On the Origin of Dream's Raven Kink
I've finished a new fic, you can read it also on AO3. Thanks to @tryan-a-bex for beta reading :-).
Dream of the Endless has not always had a raven. Not until he got the raven kink from a cave woman named Lusyjen.
With a story like this, every word is a potential trap for some sort of historical inaccuracy, so, kindly suspend your disbelief and let's go!
"Dream of the Endless always has a raven," Lucienne says, tilting her head, brimming with concern, as I am about to leave for the Waking again, standing on the pier at the sea of dreams and nightmares.
No, not always. You forget. It has been long.
You were the first one and after you, I could not do without a raven.
Only now, I must. It is a fair story that you are trying to tell me, but "Jessamy was the last."
I could not protect her. It is as if a part of me died. Yet another part. If the pain of it will ever pass, I do not know, although I am aware that all memories dull with time, even mine. The bond was... strong. I spent much time looking at the world through her eyes. I know what she would tell me if she was here now and discarded her usual diplomacy. That I should get out more. Use my own eyes. That I do not really need her. But I do. Company is a rare thing. I think you are here for something else, I can still hear Hob's voice in my mind. I am loath to admit it but I do yearn for something, someone. Perhaps I should put more trust in Lucienne, if not in anyone else. Though I am not sure whether I know how. Whether I ever have. She told me she did not feel abandoned when the Dreaming started to crumble and the library was lost to her. But she must have felt... lonely. And yet she remained, even if she could have crossed to the Waking.
I must find a way to make it up to her. Alleviate her burden. Otherwise, there may come a day when everything is too much, even for her.
She does not see my hands tremble as I face away from her and the sea parts before me.
45,000 years ago in what is today mainland Greece (and remember folks, this is the Ice Age).
The nights grow longer; another season of cold and snow is nigh. I know that I will not...would not...last through it. My tribe knows that too. Nobody has said anything, but when we arrive in a deep valley wherein lies a cave that I hold most sacred - and therefore, they do too - we stop. Shelters are built among the trees in front of the cave. We... they...will be here for days after....
I am not afraid. Or am I?
When the preparations are done, four of the men carry me inside, where a fire burns already. I can no longer smell the salt and fish in the air from the sea - the great water that one cannot drink - as I could outside. It is not far. Shadows would lengthen for maybe one ell before one would arrive at its shore. I am fond of the sea though it is also dreadful. They lay me down on a flat stone covered by several layers of fur. Many years ago, my mother and I put paintings on these walls. Ravens and wolves. Facing my father's and brother's red deer and horses painted in red ochre. They are still there, but now I can barely see them. My eyes have weakened to the point of not being able to find herbs in woods and meadows, making me rely on my nose. My remaining teeth are worn out. I can only eat, with difficulty, the most tender meat and berries and mushrooms. My joints are painful and swollen when walking from sunrise to sunset. Hunting is a thing of the past. I have lost half of my hair and I know that there is some foulness in my blood. I have lived much longer than most. Perhaps it is a thing that happens when one has seen too many winters. The cold consumes the soul's strength coursing in one's veins. I am the wise woman of my tribe, a wosa, and yet there is so much I do not know.
I thumb the cave lion teeth hanging from a flax string around my neck. They have as many notches in them as all fingers and toes of two healthy people together. For as long as I can remember, I have been making a notch for every time that the snow melted and birches and oaks sprouted new leaves, heralding the spring and the coming abundance of food. My finger stops on the second notch of the oldest tooth, yellowed by time; that was when I first encountered ravens. Magnificent black birds, their feathers shiny like water flowing over rocks. None of us has seen such as them in the land from which we journeyed, in need of more space and more game. Others of my tribe thought them croaking, but to me, they spoke. Not in words, precisely, but in visions and feelings. Two ravens have been following me ever since. The elders did not believe me. I was too young for such things, they said. A few years later, when I crafted a lightweight spear with an antler tip as I saw it in a vision of other people making it - I observed them as if I was perched on a tree right above them - the elders shook their heads. A child's toy, they said. A spear must be thick and have a stone tip, they said. When I returned to our settlement with a deer so large I could barely carry it, they began paying attention.
A pair of ravens now wait silently outside the cave for my last flight. As usual, they have been given the best meat from this morning's kill in sacrifice. And eyes. They need them for their farsight. I can feel their contentment. They will mourn me but they know that all things must end. As did their predecessors; they are not the first ones. It is only natural and proper. My niece and nephew begin to play their flutes made of mute swan bone. Another notch on the first tooth calls me to touch it. That was the year I first saw the strange man-shaped spirit in my dreams. I have seen him many times after but he never spoke and I never told anyone about him. He would not have approved of that, I felt. But I know that it is he who has been helping me to guide shards of people's souls back to their bodies. It is an easy thing for a soul-part to wander off into the unseen realms after a terror or loss. Not so easy to lead it back where it belongs. I have also been reconciling the malevolent spirits that cause pains and ailments. But that too, has its bounds. I can no longer lure them away from myself.
I open my eyes. The man-shaped spirit stands two steps from the foot of my stone bed as if called by my thoughts. Even though he has never appeared to me outside of the dreamworld, even here, I am the only one who sees him. The others but avoid the space where he is standing. He is nothing like men of the waking world; his face is smooth like a young woman's, skin without a fault, as light as the palest seashell. No one has that, not my kin, not any people I have heard of in the countless trading circles I took part in. And then there are his eyes... I grew accustomed to them and they are kind but the colour is all wrong. Blue as the sea in sunlight. And yet, they are beautiful. He looks sorrowful, more than usual, but even so, the corners of his lips move slightly upwards when he looks at me and nods. I shut my eyes again.
