The Flume And The Flute

It was said that some eons ago, there existed a union of unlikely creatures, and as far as records went, that was no real account at all; but if we were to assume that such a thing couldn’t exist, then a disservice to the realms would be far too great, in every sense but the metaphysical. 

The realm of the mortals and immortals harnessed their purest of its essence, and they distilled it, cared for it and then named it water, or if it was the other way around, that water was such the driving force that created the reality of the realms and babied the world into existence. In turn, it came to be seen as the utmost important to the works of the inhabitants of the Peonie Mountains, where things ran cold and hard. Without water, there was little forces that could bend the hands of the Gods, an old saying within the palace of the Peonie Mountain.

There lived upon its vast mountains a simple deity name of Eunie. And Eunie had been barren for eons, and in her desperation for a child, she had made the offer of work, sickling her homestead frozen rivers until it became precious water, and offered it to the many great Gods of the mountain. And lo she did live and labor, years after years, and decades after decades, bits and pieces of magic seeps in with her sweats and tears, warming up the water day by day. And when the rivers ran nice and hot, Eunie appeared before the Mountain God and Goddess with a basin of full of water as an offering, in the hope that their magic would grant her what she wanted most.

  Moved by such an endeavor, the Goddess Peon had convinced her husband, the powerful Arice, the one ruler of all Peonie Mountain range and he who stood at its zenith since the beginning of time, that Eunie had been a faithful servant to the throne for an eternity, henceforth her wish should be granted.

Unconvinced that the heart of one so old, and a physicale so barren, could be strong enough to raise a young deity all on her own for all eternity, as Arice knew his own heart, and whose mind full of steadfast contradictions, so his reluctance grew. However, love was in his hearth of hearths, for gazing upon Eunie at her best, and his spouse at her worst, and so the powerful Arice perched upon his strut throne so, demanding that if Eunie, whose soul, if one and pure, and of proper perseverance, then one day, she would have what she have always wanted.

Eunie, in her gratefulness, accepted Arice’s challenge and ensconced herself to her home, waiting for the Gods to deliver her a child to have and to hold. But decades passed and there was still no news of such a child, and Eunie’s body grew weak and tired, and so was her mind. Freezing over and under the enormous weight of the wait, Eunie had thrice tried stepping foot inside the palace, but was not received. Eunie had then given up and jumped into the water she offered the Royal family, and there her immortal body broke and streamed onto the rivers of the world far and wide, both alive and dead, hoping one day she would find and be with a child that was promised to her. 

In the Far South, and as far as one could imagine, unbothered by the hardness of the unforgiving cold, was the kingdom of the humans, where things were bright and warm, filled with mortal energy and music in all of its pure spirituality. And in its gladdened state of amenable contentment, a particular boy name of Rayn was sitting atop a hut made of tree branches and leaves playing his wooden flute.

His tunes lifted and fell sudden as often as could be, bringing the winds and sands of change, and not just in its essence crowning the realization of magic, a thing of the immortal realms, and of the gods. However, the boy was not attuned to the power of his own making, and for good reasons often of orphans and desolate children encountered, and that was all that.

Rayn played his music day and night, only stopped to eat and drink, and worked in a farm on the weekends for a sheepherder, who loved telling him stories of the cold Far North. The more he played, the more awoke he was, in spirit and body, bringing the life around him to life in most curious ways. At first, in staccato of notes, the insects swirled around him, and then overhead, which scared him. And so he changed his tunes, to the most sorrowful, birds and animals of the woods gathered and joined him in attention of what he had achieved, which made him cry.

And everyday, he would start it all over again, in tunes he was cognizant of, to the ones he was scared of, to the ones that made him emotional. One not so particular day, he finished all of his routines, and he felt nothing, not one single emotion came through, and it had struck him odd. There was absolute silence in the forest, and the stillness of the trees were palpably cold and distant like Death had swept through haplessly, leaving no space for the mortals to tread, and not a breath that was whispered in the hearts of men that day throughout the Far South. 

The wise king of the castle of the Far South had rendered the strange phenomenon that was rising in his kingdom a curse, for the Gods had once again declared an icy blight on his kingdom for the first time ever since his ancestors fought off the Peonies and banish them to the Far North. A call for the rescue of the kingdom had been sounded throughout, and day after day, proclaimed heroes and warriors, and even powerful wizards and witches had come from all over to put a stop to this magic, but none had succeeded. When asked, they all would say that this magic is not of the living realm, and that it cannot be dispelled by those who were living; and so it was not of its complicated nature, but because of its most simplistic form that magic of this kind was the most vicious in its wake. 

The sheepherder who offered Rayn work decided to leave his farmland in order to find more prosperous venues, and so young Rayn bid him good fortune and regressed into his tree hut, living through the cold and loneliness, playing his music. 

And as he played, he found himself in harmony with his surroundings, and eventually got accustomed to it; any discernment to life was now only with food and water, which he had never found to be particularly difficult to obtain. The food he ate was whatever he could gather from the forest, with some help from his animal friends, and the water he drank was from a river near by, which always rejuvenated him in ways he never could describe.

