The Tale of Orion in Brief
Long ago, when the cosmos was young and gods still bothered to check in on humanity’s progress reports, the Red Star of Sirius burned at the very heart of the Constellation of Orion. It throbbed there like a cosmic valentine, daring our knuckle-dragging ancestors to stop grunting at dirt and look up for once. And look up they did—necks craned, jaws slack, probably drooling—because that blazing red beacon was the most interesting thing that had happened since fire.
Orion himself took pity on these upright apes. He was a patient teacher, if slightly exasperated. First, he taught them to stand properly upright—not the hunched shuffle they’d been doing, but actual vertical posture, spines straight, shoulders back. “Pretend you have dignity,” he seemed to say from his celestial platform. Then came the weapons training: club in one hand (the hitting hand), shield in the other (the not-getting-hit hand). He demonstrated the proper grip, the weight distribution, the follow-through. These were not easy lessons for creatures who’d only recently figured out that rocks could do more than stub toes.
The bow and arrow came next—a revelation that must have seemed like witchcraft. Orion showed them how to nock an arrow, how to hold three or four extras between their fingers while drawing the bow, creating humanity’s first multitasking exercise. He taught them about the knife sheath, that revolutionary bit of engineering that meant you could carry a blade on your hip without castrating yourself every time you sat down. He showed them how to hurl stones during the Orionid meteor showers—cosmic target practice, using the sky’s own ammunition. And when Mars, that belligerent red bastard, came wheeling overhead like a drunk looking for a fight, Orion taught them the most important lesson of all: duck.
But perhaps his finest tactical instruction was the Taurus Maneuver—how to circle a charging bull, squaring off, using geometry and nerve instead of sheer stupidity. This was thinking-man’s violence, strategic brutality, the kind of knowledge that separates those who eat beef from those who become beef.
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. There was Ba, the thumb, the most useful digit, the opposer, the one who taught us to grip and grasp and say “no” to the universe. Then Ma, the index finger, second-most useful, the pointer-outer of danger, the indicator of trouble ahead. Next came Am, the middle finger (yes, that one), representing life-forms and people, because when you throw your best punch—dogs and loyal companions at your side—that knuckle lines up perfectly with the arm bone in a declaration of solidarity and violence.
Then there was Baam or Baum, the ring finger, the nuclear family tree, the binding digit, the one that connects you to your lineage and legacy. And finally Maab, or “the Mob”—the pinky, which only reaches full growth in fully grown men, extending the family tree in the opposite direction, representing the collective, the gang, the tribe, the strength in numbers.
Armed with Orion’s teachings and intimately acquainted with their own hands, humanity graduated to the next challenge: cooking. And here’s where things got complicated.
They discovered that the color red—the same crimson as Orion’s Sirius heart in that age—had a disturbing effect on the elders. It made them upset. Not the mild “oh bother” kind of upset, but the primal, gut-churning anxiety that comes from watching Mars, that red menace, occasionally smash directly into Orion’s head in the night sky. Red meant danger. Red meant blood. Red meant Mars was having another one of his episodes.
The elders, being elders, preferred not to be serious whenever cosmically possible. Seriousness was exhausting, and they’d already lived through enough cosmic trauma, thank you very much.
One particular elder, the elf lord Supit (whose name would echo through culinary history in ways she could never imagine), made a breakthrough discovery: if you clapped when you saw red, it somehow eased the burden on the heart. The physical action interrupted the fear response, transformed dread into rhythm, turned anxiety into applause. It was primitive cognitive behavioral therapy, discovered purely by accident.
By this time, Orion’s Sirius heart had shifted in color—no longer the alarming red but a gentler purple, as if the cosmos itself was trying to calm everyone down.
Another elder, Elva, made an equally revolutionary discovery: if you cooked red meat until it wasn’t red anymore, it helped you live longer. It was easier on the stomach, less likely to kill you with invisible demons (bacteria, though they wouldn’t know that term for millennia). Red was hard on the stomach, hard on the heart, hard on the nerves. Purple was better. Brown was best.
