exiled by her own people. For this reason did she take up their blood, and crafted from it a weapon which became her symbol, so that such circumstances would never befall her again.
And when she heard that song of the Heartland, Kan Kheredeth, she caught, as it were, the scent of suffering prey.
Just as where lies prey thus prone there must lurk a predator, came she in this wise to Kheredeth: in search of the predator, to do justice on him and his prey; but a cruel justice, justice after her own winter-blasted fashion, making use of the blood-sword. She would slay Dragon and Shadow, both, and end all these struggles for good and all. But Mauvaine, even she does not see all. Suffering has made her cold; vengeance, blind. Her morality is zealous and stark, too clearly defined; she must learn humanity again. She as much as the Shadow threatens the miraculous land.
When winter has sufficiently advanced, the Skotomaguch moves his operations from the Black Fortress in the south, northward to the City of the Sun. The Shadow and its agents attempt many times to make the child Ymer to accompany the retinue. But she cannot be moved, sitting in simple childlike joy and wonder, seeming oblivious, yet observing all. So gentle, so small, so soft is she, and yet immovable and obdurate as stone. The Shadow commanded her, tempted her, threatened her, all to no avail. The Shadow attempted to force her, even simply asked her, but Ymer would not be moved. Skotomaguch seemed to have no effect upon her, and the whole Black Court moved north and left the royal child behind. When they had gone, she took herself into the Wilderness beyond the borders, and there cleaved to the company of animals and forest shades, remaining ever on the borders of the Heartland, watching for a sign of her duty to come.
Shortly after Ymer's departure, the Black Fortress collapsed, unnoticed by anyone.
Those denizens who remained in Kheredeth were for the most part underground, but the gods had fled. Yet, like Ymer, Migothach too remained at the fringes of the Wilderness, peering into the shadows, awaiting the day that battle would be joined between the Dragon and his Shadow.