Ranya — The Drink Spinner
Ranya Drink Spinner

In the darkness, where everything once danced, there were those who worked already. In the pleasure came the worker: the energy would come to be known by many names over time, lacing together the energies of light and darkness, turning power into play. Ranya would be the dress of sound that settled around it on the worlds that once were. But it is as nameless as it was once formless: a constantly shifting, changing core of creation, born before time and existing forever through it. From a nowhen land to an everyhow land, the spinner worked, empowered by the dancing and the wildness and, eventually, the full scope of life and death.

Thanks to its forever chance and essence, Ranya has seen the formation and destruction of realms. From the first reality to the one that thrives now, it has existed, somewhere in the place before. The First Firmament is its scientific name: a structure, a remnant, a creator and closure of the very first cosmos in reality. Of it, came the energy that some took to shape worlds. Universes, realities, dimensions, born from the pleasure it gave and the power it bore. Not all — nowhere near enough power for all — and yet, enough, to persist through the end of times and forever be the thing that came before. One of many, living among the darkness and the chaos, giving breath to light and life: the First Firmament and The Lonely One and Eternity and The Only One Beneath among others, whose fractures and children are seen as gods and primordials themselves. The ones who would always come before.

But just watching was never the only option. Not for the one who laced light into darkness and made big bangs. Not the one from whom stories flowed. It, too, wanted the life it made; it, too, wanted a place and a name and a time, sometimes. In the first reality, in the first run of life and cycles of creation, the essence took its best attempt at a form: the great drink spinner, a creature that moved like a spider and struck like a scorpion and laughed like chimes through the sky.

And loved. It loved so well that worlds became its own: it loved so well, that a whole universe belonged to it.

In Orixe, nothing was ever only as it seemed. This was because nothing knew death, or pain. At first, Ranya was invoked only in the name of glory: the blessings of vines and connections, of celebration, fertility, sex, creation, life, protection, blessings. The Spider was liberation. The spider was The Ever One, meant only for goodness. When marriage rang through the skies, the heavens burned with lights and love for days on end; everyone drank and danced and sang the songs of Spider and the Dove: Ranya and Qisne. But even in a world free of death, one must weave: light without darkness cannot persist.

Unlike Ranya the Spider (who is sometimes called Balizusi), Qisne the Dove (who is sometimes called Raquiksi) was not a first. The child of a one who came before, Qisne was the invocation of her own set of laws and prestige: mystery and magic, desire, fertility, nature and the wilds, Qisne was an essence of beauty and intrigue. Their marriage cemented power over Orixe, a planet as large as a sun, and made them new titles: The King and Queen of Sky and Land. But, Qisne was not like Ranya. When she created, she had no knowledge; her creations would go evil, lose themselves in celebration and bring chaos, and a taste for the death that would not come. From this, Ranya had to make dying: to dismiss the monsters she made, which would eventually become Solaments. The mystery of her became a story that even Ranya could not see coming, no matter how wide and righteous his stories had and would still go.

Because no creature, mortal or divine, ever understands the keys to the shades that come. They walk the road to perdition the same, becoming what they were always meant to be, no matter their hopes.

Qisne's mother, The Distribution of Stars was an entity repayment and returns. Retribution. Nemesis to all, especially the ones who helped to weave too much together. Especially Ranya, who still kept records of the stories, each of them moving through him in the way that giants moved through forests: knocking everything over and leaving their mark, every life and stone. Born unto Qisne was this mystery, this repayment of life: the origin of death, started to save her mistake, and worsened over time, until madness lived in her in such a way that death was all she could think of.

Qisne would try to give death, too. She would try to give it to Ranya, before Orixe would fall and the universe it inhabited would die. She would poison her husband in his sleep and repay his love with pain, as the corruption of death changed her wings from light and love to the darkness of a hawk: her singing would become a song of death, a song of pain, as her lovers limbs began to strike and sting and swathe in pain and torment. No longer an orison of glory alone, Ranya would become what it was always meant to be: duality itself.

Help and harm, pleasure and pain, taste and torment, Ranya The Spider became the perfect match for Qisne The Hawk who still, sometimes, had the wings of a dove as she ran over nature, desire and magic, the things that are always two at once, beginning and ending. They became the bookends of reality, doomed to repeat it forever and ever: creating and destroying, loving and losing one another.

Over the cosmos and realities of all that is and will be, their essences would take over new forms. New bodies. Ranya, ever attempting to save Qisne from the keys to perdition; Qisne, always fighting the damnation of her mother, the way she was born to be a nemesis to all she wanted. And ever failing, again and again and again, from the first, to the last.

Until Galaviz, with friends of true power, came to be.