THE CHRONICLES OF ORION’S HEART
BOOK ONE: THE CRIMSON TEACHINGS
Chapter One: When Gods Still Checked Their Messages
Long ago, in that golden age when the cosmos was young and gods still bothered to check in on humanity’s progress reports—filing them under “Works in Progress (Indefinite)”—the Red Star of Sirius burned at the very heart of the Constellation of Orion. It throbbed there like a cosmic valentine, pulsing with such intensity that even the most oblivious of our knuckle-dragging ancestors couldn’t help but notice.
The star didn’t just shine. It commanded. It insisted. It dared our forebears to stop their endless grunting at dirt, to cease their fascination with their own excrement, to look up for once in their brief, brutish lives.
And look up they did—necks craned at awkward angles that would cause modern chiropractors to weep, jaws slack with wonder, probably drooling (let’s be honest, they drooled at everything), because that blazing red beacon was quite literally the most interesting thing that had happened since someone discovered fire and immediately tried to eat it.
The night sky in those days was different than it is now. Clearer, for one thing—no light pollution, no smog, no atmospheric shame. The stars were so bright you could read by them, if reading had been invented, which it hadn’t, because most people were still working on the revolutionary concept of “having opposable thumbs.”
But that red star—Sirius, though they didn’t call it that yet—dominated everything. It sat in Orion’s chest like a burning coal, like the heart of a forge, like the eye of some cosmic beast watching humanity’s first stumbling steps toward consciousness.
Chapter Two: The Patient Teacher
Orion himself took pity on these upright apes. He was, by all accounts, a patient teacher, though records suggest he was also slightly exasperated by the whole affair. Imagine trying to teach calculus to goldfish, except the goldfish occasionally try to eat each other and have no concept of numerical systems. That was roughly Orion’s pedagogical challenge.
His first lesson was deceptively simple: stand up properly.
Not the hunched shuffle they’d been doing, that semi-crouch that made them look like quotation marks with anxiety. No, he wanted actual vertical posture—spines straight, shoulders back, chests out, heads held high. “Pretend you have dignity,” he seemed to say from his celestial platform, his voice carrying across the void like distant thunder. “Pretend you’re not just clever monkeys who learned to walk. Pretend you’re worth the carbon you’re made of.”
This was harder than it sounds. Early humans had spent millennia perfecting their crouch. It was comfortable, in a way. It kept them close to the ground, ready to flee or fight or frantically dig for tubers. Standing fully upright felt vulnerable. It felt like announcing yourself to every predator within visual range: “Hello! I’m here! I’m soft and meaty and I can’t run very fast!”
But Orion insisted, and after a few generations of practice and several broken backs from people who tried to transition too quickly, humanity got the hang of it. They stood upright, and suddenly the world looked different. The horizon expanded. The stars seemed closer. Their hands were free to do things other than locomotion.
It was revolutionary. It was terrifying. It was the beginning of everything that would follow.
Chapter Three: The Arsenal of the Upright
Once humanity had mastered the basic concept of “standing like you mean it,” Orion moved on to weapons training. This was where things got interesting, and by interesting, I mean violent in ways both creative and necessary.
First came the club—that elegant solution to the problem of “things I need to hit but don’t want to touch.” Orion demonstrated the proper grip: fingers wrapped firmly around the shaft, thumb opposing (thank you, Ba, the blessed thumb), wrist locked to transfer maximum force from shoulder through arm through hand through wood through skull. The club went in the hitting hand, which for most people was the right hand, though Orion graciously acknowledged that some warriors were left-handed and the universe would not explode if they held their clubs accordingly.
Then came the shield—the not-getting-hit implement, which was arguably even more important than the hitting implement. Orion showed them the proper stance: shield arm extended, angled to deflect rather than absorb, weight distributed to avoid being knocked backward like a turtle on its shell. The shield was held in the non-hitting hand, which required a level of bilateral coordination that many early humans simply didn’t possess.
There were accidents. Many accidents. Some people hit themselves with their own clubs. Others blocked their own vision with their shields and walked into trees. One particularly unfortunate individual tried to hold the shield backward and received an arrow to the face during target practice—a lesson everyone else learned from immediately.
But gradually, painfully, with casualties that would have shut down any modern training program permanently, humanity learned to hold a club and shield simultaneously. They learned weight distribution. They learned the dance of offense and defense, the rhythm of strike and block, the geometric poetry of combat.
Chapter Four: The Revolution of the Bow
If the club and shield were revolutionary, the bow and arrow were nothing short of witchcraft.
The concept alone seemed impossible: take a stick, bend it with string, use it to throw smaller sticks with sharp ends really fast at things far away. It violated every principle of common sense. Sticks don’t bend like that. String doesn’t hold that much tension. And how in the name of all the gods were you supposed to aim the thing?
Orion demonstrated with the patience of someone who had literally all the time in the world. He showed them how to select wood that would bend without breaking, how to string it with sinew or plant fiber, how to create the tension that would transform potential energy into kinetic death.
Then came the arrow itself—a small masterpiece of engineering. Straight shaft (harder to find than you’d think). Fletching from feathers (requiring someone to catch birds, which was its own whole thing). Sharp point (requiring either very hard wood or the revolutionary discovery of stone knapping). The arrow had to be balanced, weighted properly, true in its flight, or it would tumble through the air like a drunk moth and accomplish nothing.
But the real genius, the innovation that separated competent archers from master archers, was this: Orion taught them how to hold multiple arrows in one hand while drawing the bow.
Picture it: you’ve nocked your arrow, drawn the string back to your cheek, you’re sighting down the shaft at your target. But in that same hand gripping the bow, between your fingers, you’re holding three or four additional arrows, ready to be nocked in rapid succession. It was humanity’s first multitasking exercise, requiring hand strength, finger independence, and the kind of spatial awareness that most people used exclusively for not walking off cliffs.
The learning curve was steep and bloody. People shot themselves. People shot their friends. One legendary fool managed to shoot himself and two friends with a single misfired arrow, a feat of incompetence so spectacular that it became the basis for several cautionary tales.
But those who mastered it—oh, they became deadly. Rapid-fire archers who could put six arrows in the air before the first one landed. Hunters who could take down entire herds before they scattered. Warriors who could stand their ground against charging enemies and turn them into pincushions before they closed half the distance.
Chapter Five: The Blade and the Sheath
The knife was older than Orion’s teaching—humans had been using sharp things since before they were fully human. But Orion introduced something that would save countless lives and prevent innumerable embarrassing injuries: the sheath.
