The Killing Moon

SECOND INTERLUDE

This truth Gujaareh has never liked to acknowledge: our Hananja is not the greatest of the Dreaming Moon’s children. She is not artful like Dane-inge, who dances rainbows across the sky to mark the end of floodseason. Nor is She industrious like Merik, who grinds down the mountains and fills up the valleys left by his father’s rutting. Yet it was given to Hananja to see to Her family’s health and happiness—an important task in any lineage, to be sure, but even more so among immortals. Thus did She create the place we call Ina-Karekh, where Her fellow gods might entertain themselves with every wonder in imagination. But because there was nowhere to put this place—for Ina-Karekh is vaster than both the heavens and earth—She kept it within herself. She taught Her brothers and sisters to separate out their innermost selves and send only that to Ina-Karekh, leaving the rest behind. And because the gods found our kind entertaining, She shared this gift with mortals too.

One might say this was a kind of madness, however. Consider: our Goddess has invited so many to dwell within Her mind. How does She think Her own thoughts? Where in all of Ina-Karekh are Her own dreams hidden—if She permits Herself anything at all?

Then consider the following.

When the Gatherer Sekhmen was a child, he could not sleep unless the Moon Sisters sang to him at night. He tried to sing their songs to his siblings in the House of Children, but they heard only silence.

As an acolyte, the Gatherer Adjes conversed most earnestly with Gujaareh’s Kings on their Thrones of Dreams.

The Gatherer Me-ithor showed signs of the dreaming gift early, but his parents were faithless and tried to keep him from the Hetawa. At seven floods he slew his mother in her bed, thinking her a monster.

In the Gatherer Samise’s times of pranje—of which I speak only to illustrate my tale—it was necessary that his nails be wrapped in hekeh strips, with a wooden bit strapped into his mouth, or he would bite and claw himself to free the insects beneath his skin.

Do you think I malign their names in saying these things? Did I malign the Goddess, by suggesting that Her madness infects her Servants? I mean only for you to understand this: the dreaming gift has always been a two-edged blade. But as She taught us—is it not wisdom to seek the treasure in what others might scorn as a curse? Is it not civilized of us to make of madness, magic?