10/15: Myth
((One from @oc-growth-and-development’s prompts. Not Starbound today, you get a sample of something from my original universe~))
Once, when the world was young but not very young, and form was still new to the threads that dreamed it, a man chanced upon a shred of Tales. Not the paltry fireside yarn, or the tragic told to make the crowd weep, but true Story. Perhaps he was even born with it. But that does not matter. He had the words, but no form to guide them, and so he wandered wherever he pleased. He wandered with whomever he pleased, too, and left sweet memories and broken hearts behind him in equal measure.
A snake watched him from her hole in the grass and shook her scaly head, for in those days (as in these), animals were wiser to such things than most mortals are, and she knew what the man had found. “It is too big for him,” she muttered to herself, “this Old Tale. If he just had someone to help…”
And perhaps the Story inspired her too, for she had an idea. She took herself deep into the Mountains, where the world’s youth still lingers even today, bubbling up out of the springs that we dream to be water, dancing over the ground. She drank long and deep from one of the springs and gathered the waters about herself until it became a new form, a comely maid. “Perhaps like this,” she said, “he may listen.”
So she crept back down to where she had seen the man last, and as luck would have it, there he was, fighting the words and fancying the world as ever. She let slip a smile and a girdle, and whispered secrets to him all night long. As the sun rose, so did the snake, and crept back to the mountain where she shed her form like an old skin. She knew the Story drove him too deeply to keep his interest for long. Her form became a strong fields-man next, and this night passed as it had before.
And the man found that the words did not drive him so hard now. Perhaps he could stay another night. And another? Even a third. By day, he found himself thinking in arcs and curves, and the Story tumbled less sharply between them than it had in the open space it held before. And the snake came to him each night in a new form, in all the shapes she could imagine, and shed the old with the sunrise each day until all the moons had passed in their turn and the first came round again. And still she whispered, and sometimes he replied. Often. Ever.
The man caught the snake’s old-crone hand as she rose to leave that last time. A year and a day, they both knew. That was how long such a thing could last. “Stay,” he still asked.
“You know I can’t,” the snake replied, feeling the itch build as the old magic fought to be free, to return to the ground and the pools and the dream. “Please, let me leave.” She dreaded what may happen if she shed her form now, if he saw just a snake in the grass. That was all she was, still, despite the Story she had known. Despite the man who lived it. For Want and Love can only go so far.
But with the skill that only a Bard can bear, he touched her chin, and slid the shape away on his own. He caught her and let the snake twine around his arm. She willed the ground to swallow her until he touched her chin, ran a finger along half-remembered lips. Just the way he had touched her the night before, the first night, so many times between.
“You knew?” she asked.
“From the third. Magic cannot change your eyes.” He carried her down to their fire, and sat, and made breakfast for her for the first time.
As she ate, he carved words in the dirt, arcing forms so like her scaled tail and long forked tongue. The snake marveled at this homage. Then he spoke the forms aloud, and she marveled still more, for he had given Form to the Tale.
“It is nearly done,” he said shyly, as it drew to a close. “But I need a few shapes more to catch it all. And… I would like to tell you, when I am done. A Story is not told until it is shared.”
The snake smiled in that slow way snakes do, in that slow way he had come to love so well. “Perhaps a little more.” And she led him through the grass, through the hills, to the mountain spring. “I can teach you. I can teach them all.”