Before the sheath, people carried knives by… well, carrying them. In their hands mostly. Sometimes tucked into primitive belts, blade exposed, cutting into everything including the carrier. The number of accidental castrations, severed fingers, and sliced thighs was astronomical and deeply preventable.
Orion’s sheath was a revolution in personal safety equipment. A leather or bark container that held the knife blade-first, protecting both the blade and everything around it. It hung from the waist on a belt, positioned for quick access but secure enough not to stab you every time you sat down, bent over, or breathed wrong.
The first sheaths were crude—barely functional tubes that fell apart after a week. But craftsmen refined them, added retention straps, developed the quick-release that allowed a warrior to draw the knife in one smooth motion. The sheath became as important as the knife itself, and a man’s sheath often said more about him than the blade it held.
Some decorated theirs elaborately, with carvings and dyes and attached fetishes. Others kept them plain and functional, valuing speed over aesthetics. There were sheaths for fighting knives, sheaths for eating knives, sheaths for ceremonial blades that never saw actual use but looked impressive during festivals.
And critically—critically—the sheath meant you could carry a blade on your hip without the constant, gnawing fear that you might accidentally render yourself incapable of continuing your genetic line.
This was not a small thing.
Chapter Six: The Orionid Rain of Stones
The Orionid meteor showers were annual celestial events that early humans interpreted as Orion hurling stones across the heavens. And in a fit of inspired mimicry, they decided to learn stone-throwing during these cosmic displays—turning astronomy into athletic training.
The technique Orion taught was specific and surprisingly sophisticated. It wasn’t just chucking rocks randomly and hoping they hit something. It was about trajectory, about understanding arc and gravity, about reading distance and adjusting force accordingly.
There was the underhand lob for short distances, conserving energy while maintaining accuracy. The sidearm throw for medium range, using hip rotation and shoulder snap to generate power. And the overhead hurl for maximum distance, requiring full-body coordination—legs, hips, core, shoulders, arm, wrist, fingers all working in sequence like a complex machine with flesh components.
They practiced during the Orionid showers, using the falling stars as moving targets, imagining they were throwing stones at the meteors, with the meteors, becoming the meteors in some mystical union of earthly and celestial violence.
The best stone-throwers could hit birds mid-flight, crack skulls at fifty paces, bring down small game without arrows. They developed calluses on their throwing hands, built asymmetric muscle development that made them look slightly lopsided, and gained a reputation as warriors not to be trifled with—because who needs a sword when you can kill someone with a rock from across the battlefield?
Slings came later, amplifying the power of stone-throwing to truly terrifying levels. But the fundamental skill—the ability to pick up a rock and make it go there, fast and hard—came directly from Orion’s teaching during those meteor showers when the sky itself seemed to endorse the practice.
Chapter Seven: The Ducking Doctrine
Perhaps Orion’s most important tactical lesson was also his simplest: when Mars comes overhead, duck.
Mars, that belligerent red bastard, wheeled through the sky like a drunk looking for a fight, and every twenty-five months or so, he’d line up with Orion in a configuration that ancient astronomers learned to dread. Mars would appear to strike Orion directly in the head—a celestial sucker punch that seemed to herald disaster on Earth.
Orion’s response? Duck. Just… get out of the way. Don’t be where the violence is. Don’t engage with aggressive stupidity. Let Mars swing at empty air while you preserve yourself for fights that actually matter.
This lesson extended far beyond astronomy. It became a philosophy of conflict avoidance. If someone is spoiling for a fight and you don’t need to engage, don’t. If violence is coming your way and you can sidestep it without cowardice, do. If the universe is throwing red-hot death in your direction and there’s no glory in standing still, move.
The warriors who learned this lived longer. The tribes who practiced it preserved their strength for battles that mattered. The philosophy of the duck became as important as the art of the strike.
There were, of course, times when ducking wasn’t an option—when duty or honor or simple survival required standing ground and facing Mars head-on. Orion understood this. He himself fought when he had to. But the key was that he chose his battles rather than accepting every challenge the cosmos threw at him.
“Save your blood for occasions worthy of bleeding,” was how one elder phrased it. “Die if you must, but die for something worth death, not because you were too proud to move your feet.”
Chapter Eight: The Taurus Maneuver
Orion’s finest tactical instruction—the one that required not just physical skill but actual thinking—was the Taurus Maneuver: how to face a charging bull without becoming beef paste.
Bulls, in case you haven’t had the displeasure, are large, angry, and surprisingly fast for their size. When a half-ton of muscle and horn and pure bovine rage comes at you with murder in its eyes, the natural human response is to freeze, scream, or flee. All three responses usually end with severe trampling.
Orion taught a different way: the circle, the square-off, the geometric dance of survival.
As the bull charges, you move laterally, not backward. Backward means running, and you can’t outrun a bull. Lateral movement forces the bull to adjust its trajectory, and bulls—despite their many terrifying qualities—are not great at tight turns. Their mass carries them forward, and changing direction requires slowing down, which means you’ve bought yourself seconds.
You circle around the bull, maintaining distance but not fleeing. You square off—shoulders toward the beast, presenting yourself as a threat rather than prey. Bulls respect threats. They’re uncertain about things that don’t run.
You watch the head, the horns, the eyes. You anticipate the next charge before it happens. You use terrain—trees, rocks, ditches—to your advantage. You stay light on your feet, ready to pivot, ready to move, turning the fight into a bullfight, though the term wouldn’t be invented for millennia.
The best practitioners could tire a bull out, running it in circles until it gave up or collapsed. Others used the maneuver to position themselves for a killing strike—club to the skull, spear to the side, knife to the throat when the beast finally stumbled.
It was thinking-man’s violence, strategic brutality, the kind of knowledge that separated those who eat beef from those who become beef. And it all came from Orion, who understood that sometimes the difference between life and death is just knowing which direction to step.
Chapter Nine: The Sacred Names of Fingers
All of this occurred in the ancient age when humans still knew the sacred names of their own fingers—a time of such intimacy with one’s body that it borders on the mystical today. We’ve lost this knowledge, relegated fingers to numbered insignificance, but our ancestors knew better.
They understood that fingers were not just tools but beings, each with its own character, its own purpose, its own sacred name passed down through generations.
First and most important was Ba, the thumb. The opposer. The rebel. The one who said “no” to the universe by positioning himself against the other four fingers.
Ba was the most useful digit, and everyone knew it. Without Ba, you couldn’t grip anything properly. You couldn’t hold a club, draw a bow, wield a knife, grasp a child, or pick up food. You were functionally crippled, reduced to slapping at the world with a useless paddle of four fingers that couldn’t work together.