Supit, obsessed with satisfying the stomach and solving its endless complaints, worked tirelessly on the problem of food. One evening, as she cooked her meat over the fire, inspiration struck with the force of a meteor. She looked at a bowl normally used for drinking water, looked at her cooked meat, looked at some gathered vegetables and herbs, and thought: What if I combine these?
The mixture of foods in water she called soup, a simple, perfect word for a revolutionary concept. But immediately she encountered a problem—she kept burning her fingers trying to eat it. The pain from the scorched fingertips shot straight to her stomach, creating a horrible feedback loop of suffering.
“Pain from the stomach goes into the hands,” she muttered, sucking on her blistered fingers. “I just can’t win.”
She gazed up at Orion, her celestial father, mentor of humanity, and asked the eternal question: “Is there any way to beat the zero-sum game?”
For a moment, nothing happened. The stars twinkled indifferently. The universe maintained its customary silence.
And then—Orion moved.
Not the slow creep of celestial mechanics, but actual movement, as he had done only in the oldest stories. He sprinted across the sky toward the North Star with purpose and fatherly concern, reached into the cosmic cupboard, and returned bearing a gift. He descended just enough to hand Elder Supit an enormous dipper, constellation-sized and glowing.
“Here you go, my precious daughter,” his voice rolled like thunder across clouds. “Use this to keep the pain away.”
Supit held the Big Dipper in her weathered hands, understanding immediately. She fashioned a smaller, earthly version—a curved tool, a scooping implement, an intermediary between bowl and mouth. She called it the spoon, to accompany the soup, and in that moment of perfect linguistic symmetry, humanity overcame the zero-sum game.
She ate her soup without burning her fingers. She fed it to others, and they marveled. Word spread like wildfire: 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.
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 even 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 red star would continue its journey, the constellations would wheel overhead, and Mars would keep making his violent passes. But humanity had soup, and spoons, and the knowledge that even zero-sum games can be won if you’re clever enough to change the rules.
Long before judgment became something to fear, there was Orion—the Hunter, the Teacher, the Watcher—and unlike his crimson rival Mars, Orion judged humanity with nothing but hope. Where Mars kept ledgers of sin and catalogs of failure, Orion kept something far more precious: a record of every name, every birthday, every marking and grouping, every territory and tribe. He knew them all, intimately, the way a shepherd knows his flock, the way a father knows his children’s footsteps in the dark.
Yes, Orion used the same system as Mars—names, birthdays, markings, groups, areas—but he wielded it as a completely different instrument. Where Mars struck like a hammer looking for nails, Orion observed like a gardener tending varied plants, noting which needed sun and which preferred shade. He judged some more positively than others, true, but even his least favorable judgment was still fundamentally positive—the difference between “magnificent” and “pretty good” rather than between “acceptable” and “damned.”
And here was Orion’s genius: he ducked when Mars came overhead. He had learned, over eons of cosmic dance, to avoid being in the same celestial neighborhood as that red hothead unless absolutely necessary. They had an arrangement, an understanding born of ancient necessity and sealed with the original nuclear family tree—the Baam, the binding finger, the covenant of kinship.
The irony that few understood was this: the system of depravity Mars wielded so viciously was actually Orion’s creation. He had developed it first, then handed it over to Mars in that primordial deal, the way you might give a younger brother your old toys—except this toy was the entire apparatus for tracking human destiny. What Mars turned into a weapon of condemnation, Orion had designed as a tool of recognition.
The system was first created in late July, in the golden age when calendars made sense.
Back then, the lunar calendar was perfect: thirteen months of exactly twenty-eight days, with one sacred day standing alone at the end—the day outside of time, the breathing space between years. The solar calendar was equally perfect: twelve months of thirty days each, plus five or six festival days at the year’s conclusion, depending on the sun’s mood.
It was during this time—late July, around the old world’s New Year—that the Orion constellation rose steadily each evening, and with each passing year, humanity witnessed something both beautiful and terrifying: Orion’s red heart turned steadily more purple, then more blue, then began to fall out of his chest.
It looked, to those ancient stargazers, as if the sun itself was calling to Orion’s heart, pulling it away with solar gravity and cosmic longing. To this day, in late July, you can watch the drama unfold—the sun drawing the star Sirius closer, dragging it away from Orion’s chest like a parent prying a toy from a child’s grip.
