Info


Profile



Lilin
Aliases The Flying Fish Goddess, Goddess of the Horizon, Goddess of the Line between Sea and Sky
Age Roughly 500
Basics

Lilin is a Goddess of the Lower Empire, a daughter of the Upper Empire God Ihir. Three hundred years ago, Lilin disobeyed her father's orders and escaped to wander among the mortals who had made His first nest their home. In His fury, He chained her to a rock on the seabed, and she has been trapped in the Deeps ever since, pulling many a ship to its doom.

In corporeal form, she takes on the appearance of a massive flying fish, more than a mile long, with silver wings that appear—or so it's said—"neither a bird's nor a fish's". In this form she is often mistaken for an island by sailors who spy her when she surfaces through the mist on the Deeps.

Before her right to live in Heaven was revoked, she appeared in visions to mortals as a silver-blue child in a shimmering gown. (Human minds parse visions of the Gods in ways that they understand, and I draw her the way she would appear unto Astrans.) She is able to both swim and fly.

As goddess of the line between the sky and the sea, she is able to will into existence any phenomenon that occurs where the water meets the air of the Argenta Ocean, such as waves, seastorms and whirlpools. Often these phenomena follow the whims of her mood: violent storms and vicious whirlpools appear when she is restless. Like veins through the land, rivers channel her power, and when she is in a particularly foul mood, even waters far upstream grow turbulent.

Story

Excerpt from an Astran legend:

Ihir has many sons and daughters. They were born of His love for the land and the sea, but this love is not of the form to which humanity is familiar. They are to Him as servants, and love, as in the eyes of all gods, synonymous to obligation.

Of all His sons and daughters, Lilin was the first to learn His rule. Whenever the palace was quiet and the sky still, she peered through the gaps of heaven’s floorboards, and saw the humans on their fields below. She watched them race through the stalks and join hands on the barren land, lighting flames and laughing as they danced in circles.

Laughing. Lilin wondered at this odd sound. Why did she never laugh? She thought, perhaps, that heaven did not know what laughter was, not Father Ihir and not the gods of old.

So she made a promise to see this world for herself, and when Kala and Hela of the Gates were looking the other way, she slipped down the marble stairway, and soared away upon her wings to the land below.

It didn’t take long for her absence to be discovered. In His horror, Ihir sent His guards out to search for her—and when they reported that they had seen her flying in the world of mortals, He was furious.

After her He flew Himself—catching her in midair in His merciless beak. She screamed to be released, but He did not relent.

“I gave you a home, and a world—and yet you would deceive me to flee it!” bellowed He. “Since you love this world so much, you shall never leave it again! Creature of the ocean, I chain you to the sea forever—and may these chains never release you for the rest of eternity!”

He did not consider a more merciful sentence, not even for His daughter, and she did not think of pleading for one.

And so chained she was, to a rock in the sea. And Lilin cried but a single tear, for she did not understand the word “forever”. She only knew the humans, who were temporary, who rose and fell like spring and winter. She believed that there would be an end to it, because there was always an end.