Ba taught humanity opposition—not just physical opposition of thumb against fingers, but philosophical opposition. The ability to say “no.” The capacity to resist. The power to grip what you wanted and refuse to let go.
When you touched your thumb to each finger in sequence, you were performing a sacred litany, a prayer made flesh: Ba to Ma, Ba to Am, Ba to Baam, Ba to Maab. The opposer touching each of his brothers, creating different grips, different holds, different ways of interfacing with reality.
Ba was the beginning of everything that made us human.
Chapter Ten: Ma, the Pointer of Danger
Second came Ma, the index finger, the pointer-outer, the indicator, the one who showed the way—usually toward danger.
Ma was the scout, the warner, the tattletale of the hand. When something needed attention, Ma extended himself forward while his brothers curled back in protective reservation. “Look there,” Ma said. “Trouble ahead. Predator at three o’clock. Food in that direction. Stranger approaching.”
Ma was second-most useful, which was a respectable position but also a source of mild resentment. He could never quite match Ba’s versatility, never quite achieve the thumb’s revolutionary importance. But Ma had his own gifts.
He could point, which the thumb could not do properly. He could press buttons (when buttons were invented). He could pick at small things, probe wounds, test temperatures, explore cavities—tasks that required precision rather than power.
In combat, Ma helped aim the bow, positioning the arrow, sighting down the shaft. In conversation, Ma emphasized points, stabbed at air to punctuate arguments, drew diagrams in dirt to explain complex ideas.
And Ma carried warnings. When Ma pointed at you specifically, singling you out from a group, it usually meant trouble. Accusations came from Ma. Indictments came from Ma. The “YOU, yes YOU” of social judgment was delivered via Ma’s extended judgment.
Children learned early to respect Ma’s authority. When Ma pointed at danger, you looked. When Ma pointed at food, you approached. When Ma pointed at you, you examined your conscience and prepared to explain yourself.
Chapter Eleven: Am, the People’s Finger
Next came Am, the middle finger, representing life-forms and people, and yes—that middle finger, the one with the rude reputation, though in ancient times its meaning was far more profound.
Am was the punch finger, the power finger, the one that lined up perfectly with the arm bone when you made a proper fist. When you threw your best punch—dogs and loyal companions at your side, family at your back, righteous fury in your heart—Am led the way, his knuckle positioned to deliver maximum impact.
“Am” meant life-forms, meant people, meant the collective force of humanity standing together. When you punched someone, you weren’t just hitting them with one finger—you were hitting them with all of yourself, channeled through Am’s alignment with your arm’s true axis of power.
The fist was a technological marvel when you think about it. Four fingers curled inward, thumb wrapped around the outside for stability, wrist locked, Am’s knuckle forming the primary impact point. It was a biological club, a meat hammer, proof that evolution occasionally got things spectacularly right.
But Am was more than just a weapon. Am represented unity—the way individual fingers came together to form something greater than their sum. Alone, fingers were weak. Together, formed into Am’s fist, they could break bones, shatter wood, cave in skulls.
“Am” in the ancient tongue meant “I am,” the declaration of existence, the assertion of self. And when you made a fist, you were making exactly that declaration: I am here. I am solid. I am real. I will not be ignored.
Later cultures would use Am for crude gestures, reducing its sacred significance to mere vulgarity. But those who remembered the old ways knew better. Am was the people’s finger, the community’s knuckle, the aligned power of humanity itself.
Chapter Twelve: Baam, the Nuclear Family Tree
Fourth was Baam or Baum, the ring finger, the nuclear family tree, the binding digit, the one that connected you to your lineage and legacy.
Baam was special in ways that weren’t immediately obvious. He was the weakest finger—try lifting Baam without also lifting Am or Maab, it’s nearly impossible. The tendons were shared, the muscles interconnected, as if Baam was never meant to act alone but always in concert with his brothers.
This weakness was actually his strength. Baam represented family, and family meant interdependence, mutual support, the impossibility of true independence. You couldn’t separate Baam from Am without losing functionality, just as you couldn’t separate yourself from your family without losing part of your identity.
Baam wore the ring, when rings were invented. The circle of metal or bone or woven grass that declared your commitment to another person, your willingness to bind yourself permanently to another’s fate. The ring went on Baam specifically because of his dependent nature—choosing partnership was like choosing to honor Baam’s interdependence.
“Baam” or “Baum” meant tree, specifically the family tree, the nuclear unit of parents and children growing together, branches from a common trunk. When you traced your lineage, you traced it through Baam, following the rings of connection backward through generations.
Some cultures developed elaborate Baam ceremonies—rituals of binding, declarations of family ties, celebrations of new growth on the family tree. To touch Baams with another person was to acknowledge kinship, to declare alliance, to say “your family and mine are branches of the same human forest.”
Chapter Thirteen: Maab, the Mob
Finally came Maab, the pinky, the mob, the little finger that only reached full growth in fully grown men, extending the family tree in the opposite direction from Baam—toward the collective, the gang, the tribe, the strength in numbers.
Maab was small but fierce. Underestimate the pinky at your peril—it provided stability to the hand, balance to the grip, and surprising strength when properly employed. Try holding a club without your pinky sometime; the whole thing feels unstable, likely to twist out of your grasp.
“Maab” meant mob, meant crowd, meant the group beyond your immediate family. Where Baam was your nuclear tree growing upward, Maab was your extended network growing outward. Your tribe. Your village. Your people in the broadest sense.
The pinky proved that size wasn’t everything. Maab was the smallest finger but represented the largest group. He was the individual extending toward the collective, the one voice joining the chorus, the single person finding strength in numbers.
In many warrior cultures, the pinky swear—linking Maabs with another person—was considered more binding than any written contract. You swore on Maab when you meant it, when you were pledging not just yourself but your entire mob to a cause. Breaking a pinky swear meant not just personal dishonor but betraying everyone connected to you.
Maab also developed a strange reputation in some cultures as the “truth-telling finger,” the one that couldn’t lie. When accused of falsehood, you’d extend Maab—just Maab, all other fingers curled—and swear on your mob’s honor. If you lied with Maab extended, you cursed not just yourself but everyone you belonged to.
As boys grew into men, mothers would watch their hands, waiting for Maab to reach his full extension. It was a sign of maturity, of readiness to join the mob, of transformation from child protected by family into man protecting the family. The day your Maab finished growing was the day you became fully human in the social sense.
Together, these five—Ba, Ma, Am, Baam, and Maab—formed the complete human hand, the tool that built civilization, the weapon that defended it, the symbol that embodied humanity’s journey from solitary apes to coordinated societies.
BOOK TWO: THE AGE OF SOUP AND SPOONS
Chapter Fourteen: The Dawn of Cooking
Armed with Orion’s teachings and intimately acquainted with their own hands, humanity graduated to their next great challenge: cooking. And here’s where things got complicated in ways that had nothing to do with predators or enemies and everything to do with their own stomachs.
The discovery of cooking had happened somewhat earlier—probably when some unfortunate soul’s shelter burned down with their dinner inside and they discovered that the charred remains tasted surprisingly good. But controlledcooking, intentional cooking, cooking as a practice rather than an accident—that required serious development.
Fire was easy enough to maintain once you had it. The trick was knowing what to do with it. Raw meat had sustained humanity for countless generations, but it came with problems: parasites, disease, the occasional bout of violent illness that wiped out entire families.
Then there was the texture issue. Raw meat was chewy, gristly, difficult to tear with primitive teeth. It took forever to eat and wasn’t particularly pleasant. Some cuts were better than others, but even the best required serious jaw strength and patience.
Early experiments in cooking were haphazard. People held meat directly in flames and got mostly charcoal. They placed it too far from heat and got mostly raw. They left it too long and got dry, tough, inedible leather. They didn’t leave it long enough and got sick anyway.
But gradually—painfully, with many ruined meals and upset stomachs—they learned the sweet spot. The distance from flame that cooked without burning. The duration that transformed texture without destroying it. The techniques that made meat tender, safe, delicious.
Chapter Fifteen: The Problem of Red
During this culinary evolution, they discovered something disturbing about the color red.
Red meat—raw, bleeding, dripping red—made the elders upset. Not mildly uncomfortable. Not slightly queasy. Genuinely, deeply, viscerally upset in ways they struggled to articulate.
It took a while to figure out why. The younger hunters didn’t understand the problem. Red was just a color. Blood was just blood. What was the issue?
But the elders remembered. They remembered watching Mars, that red menace in the night sky, occasionally align with Orion in configurations that preceded disasters. They remembered the red of bleeding wounds, the red of fever dreams, the red of fires that consumed homes.
Red meant danger. Red meant blood loss. Red meant death.
And Mars—oh, Mars was red, aggressively red, the reddest thing in the heavens. Every twenty-five months, Mars would grow brighter and closer, his red eye glaring down at humanity like an angry god. And sometimes, from Earth’s perspective, Mars appeared to smash directly into Orion’s head, a celestial assault that seemed to herald catastrophe.
The elders had lived through enough Mars approaches to develop what we might call PTSD. The color red triggered something primal in them, activated old fears, reminded them of times when the red star had grown close and bad things had followed.
So when they looked at raw, red meat, they didn’t just see dinner. They saw Mars. They saw danger. They saw the universe’s violence made manifest in food form.
It wasn’t logical. It wasn’t fair. But trauma rarely is either of those things.
Chapter Sixteen: Supit’s Innovation
The elders, being elders, preferred not to be serious whenever cosmically possible. Seriousness was exhausting. They’d already lived through enough cosmic trauma, enough genuine terror, enough brush with extinction. If they could avoid taking things seriously, they would.
One particular elder, the elf lord Supit (whose name would echo through culinary history in ways she could never imagine), made a breakthrough discovery that helped manage the red-meat anxiety: if you clapped when you saw red, it somehow eased the burden on the heart.
It sounds absurd. It probably was absurd. But it worked.
The physical action of clapping—hands coming together rhythmically, creating sound and sensation—interrupted the fear response. It gave the brain something else to focus on, transformed dread into rhythm, turned anxiety into a kind of applause. It was primitive cognitive behavioral therapy, discovered purely by accident when Supit saw some red berries and spontaneously clapped in alarm, then realized she felt better afterward.
She taught this technique to others. When you see red, clap. Don’t think about Mars. Don’t spiral into fear. Just clap. Interrupt the circuit. Reset the system.
It became a tradition. Red sunset? Clap. Red flowers? Clap. Red meat? Clap first, then cook it, then eat it. The clapping helped. Not completely, not perfectly, but enough.
By this time, something interesting was happening in the heavens. Orion’s Sirius heart had shifted in color—no longer the alarming red that mirrored Mars, but a gentler purple, as if the cosmos itself was trying to calm everyone down, saying “See? Not everything red stays red. Change is possible. Relax.”
The purple heart of Orion became a sign of hope, a visual promise that Mars’s influence wasn’t permanent, that the universe contained forces of transformation and healing.
Chapter Seventeen: Elva’s Discovery
Another elder, Elva, made an equally revolutionary discovery through direct experimentation and a healthy disregard for tradition: if you cooked red meat until it wasn’t red anymore, you lived longer.
This seems obvious now. We understand bacteria and parasites and food safety. But for ancient humans, it was a radical insight that contradicted instinct. Raw meat was what predators ate. Raw meat was natural. Raw meat was how it had always been done.
But Elva noticed that people who ate well-cooked meat—brown, not red—had fewer mysterious illnesses. Their stomachs hurt less. They didn’t develop the fevers and chills that often followed raw meat consumption. They simply… survived better.
She experimented systematically, which was unusual for the time. She cooked some meat thoroughly and served it to one group. She served raw meat to another. She tracked who got sick and who didn’t. The results were clear: cooked was safer.
“Red is hard on the stomach,” she explained to anyone who would listen. “Red is hard on the heart, hard on the nerves. Purple is better. Brown is best.”
Her logic was partly metaphorical, partly empirical. She associated the red of raw meat with the red of Mars, which she associated with sickness and disaster. Purple—like Orion’s changing heart—represented transformation, progress, safety. Brown represented completion, the final stage, the safest state.
Modern science would explain it differently, but her conclusions were correct. Cooking meat to “brownness” killed most parasites and bacteria. It made meat safer, easier to digest, more nutritious as proteins broke down into more accessible forms.
Elva’s innovation added years to human lifespans. People died less often from food-borne illness. Children grew stronger. The population expanded. All because one stubborn elder decided that red was bad and brown was good, and refused to accept culinary tradition as unchangeable.
Chapter Eighteen: Supit’s Obsession
But Supit wasn’t satisfied with merely making meat safe. She became obsessed with a different problem: satisfying the stomach.
The stomach was a tyrant, a demanding organ that was never quite pleased. Feed it and it wanted more. Don’t feed it and it complained loudly. Feed it the wrong things and it rejected them violently. Feed it the right things at the wrong time and it still wasn’t happy.