But belief in Orion was firm in that age, and humanity refused to panic. They reframed the narrative with the kind of creative theology that has always been our species’ secret weapon.
“Orion is merely resting,” said some, “hibernating at year’s end, growing a larger chest cavity, doing what we all do after we have children—expanding to accommodate more love.”
“His heart isn’t gone,” others insisted. “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?”
“Orion’s heart will return to where it was,” the optimists declared. “That star leaving his chest isn’t his heart at all—you can see his true heart is still right there. What’s departing is his love, something else entirely. He’s showing love for the sun, giving his heart to the Son metaphorically, because look—his actual heart remains in his chest!” And indeed it did—there was (and is) a star in Orion’s chest that represents his heart to this day.
One particularly practical elder offered: “It’s simply his energy level. When Orion wakes on the New Year, his energy level drags behind him like a man stumbling to the coffee pot. It takes longer for him to gather his energy than to move his body. We’ve all been there.”
But another elder had a completely different theory, delivered with the confidence of someone who’d thought about this way too much:
“It was never Orion’s heart to begin with! The star that shifts from red to purple to blue to white—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. Don’t you understand? It can be serious over here for a while, then serious over there—the star of Sirius is the star of the shield itself!”
A skeptical voice interrupted: “How can it be his shield if he’s already holding his shield all the time? And besides, now he holds a bow, not a shield!”
“No, no, no—you misunderstand!” came the passionate rebuttal. “The shield he holds up has always been there, yes, yet some of you see him with bow and arrow instead. What leaves his chest isn’t his heart but his companion—the puppy he once held close, who now runs around him in eternal play!”
The elder warmed to his theme: “The dog is always serious—Sirius over here, Sirius over there, never sitting still. We men once had hearts as strong and serious as the dogs, but then we embraced the dog as Orion did. Our strong Sirius-red hearts now belong to our dogs. They’re the ones running around doing serious things while we watch and occasionally shout commands.”
These were the words of Commander Vesuvius, who appeared to them from a different age entirely—a temporal tourist, a chrono-messenger. He was the one 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.
“The heart of Orion is no longer red and Sirius,” Vesuvius explained, his voice carrying the weight of witnessed catastrophe, “because Mars hit us on the head too many times. We gave our Sirius-red heart to the dogs, who run around kind of doing what we want them to—at least for the most part.”
But Pendragon, listening intently, knew there was more to the story. “There will be one born again,” he prophesied, “as my ancestor was before. One born who will explain when the Sirius-red heart will be Orion’s again. Certainly, the dogs cannot run around being serious for us forever.”
He gestured to his companion: “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?” And indeed, the cousin of Pendragon was a Supremo of Olympia, blessed with magical abilities and a heart that burned with unusual intensity. Yet even he was not as fast as the Sirius dogs, nor could he run as far.
Pendragon recited the ancient formula: “Birthdays are from the mother, names are from the father. Groups are of the father, markings from the mother. And Orion—Orion is the master of serendipity, working in partnership with Mars, though never in agreement.”
Vesuvius spoke again, his voice dropping to the register of secret knowledge: “Some see Sirius as a dog, but we know he is a lion.”
The revelation hung in the air like incense.
“There was once a breed of lion so great it ruled over the whole world. His face was known to every corner of the animal kingdom. He could teach you everything you needed to know simply by looking at you the right way—no words necessary, just that gaze, penetrating and wise and fierce and loving all at once.”
Vesuvius continued, his eyes distant with memory or vision: “That lion was important, and he is still with us. He was the standard of strength and loyalty. He was half man, half lion—yet there were many of him, do you understand? The four-legged lions answered to his command, as did the human men. His face still lives in our hearts.”
“He is the one,” Vesuvius declared with absolute certainty, “who will lead us to plant the pine seed on Mars. He is the one who will be born again with the Sirius-red heart of a lion. And I tell you this: no dogs, however serious you believe them to be, can keep pace with a lion bearing a mane like his.”
His voice rose to a crescendo: “The name of his mane is where we originate! In the beginning, the universe was created in seven weeks when he was a baby and first rumbled his name. He said—”
And here, Vesuvius 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.
He said: