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.
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