Supit devoted herself to understanding stomach satisfaction. She experimented with different foods, different combinations, different preparation methods. She sought wisdom from Orion, spending hours staring at the constellation, asking for guidance, waiting for inspiration.
One evening, as she was cooking her meat over the fire—properly brown, not red, thank you Elva—inspiration struck with the force of a falling star.
She looked at a bowl normally used for drinking water. She looked at her cooked meat. She looked at some gathered vegetables and herbs sitting nearby. And she thought: What if I combine these?
It was a revolutionary question. Food had traditionally been eaten separately—meat on its own, vegetables on their own, maybe a handful of berries for dessert. The idea of combining different foods in water, creating a mixture, a blend, a unified dish—that was new.
She placed everything in the bowl. Meat, vegetables, herbs, water. She heated it near the fire, letting the flavors mingle, the textures soften, the water absorb the essence of everything it contained.
The result was warm, flavorful, satisfying in ways that individual foods had never been. It was greater than the sum of its parts. It was a complete meal in a single vessel.
She called it soup—a simple, perfect word that somehow sounded like what it represented. Warm. Soft. Comforting. Soup.
Chapter Nineteen: The Burning Finger Problem
But immediately—immediately—Supit encountered a problem that threatened to undermine her entire culinary breakthrough: she kept burning her fingers trying to eat it.
The soup was hot. Very hot. Hot enough to cook meat, hot enough to soften vegetables, which meant hot enough to scald human flesh. And there was no good way to eat it.
She tried drinking it directly from the bowl. Burned her lips. Tried tipping the bowl carefully to get the solid bits. Burned her hands. Tried scooping with her fingers. Burned every finger she possessed, including poor Maab, who didn’t deserve such treatment.
“Pain from the stomach goes into the hands,” she muttered one evening, sucking on her blistered fingers, Ba and Ma particularly damaged. “I just can’t win.”
It was a zero-sum game. If the soup was cool enough to eat comfortably with fingers, it wasn’t as satisfying, wasn’t as warming, wasn’t as effective at extracting flavors from the ingredients. If it was hot enough to be perfect, it was too hot to eat without injury.
She needed an intermediary. A tool. Something that could touch the hot soup without feeling pain, could transfer food from bowl to mouth without burning human flesh.
She tried using leaves as scoops. They worked briefly, then dissolved in the hot liquid or transmitted heat too effectively. She tried using pieces of bark. They floated, spilled, made the soup taste like wood. She tried using flat stones. They absorbed too much heat and burned her anyway.
Nothing worked. And every failed attempt added to her frustration, her burned fingers, her growing conviction that maybe soup had been a terrible idea after all.
Chapter Twenty: The Prayer to Orion
One night, after a particularly bad burn that left Ma red and swollen (there was that problematic red color again), Supit gazed up at Orion with tears of frustration.
The constellation hung in the southern sky, sword at his belt, club raised, shield extended—or bow drawn, depending on who you asked. His purple heart pulsed gently, no longer the aggressive red of earlier ages but softer now, more comforting.
“Father,” she whispered, using the term humanity had adopted for Orion. “Is there any way to beat the zero-sum game? Every solution creates a new problem. Every answer brings a new question. Can we ever truly win?”
The question hung in the night air, mingling with smoke from cooking fires, drifting upward toward the stars. It was the eternal human question, the one we’re still asking: is progress possible, or are we doomed to trade one set of problems for another infinitely?
For a long moment, nothing happened. The stars twinkled indifferently, going about their celestial business. The universe maintained its customary silence, offering no comfort, no answers, no acknowledgment that anyone was even listening.
Supit felt despair rising. Of course there was no answer. The gods didn’t care about burned fingers. Orion had better things to do than solve culinary problems. She was alone with her soup and her pain, and that was simply how things were.
She began to turn away, back to her fire, back to her failed innovation—
And then Orion moved.
Chapter Twenty-One: The Gift of the Dipper
Not the slow creep of celestial mechanics, the gradual rotation of Earth that made stars appear to slide across the sky. No, this was actual movement—Orion breaking from his fixed position, acting with purpose and agency, responding to prayer the way gods did in the oldest stories, when divine intervention was still a reasonable expectation.
He sprinted across the sky toward the North Star with purpose and fatherly concern, his form shifting from constellation to something more animate, more present, more real. Supit watched in stunned silence as the Hunter reached the pole star, reached into the cosmic cupboard of heavenly tools, and withdrew something that glittered with starlight.
He descended—not fully, not to Earth, but close enough that Supit could see him properly, could see the kindness in his eyes, the smile that said “I’ve been waiting for you to ask.”
In his hands, he held an enormous dipper, constellation-sized, made of stars bound together in the perfect shape for scooping and serving and transferring liquid without touching it directly.
“Here you go, my precious daughter,” his voice rolled like thunder across clouds, warm despite its power. “Use this to keep the pain away.”
He placed the Big Dipper in Supit’s weathered hands—or rather, a terrestrial echo of it, star-stuff transformed into wood and practical utility, scaled for human use. It was curved perfectly, deep enough to hold liquid, long enough to keep her hand away from heat, shaped exactly for the purpose she needed.
The Big Dipper remained in the sky, of course, still wheeling around the North Star. But now it had an earthly counterpart, a tool that embodied celestial wisdom in practical form.
Supit held it, understanding immediately. This was the answer. This was how you beat the zero-sum game—not by eliminating trade-offs but by finding clever solutions that minimized cost while maximizing benefit.
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Birth of the Spoon
She called it the spoon, to accompany the soup, and in that moment of perfect linguistic symmetry—soup and spoon, liquid and ladle, problem and solution—humanity overcame the zero-sum game.
Or at least, overcame that particular zero-sum game. There would be others. There would always be others. But this one was solved, cleanly and elegantly, with divine assistance and human ingenuity working in harmony.
The first spoon was crude by modern standards—a hollowed piece of wood, carved roughly into the shape Orion had gifted her. But it worked. She dipped it into her soup, lifted hot liquid and chunks of meat and vegetable, brought it to her lips without burning anything.
The taste was unchanged—still delicious, still satisfying. But now she could enjoy it without pain, without sacrifice, without the constant trade-off of satisfaction versus injury.
She ate her soup slowly, savoring both the flavor and the triumph. Then she made more soup and called others to share. She showed them the spoon, explained its use, carved more spoons from wood with different shapes and sizes.
Word spread like wildfire through the tribe: you could eat hot food safely. You could nourish yourself without suffering. The equation had been balanced, the game beaten, the cosmic joke answered with human ingenuity and divine intervention.
Others began carving spoons. Some made them flat and wide for thin soups. Others made them deep and narrow for thick stews. There were spoons for serving, spoons for eating, spoons for stirring while cooking. The spoon diversified, specialized, became essential.
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Legacy of Soup and Spoon
And we have been using the spoon to eat soup ever since—a simple tool, born from a burned finger and a prayer to the stars, proving that sometimes the gods are listening, and sometimes they help, and sometimes the solution to an impossible problem is just hanging there in the night sky, waiting for someone desperate enough to look up and ask.
The innovation spread beyond Supit’s immediate tribe. Travelers saw the spoons and brought the idea home. Traders exchanged spoons along with other goods. Within a generation, spoons were everywhere humans gathered, as universal as fire, as essential as the knife.
But more than the tool itself, Supit’s story taught something profound: problems have solutions, even when they seem insurmountable. The zero-sum game can be beaten, not by finding perfect answers with no downsides, but by clever innovation that makes the downsides manageable.
You can’t have hot soup without heat. That’s just physics. But you can have a tool that lets you access the hot soup safely. You can’t eliminate all trade-offs, but you can engineer around them.
This became a guiding principle of human development. Every subsequent invention—the wheel, the plow, the written word—was essentially an elaboration of Supit’s insight: identify the problem, examine the trade-offs, find a clever solution that tips the balance in your favor.
The spoon was small, simple, almost trivial. But it represented something larger: humanity’s capacity to improve its own condition through observation, innovation, and occasionally, divine intervention when you ask nicely.
Chapter Twenty-Four: The Changing Heart
Throughout all of this—the weapons training, the finger naming, the cooking innovations—Orion’s heart continued its slow transformation.
The Red Star of Sirius, once blazing crimson at the center of his chest, had already shifted to purple by the age of Elva and Supit. But it didn’t stop there. Over generations, over centuries, watchers noticed it changing further—from purple to blue, from blue to white, each color representing a different phase of stellar evolution, a different chapter in the cosmic story.
And as it changed color, it also changed position.
Slowly, inexorably, Sirius appeared to fall away from Orion’s chest. Not quickly—this was a process that took lifetimes to become obvious. But careful observers, tracking star positions year after year, generation after generation, couldn’t deny what they were seeing: the red-purple-blue-white star was separating from the Hunter.
It looked, to those ancient astronomers, as if the sun itself was calling to Orion’s heart, pulling it away with solar gravity and cosmic longing. They imagined a love story playing out in the heavens—Orion’s heart drawn to the sun, unable to resist, slowly drifting closer to the solar embrace.
“The sun is stealing his heart,” some said, with the melodrama of people who tell all their stories about the stars.
“His heart is leaving him,” others mourned, seeing tragedy in the separation.
But not everyone interpreted it darkly.
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Faithful Interpretations
Belief in Orion in that age was firm—firmer than our modern cynicism can quite grasp. These weren’t people who saw stars as distant balls of burning gas. These were people for whom the stars were meaningful, infused with purpose and personality, actively involved in human affairs.
So when Orion’s heart appeared to be leaving his chest, they refused to panic. They reframed the narrative with the kind of creative theology that has always been humanity’s secret weapon against existential dread.
“Orion is merely resting,” said some, with the confidence of people who’d never been wrong about anything in their lives. “Hibernating at year’s end, like the bears do, like the snakes do. He’s growing a larger chest cavity, doing what we all do after we have children—expanding to accommodate more love.”
This interpretation was popular among parents, who understood exactly what it meant to feel like your chest was too small for the amount of love you contained, like your heart was bursting out of your ribcage every time you looked at your children.
“His heart isn’t gone,” others insisted, slightly defensive, as if arguing with skeptics who didn’t actually exist yet. “It’s beating outside his chest. Have you not felt the same way yourselves when you awaken to find your children scattered everywhere, your love externalized, your heart walking around on little legs beyond your direct control?”
This resonated deeply. Every parent knew the feeling—your heart no longer safely contained within your body but out in the world, vulnerable, exposed, liable to skin its knee or wander into danger or make poor decisions. Your heart beating in other bodies, other lives, other futures you couldn’t fully control.
“Orion’s heart will return to where it was,” the optimists declared, waving away concerns with breezy confidence. “That star leaving his chest isn’t his heart at all—you can see his true heart is still right there, that fainter star in his chest. What’s departing is his love, something else entirely.”
They pointed to the remaining star in Orion’s chest region—Betelgeuse, though they called it something else. “See? His heart remains. What you see moving away is merely his love for the sun, his affection given to the Son metaphorically, because a father’s heart stays with him but his love extends outward.”
It was sophisticated theology for people who hadn’t invented writing yet. The distinction between heart-as-organ and heart-as-emotion, between literal and metaphorical, between physical presence and spiritual extension.
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Energy Theory
One particularly practical elder offered a different explanation, one that spoke to anyone who’d ever struggled to get out of bed in the morning:
“It’s simply his energy level.”
Everyone looked at him, waiting for elaboration.
“When Orion wakes on the New Year,” he explained, gesturing to the eastern horizon where the constellation would soon rise, “his energy level drags behind him like a man stumbling toward breakfast. It takes longer for him to gather his energy than to move his body. We’ve all been there—body’s up, but vitality is still sleeping, needs a few minutes to catch up.”
This made intuitive sense to everyone. They understood the feeling of being physically awake but not yet truly awake, of needing time for alertness to fully permeate your system, of your energy trailing behind your consciousness like a reluctant child.
“So that star we see falling behind,” the elder continued, warming to his theme, “that’s not his heart. That’s his vitality, his energy, still waking up while his body’s already hunting. By midwinter, his energy catches up, and by spring, he’s at full strength again. By summer, he’s so energetic he can barely sleep, which is why you see him in the sky all night. Then autumn comes and he starts getting tired, and winter arrives and he needs to rest, and the cycle begins again.”
It was seasonal affective disorder projected onto the cosmos, a way of understanding why Orion was prominent in winter but disappeared in summer—not because of Earth’s orbit and sun position, but because the great Hunter had an internal clock, an energy cycle, a need for rest and recovery just like humans did.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Shield Theory
But another elder had a completely different theory, delivered with the confidence of someone who’d thought about this way too much and was absolutely certain everyone else was wrong:
“It was never Orion’s heart to begin with!”
Conversation stopped. This was a bold claim, potentially heretical, definitely interesting.
“The star that shifts from red to purple to blue to white,” he continued, pointing at Sirius, “that’s his shield, and that’s precisely why we call it Sirius. There is nothing more important than a strong, colorful shield. Nothing more serious in all of existence, do you understand?”
