M’li Re-emergence Myth

one of the many mythic-type stories gathered by Bluenight Light La Far,

a librarian, historian, and folklorist of the planet M’li

An early M'li myth - arguably the earliest - tells that there was once an Awe, an older Awe, longing and lonely, which soon forgot how to let in the light. 

Its membranes thickened and gummed, the light within trapped in an increasingly poisonous loop through its organism, a septic-cycling that soon led to a confusion of dissolutions, fermentations, and coagulations. 

At last it fell, landing on M’li and fountaining into a well of light. Similar to an effect seen elsewhere in the cosmos, the plants of that spot grew to nearly scrape the sky. 

 

The humes left on M’li had long struggled, had eked out bare life on a planet clouded and cold. Stories disagreed strongly about what had happened to the civilisation, with all its metals and mechanical marvels, that evidence suggested preceded these last vestiges of the humes.

 

Very few were left alive, perhaps under 1,000 people, when they found the Awe.

 

When they felt it for the first time.

Finding the Awe even as it faded, with its ending breaths it welcomed them to winter within. But then the fading itself began to fade, for although the Awe had forgotten how to let in light, the M’li would not let up. They gave, synergising from each other, and from their art, and from their love, and from their dreams, and from the rustfire they had become masters of making, they made warmth and gave the light and grew to the Awe in return. By winter’s end the Awe was young again, for - 

For the Awe – 

Light is life. 

Light is time. 

Light is.

Light

 

When the humes emerged into the thawing dawns of First Spring, they found a quiet wonder far beyond the darkness and the thunders of their summers past: Awe after Awe, hovering, descending, their glows parsing-apart the kilometer-high accumulations of clouds, descending through these now-opened spaces in those long-lasting veils that had hidden the stars, the stars, the bright and bounteous stars! – 

 

And that magnificent void, shot-through with lights alive to the ends of Time, that vastness of voices that opened up before them, that opened up within them, singing the songs of the stars and cosmic winds and comets and plate tectonics, and as a 

The Magnificent 

descending through the clouds      from the stars

            stars eternal ethereal

                        thereal

                        real

              all real, all the time, 

burning out and lighting up and being born and all and all and all ALLLIVE.

 

And right then,

 

the humes gazing up at a sky full of Awe and the expanses of cosmos beyond,

the single Awe which had sheltered them now made young and laughing,

a mass and communal elevation of consciousness occurred.

 

And in exchange for the kindness to their kin, the Awe gifted the M'li their friendship.