The men of my tribe approach me one by one, touching my arms and shoulders, then fanning out towards the light coming from the cave entrance. The women do the same, only, they take positions in the opposite direction, heading further into the darkness and its heart; there is a passage there, leading down to a cavern with a lake where rocks hang from the roof like the limbs of the sea creatures that have so many of them. The women are to guide my soul into the shadows before it can enter another world, if the Great Mother wills it so. I would perhaps welcome it.
A vision that I have had for a long time bothers me as I have never been able to truly grasp it. Perhaps I will when I join my ancestors. I have been making signs, not only on my lion teeth, but on countless bones, on cave walls, on wood, and in the dirt. To mark the passage of the moon and the sun, to imitate what animal footprints and herb leaves look like and thus capture their essence to persist long after I am dead. But what if there was more than that? A way to keep our songs and the stories that we tell when sitting at the evening fire. The earliest ones I have heard are long gone from my memory. I wish they weren't.
I breathe slowly. I am ready. Almost no one dies like this, without much pain. I am lucky. My chest is heavy and I fall into the warm embrace of sleep.
When I wake, I know that I have left my body, irrevocably. Sitting up, I look around myself. Still in a cave, but it is different. This one has an even higher ceiling and a large opening through which a myriad of stars are shining. At the sides, several fires are burning, each of a different colour. I touch my feet slowly to the ground. Sand. I look to the far end of the cave.
"Welcome in my realm and in my abode, Lusyjen." The pale spirit hasn't opened his mouth, but I can hear his words all the same. His first words to me. "Come closer." He sits in a stone seat, several steps above the floor, black fur with long hair from an animal unknown to me wrapped around his bare shoulders, legs covered with a sort of black-hide leggings, the reason for which I cannot understand as his dwelling is summer-warm. No matter, the ways of otherworldly beings are incomprehensible. They have their own reasons for everything and their moods are volatile. Behind him, gemstone crystals are protruding from the wall, larger and clearer than all the stones that traders have ever brought before me.
I come to stand still at the foot of the steps. What he is, I do not know even now. Not a spirit of forests or rivers. Not of the mountains or the sea. Something larger than that still. Perhaps the Moon himself. The pale guardian of night and sleep, clothed in the colour of raven feathers.
I bow my head as he descends to me. Not knowing how to address him properly, now that he has decided to use words, in my mind, I conjure a vision of wolves honouring the night and the moon with their howls, of the silent wings of night owls, and of children fast asleep in their mothers' arms.
He gently lifts my chin and looks into my eyes. "You may wonder why you are here. It is within my power to offer you residence in the Dreaming and my protection, as you died in your sleep." The Dreaming...that's what he calls this other world then. The whole of it is...his? Observing me with curiosity, he sits upright, hands planted firmly on the sides of his seat. Then he leans slightly leans forward. "In turn, I would ask you to be my messenger and my eyes and ears in the waking world."
"Yrshaya," I say; a word for someone of great esteem and status. "It would be my honour."
One does not refuse a call to serve a being such as him.
"Very well." He smiles in a small, secretive way. Something stirs in my chest... I have never had children but I would offer my protection to him too, however insignificant it may be, as I would protect and care for a young one. He is so thin. Like we sometimes are after a season of poor hunting. "You may choose any form that you like. A woman. A man. An animal. Anything in between. You are no longer bound to mortal flesh."
For a little while, I think about it, but I have no real doubt.
And then, I am much smaller and I have wings. Extending them, I look at my new feathers and try to flap them. They lift me into the air and I land on the nearest thing - the spirit's shoulder - which is also a very good place to be. He angles his head towards me and strokes my back lightly.
This gives me the boldness to ask, "Do you have a name, yrshaya? I should like to know, if I am to serve you."
His voice rumbles at the back of my head and when it does, there is no space for anything else. "Not a name like yours. But. I am known. As. Dream of the Endless. The Prince of Stories. And the Shaper of Forms."
What Endless might be, I cannot grasp. All things must end, and begin, again and again. But I know now that I have always been his creature. It is right. I am skilled at moving in the dreamworld and bringing back stories to tell men and women to heal them. I know the Waking and the seen and unseen paths of people and animals, even though I yearn to learn more.
I cannot resist carding through his hair with my beak and brushing my head softly against his cheek. Sitting down on the steps with a sigh, he lets me.
I have done quite a lot of research for such a short fic, but still, there is probably a lot of bullshit. A good things is that no one who has lived in that time is going to read it, so hopefully, no one will be personally offended :D. Unless we have a paleolithic Hob Gadling among us.
The climate was much colder in the Ice Age than it is today, even in the Mediterranean. Hence the concern with winter.
I do not know where the word wosa came from According to ChatGPT, it's not from any known language, so I hope I haven't stolen it from some work of fiction. If so, please tell me.
I set the story at the beginning of the upper paleolithic transition, which is supposed to be the beginning of 'modern' humanity. It looks like we have started to think in new ways and do lots of new shenanigans. See for example this video by John Vervaeke from cca 00:26:00
The common notion is that women in hunter-gatherer societies did not hunt, just gather, but it’s not that clear anymore. They actually may have.
Regarding blue eyes, that would be shocking at the time. Literally no one had that, the trait started to develop from around 10,000 years ago. Regarding light skin colour, it is my understanding that even in people who migrated to northern regions such as Europe and Asia, at this point, it wouldn't have had time to develop. Dream is supposed to look like to the person who sees him, but I did this to emphasize that Lucienne can see his otherworldliness.
I am horrible, I just had to dress Dream in pre-historic leather pants and some spectacular fur over bare chest and shoulders :-).
The question is, when does Lucienne become the librarian? If it's with the invention of cuneiform, she'll have to wait for quite a bit before her vision comes true...
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