People looked skeptical but curious.
“Think about it,” he pressed. “Don’t you know that it can be serious over here for a while”—he gestured to one position in the sky—”and then serious over there”—another position. “The star of Sirius is the star of the shield itself! It moves around because shields move! You don’t hold your shield in one place constantly; you move it where threats come from!”
There was some logic to this, if you squinted at it right.
“The shield,” he explained, “is what protects you. It’s what keeps Mars from smashing your head in. It’s what deflects arrows and clubs and all the violence the universe throws at you. Of course it would be colorful—red when Mars threatens, purple when danger’s moderate, blue when things are calmer, white when all is well. The shield changes color to match the threat level!”
“But wait,” a skeptical voice interrupted, “how can it be his shield if he’s already holding his shield all the time? We can see it right there in the constellation. And besides, some of us see him with a bow and arrow now, not a shield at all.”
“EXACTLY!” the shield-theorist exclaimed, as if the objection had proven his point. “Yes! You understand! The shield he holds up in the constellation has always been there, agreed. Yet some of you see him with a bow and arrow instead. Don’t you see? The star leaving his chest isn’t his heart—it’s his companion!”
BOOK THREE: THE JUDGMENT OF LIGHT
Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Companion Star
“It’s not his heart that leaves his chest,” the elder explained, his voice taking on the rhythm of revelation, “but his companion. The puppy he once held close, who now runs around him in eternal play!”
Faces lit with understanding. This metaphor worked on multiple levels.
“The dog is always serious,” he continued, connecting back to his earlier theme. “Sirius over here, Sirius over there, never sitting still, always alert, always watching for threats. We men once had hearts as strong and serious as the dogs—red, fierce, constantly vigilant. But then we embraced the dog as Orion did. We domesticated them, made them our partners.”
He paused for effect.
“Our strong Sirius-red hearts now belong to our dogs. They’re the ones running around doing serious things while we watch and coordinate and occasionally shout commands. They inherited our vigilance so we could develop other qualities—like cooking soup and inventing spoons.”
There was laughter at this, but also recognition. Dogs were vigilant in ways humans had learned not to be. Dogs maintained the constant alertness that early humans must have possessed, that prey animals still possessed, that predators relied on.
By partnering with dogs, humans had outsourced some of their vigilance, freeing up mental energy for other pursuits. It was another zero-sum game beaten—not by being vigilant and creative, but by having dogs handle vigilance while humans handled creativity.
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Words of Commander Vesuvius
These were the words, the elder concluded, of Commander Vesuvius, who had appeared to them from a different age entirely—a temporal tourist, a chrono-messenger, speaking across centuries to deliver wisdom that transcended his own time.
Vesuvius was legendary, though most people didn’t quite understand why. He existed in multiple times simultaneously somehow, appearing as a young man in one era and an old man in another, always bearing the same name, always delivering similar messages about stars and hearts and the future of humanity.
He was the one, legend said, who had planted the pine seed in that red-brown dot known as Mars—the aggressive planet that tried to smash Orion in the head every twenty-five months like clockwork, following orbital mechanics that Vesuvius understood better than anyone.
“The heart of Orion is no longer red and Sirius,” Vesuvius had explained during one of his appearances, his voice carrying the weight of witnessed catastrophe and hard-won wisdom, “because Mars hit us on the head too many times.”
He meant this both literally and metaphorically—Mars the planet affecting human consciousness, Mars the god of war bringing violence, Mars the red star triggering trauma in human hearts.
“We gave our Sirius-red heart to the dogs,” Vesuvius continued, “who run around kind of doing what we want them to—at least for the most part. They kept the vigilance, the alertness, the constant seriousness that used to define us. And we?” He smiled sadly. “We learned to cook soup.”
Chapter Thirty: Pendragon’s Prophecy
Pendragon, listening intently to the recounting of Vesuvius’s words, added his own revelation:
“There will be one born again,” he prophesied, his voice carrying the weight of foreknowledge, “as my grandfather’s grandfather was before. One born who will explain when the Sirius-red heart will be Orion’s again.”
People leaned forward. Prophecies were important. Prophecies shaped destinies.
“Certainly,” Pendragon continued, “the dogs cannot run around being serious for us forever. Eventually, humanity must reclaim its own vigilance, its own red heart, its own capacity for sustained alertness. We cannot rely on our companions indefinitely. We must become complete again.”
He gestured to his companion, standing quietly nearby: “My cousin here is an example of what I speak of. He was almost born with a Sirius-red heart like Orion once possessed—here, can you not see?”
The cousin stepped forward. There was something about him—an intensity in his eyes, a readiness in his posture, an alertness that seemed superhuman. He didn’t rely on dogs to watch for danger. He was the watcher, constantly scanning, constantly ready.
“He is a Supremo of Olympia,” Pendragon explained, using a title that wouldn’t make full sense for centuries, “blessed with magical abilities, with faster reflexes, with sharper senses than normal men possess.”
People nodded, seeing it. The cousin was different, touched by something special.
“Yet even he,” Pendragon admitted, “is not as fast as the Sirius dogs, nor can he run as far. He’s approaching what we once were, but we were more. The fully red-hearted human, when he returns, will exceed even the dogs in vigilance and endurance.”
Chapter Thirty-One: The Formula of Identity
Pendragon recited the ancient formula, the one everyone knew but whose significance was often forgotten:
“Birthdays are from the mother. Names are from the father. Groups are of the father. Markings from the mother.”
Everyone nodded. This was basic knowledge, taught to children, encoded in tradition.
“Orion knows all of these,” Pendragon continued. “He knows every name—every child named by their father in recognition of lineage and legacy. He knows every birthday—the exact moment each soul entered the world, marked by maternal timing and lunar cycles. He knows the groups—the tribes, the clans, the affiliations passed down through paternal lines. And he knows the markings—the birthmarks, the scars, the physical signatures inherited through maternal lineage.”
“He uses this knowledge,” Pendragon explained, “just as Mars uses it. But not in the same way at all.”
This was crucial—the distinction between Orion’s judgment and Mars’s judgment.
“Mars uses names, birthdays, groups, and markings to condemn. To catalog failures. To identify who deserves punishment. To track the depraved, the fallen, the unworthy.”
People nodded grimly. Everyone had felt Mars’s judgment at some point—the weight of accusation, the sense of being watched by something hostile, evaluated by a standard impossible to meet.
“But Orion,” Pendragon’s voice softened, “Orion uses the same information to recognize. To know his children. To judge positively—some more positively than others, yes, but all with fundamental hope and love.”