The more he ate and drank, the more music he could play, and the more attuned he was to his surroundings. However, Rayn noticed that he stopped growing up after a short while. He did not feel that he was getting stronger, just stranger each day, for the food he ate stopped granting taste, and the icy wind on his skin stopped cutting cold and swift. He began to realize he did not have to eat after a fashion, and he did not starve, and the nights began to seem like endless days, and days were too bright and bitterly. Everywhere he walked, he was quiet and neurotic. The town people that remained started to ignore him more and more, like he wasn’t really present anymore. The music he played held nothing that anyone would want to hear, not even himself. He often thought of the sheepherder and the stories he told of those who died and walked the this realm without aim, and so Rayn was scared for the first time in his life. He didn’t know if dead people was still capable of fear, so he could not decide whether or not he was dead. Days gone by, and he decided that he was, since people stopped talking to him completely, things he used to be able to touch he could not any longer, even his flute. Despair had overtaken him and so in order to escape his fate, he went back to the river that he drank from and felt a warm stream onto his hands. After a quick realization of his fate,Rayn jumped into it in order to drown himself. And glad he was. For as soon as he water engulfed him, and so drowned he was, slowly vanishing onto the forgiving oblivion of the river. And in his demise, he could feel a satiated solace.

  The kingdom of the Far South was in disarray and war broke out within and without over the scarcity of sustenance living conditions. In order to keep the his subjects alive, the wise king commanded a long pilgrimage into the depths of the Peonie mountains, asking for help from the Gods. After receiving the king, the God Arice, in his satisfactory zeal, laughed at the prostrated king, whose head down in desperation, asking for deistic intervention. God Arice gaze upon the whimper on the floor and said. 

“This is just and justice served. Ancient humans had waged war upon us and exiled us away from the lands of prosperity, and now your blood debt is due. Why would I not savor this moment and ruin it with reparations.”

In tears of rage, the king cursed the Gods of the Mountain and thus was killed. In his dying moment, the king screamed his last.

“For hubristic endeavors that brought humans the downfall of the gods, so as sons and daughters of men, we are doomed for our transgressions under the judgement of the divine since the beginning of time. But I wonder, at the end times, would the Gods be able to fend for themselves, as a reckoning rapture drown them in their own making a vengeful tempest!”

The God Erice and the Goddess Peonie shivered not at the curse of men, of the mortals so fragile, so in their victory, they descended from the mountains, bringing with them destruction for mankind; tornadoes and blizzards, glaciers and icicles, and so it was of apocalyptic proportions, making way for the immortals that rule the realms for seemingly an eternity. Millennia upon millennia passed, and myriads more, in prosperity the Gods and Goddesses did lavishly exist, and the realm was in an upheaval of sunshine and warmth, sometimes too much for comfort, making the wistful hope for a bit of chill obsolete. The Peonie Gods could feel that there was something amiss and so they investigated, and so they saw. The heat that was permeating did not come from above, but from the rivers they drank, bathed, and from the ocean they subsisted on. 

This was the workings of magic, many deities knew, and that this magic came from a curse of the fallen king of the Far South ages ago. And in an effort to stop such a danger, every measures were taken, every possibilities thought of and tried, but none had been successful. The ocean kept on rising, surely, fiercely and seemingly pestilential, even to the deities, as more and more touched the water, they became petrified, hard and monumental as statues. Eventually, the Gods of Peonie Mountains also fell to the crashing waves that swallowed the realm whole. 

On a sunny day, not so long after, the boy named Rayne was seen on a distant beach, awaken to the sounds of songbirds and marine animals. Feeling the embrace of the sea and the soul of the spirit that inhabited it, he remembered what happened to the realm, and so he fashioned out of thin air a flute, and there he stayed and sway to the tunes of his music, with the sea by his side.

When he was growing up, the ghost of Eunie appeared to him in dreams constantly, told him of stories of old and new, cradled him from the nature that she embodied and disembodied both, and taught him things nearer than near and further than far. As Rayn got to an age of sound mind and body, from under the sea, Eunie, then the Goddess of the Sea, emerged in glad tidings the immortality she gave up for a chance to be with her child, and in her hand a young maiden, Peaon, whom was gladly taken to wife by Rayn.

If ever their children asked how mere mortals defeated the Gods, Rayn told them his story, and Eunie told her stories of the ancient kings and queens, sometimes out-witting, sometimes out-loving, and sometimes, just very rarely, by coincidence, and maybe that was no account of history to be candidly told. Eunie closed her eyes in death as the kingdom prospered, as so its apparent happy ever after.

Sometimes, in their old age, whenever they heard the winds howled as they treaded the sandy beaches, dust particles toiling the heavy air, they thought they could hear perpetual wails and screams meshed with the lifting and subsiding sound of the flute, ready and willing, cold flumes of indiscriminate cacophony.