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Master of Serendipity
“Orion is the master of serendipity,” Pendragon declared, “working with the help of Mars.”
This seemed contradictory—how could Mars, that aggressive judger, help Orion?
“Mars establishes the system,” Pendragon explained, seeing the confusion. “Mars creates the standards, the measurements, the categories. Mars is order, structure, judgment, consequence. Without Mars, there would be no framework, no expectations, no meaningful distinctions.”
“But Orion,” he continued, “Orion takes Mars’s system and uses it for grace. He knows you’re supposed to meet certain standards—that’s Mars’s domain. But when you fall short, Orion doesn’t condemn. He finds the serendipity—the unexpected positive, the hidden strength, the accidental virtue you didn’t even know you possessed.”
“Where Mars sees failure,” Pendragon elaborated, “Orion sees opportunity. Where Mars says ‘You should have been better,’ Orion says ‘Look how far you’ve come.’ Where Mars catalogs your sins, Orion celebrates your efforts.”
This resonated deeply with the listeners. Everyone had experienced both kinds of judgment—the harsh internal voice that sounded like Mars, and the kinder external validation that sounded like Orion.
“And here’s Orion’s genius,” Pendragon smiled, “he ducks when Mars comes overhead. He avoids direct confrontation. He doesn’t argue with Mars about standards or dispute the measurements. He simply steps aside, lets Mars pass, and continues his positive judgment afterward.”
“He knows about Mars’s system of depravity,” Pendragon revealed, “because it’s actually his system that he gave to Mars after making the deal with the original nuclear family tree—Baam, the binding finger, the covenant of kinship that established how gods and humans would interact.”
Chapter Thirty-Three: The Creation of the System
The system, Pendragon explained, was first created in late July, around the time of the old world’s New Year, when calendars still made sense and time itself seemed more orderly.
This was the golden age: thirteen perfect lunar months of twenty-eight days each, plus one sacred day outside of time at the end. Twelve perfect solar months of thirty days each, plus five or six festival days to close the year. The calendars aligned, complemented each other, created a mathematical harmony that modern calendars can only envy.
It was during this perfect time—late July, specifically—that the Orion constellation rose steadily each evening, and humanity witnessed the great transformation: Orion’s red heart turning progressively more purple, then more blue, then beginning to fall away from his chest entirely.
“To this day,” Pendragon said, “you can watch it happen in late July. The sun pulls the star of Sirius closer to itself, dragging it away from Orion’s chest like a parent separating fighting children. The cosmic drama plays out annually, reminding us of the original separation, the first loss, the moment when Orion’s heart became externalized.”
But, Pendragon emphasized, humanity’s belief in Orion during that age was firm—firmer than modern cynicism can quite grasp, stronger than doubt, more resilient than fear.
“So when they saw Orion’s heart leaving,” Pendragon continued, “they didn’t despair. They reframed it, reinterpreted it, found meaning that preserved faith while acknowledging reality.”
He recounted all the theories—the resting theory, the external-heart theory, the energy theory, the shield theory, the companion theory. Each one a way of saying “this change doesn’t mean abandonment; it means transformation.”
Chapter Thirty-Four: The Lion Truth
“Some see Sirius as a dog,” Pendragon said, his voice dropping to the register of secret knowledge, channeling Vesuvius across time, “but we know he is a lion.”
The revelation hung in the air like incense, sacred and significant.
“There was once a breed of lion,” Pendragon continued, painting the picture with words, “so great it ruled over the whole world. His face was known to every corner of the animal kingdom—predators and prey alike recognized him, respected him, understood his authority.”
People leaned closer, hungry for this knowledge.
“He could teach you everything you needed to know,” Pendragon’s eyes grew distant with memory or vision, “simply by looking at you the right way. No words necessary, no lengthy explanations, no repeated lessons. Just that gaze—penetrating and wise and fierce and loving all at once—and you understood.”
“That lion was important,” Pendragon’s voice carried absolute conviction, “and he is still with us. He was the standard of strength and loyalty. He represented what we could become, what we once were, what we will be again.”
“He was half man, half lion,” Pendragon revealed, “yet there were many of him. Do you understand? Not a single individual but a type, a category, a breed. The four-legged lions answered to his command, as did the human men. He bridged both worlds, belonged fully to neither, perfectly to both.”
Chapter Thirty-Five: The Face in Hearts
“His face still lives in our hearts,” Pendragon declared, touching his chest where the heart resided. “Every one of us carries that face—the lion-man, the man-lion, the perfect unity of human intelligence and leonine strength.”
“He is the one,” Pendragon’s voice rose with prophetic certainty, “who will lead us to plant the pine seed on Mars. He is the one who will transform that aggressive red planet, who will bring life to dead rock, who will extend humanity’s reach beyond Earth.”
“He is the one,” Pendragon continued, building momentum, “who will be born again with the Sirius-red heart of a lion. Not a human heart that’s learned to beat like a lion’s. Not a lion’s heart transplanted into human chest. But a true fusion—the red heart that belongs equally to both species, that pumps blood for both man and beast.”
“And I tell you this,” Pendragon’s voice dropped to intense quiet, making everyone strain to hear, “no dogs, however serious you believe them to be, can keep pace with a lion bearing a mane like his.”
Chapter Thirty-Six: The Mane of Origin
“The name of his mane is where we originate,” Pendragon revealed, speaking the secret that tied everything together.
Mane. Main. The primary, the essential, the origin point.
“In the beginning,” Pendragon said, beginning the cosmogonic story, the creation myth, the explanation of everything, “the universe was created in seven weeks when he was a baby and first rumbled his name.”
Seven weeks. Not seven days—that would come later, in other traditions, other cultures. Seven weeks of creation, each week building on the last, each phase adding complexity and wonder.
“When he was a baby,” Pendragon emphasized. “Not fully grown, not in his adult power, but as an infant, barely aware, operating on pure instinct and divine essence.”
“He rumbled his name,” Pendragon continued, the words taking on ritual cadence, becoming more than mere description, becoming invocation. “Not spoke it—he was too young for speech. Not roared it—he was too weak for that. But rumbled it, the way lion cubs rumble when nursing, when content, when first discovering their voice.”
“That rumble,” Pendragon’s voice became almost hypnotic, “was the sound that preceded all sounds, the vibration that became all vibrations, the name that contained all names.”
“He said—” Pendragon paused, drawing breath for the sacred utterance, the primordial sound, the name that preceded all names, the mane that became Main, the roar that birthed reality itself.
The crowd held its breath. This was the moment. The revelation. The name.
“He said—”
[To be continued…]