Rahu

I have run out of stories.

I had hoped that another would come to me, another with a lasting impact to take the stars through my absence tomorrow night, but nothing comes.  They look at me expectantly, hopefully, with new light, the deep light of stories heard, sparking their cores.  They look at me, and I waiver, exhausted and empty.

The Seventh Sister, the Pleiad that burns the dimmest, raises her voice.  They speak back to me so rarely that I always lose the sound of their voices in the memory of my own.  Her voice is raging fire and smoldering coal, delicate crystal and thundering steeple bells, questions never asked and hopes cast aside.  The music of the spheres.

“Where do you go?  Where do you go when the night is dark and we are left to light the earth on our own?  What takes you away so that you must give us stories to fill the sky with in your absence?”

There.  There is the story, lying in her words.  Thank you, little one.

This is my story, the story of my withdrawal from the sky, and the story of immortality gone awry.  Not every journey into the night sky is smooth; not every journey is welcome, forged on strength and resourcefulness.  Some take a twisted path here and express their resentment still.  Listen to the story of the Hindu demon Rahu.  Listen to my story.

In the beginning, the gods were mortal, capable of dying either of wounds or age.  This displeased them, and because they were gods, they discovered the means to ascend past mortality.

They would make an elixir of immortality: soma.  Their cauldron would be the ocean; all they needed to achieve immortality went into it.  But, while they had been able to gather everything needed for the soma themselves, they needed the demons to stir the oceans.  The demons agreed, each calculating to snatch some of the elixir for themselves, each planning to challenge the gods’ immortality.

The demons stirred, and the ocean roiled, whipping against the beaches and lashing into the sky.  As the water churned, all that is magic, everything that cannot be explained or does not need to be, came out of the waters.  Goddesses walked onto land, and the Sun and I were launched into the sky.  Finally, just as we settled into our paths above the earth, the soma rose from the waters.

Immediately, the demons struck out at the gods, each fighting to steal the soma for themselves.  The gods rallied against them, drinking the soma as it came into their hands, all the time keeping it away from their enemies.  The oceans still raged underneath them, and water stung their eyes, and one demon, Rahu, slipped away unnoticed.

The battle still soared above the waters when he returned, if anything it was more chaotic than when he had left.  It was because of that chaos that he was able to join the battle once again without garnering attention, though this time he fought disguised as one of the gods.  He entered the field and rushed to aid the god who held the soma against the onslaught of another demon.  As the god struggled, he passed the soma into Rahu's hands for protection.

The Sun and I hung in the sky, watching it all and unable to aid the gods.  But we saw Rahu leave, and we saw him come back, saw through his disguise since he was the only one who left and then rejoined.  As one, we shouted, cried, screamed for Vishnu to stop the demon as Rahu raised the elixir to his lips.  Vishnu heard us and crashed through the sky, fighting through the clouds to reach  Rahu in time.  But the battlefield was long, and Vishnu was weary from many hours of combat.

Rahu drank.  Swallowed.  And Vishnu’s sword split him at the neck, and the elixir in his throat spilled back into the ocean along with his blood.  But he had tasted the soma; it had passed through his lips and down his throat, and so the head of Rahu was immortal.  He flew into the sky, bellowing his rage at us for calling Vishnu before his plan could be completed.  We fled before him, circling the earth with him behind, forever pursuing us, forever enraged at his lost chance at immortality.  Occasionally, very occasionally, he will catch one of us and swallow us whole, and no light can escape from us.  We vanish from the sky, eclipsed by his jaws, shut away from the cosmos.

It is a temporary revenge.  He swallows us, and we escape through his severed neck, and he cannot do anything but begin the chase again.

But he is approaching me again, and tomorrow night I will not be able to outrun him, and I will leave you briefly, my dear stars, to fend for yourselves in our sky and to remind each other of the stories.  Repeat them to each other, the stories of ascension and death, of love and loss, the stories that humanity casts into the sky so that they will become immortal.  Repeat them.  Share them.  Feel them in your fires and hear them in the empty spaces that echo between each of you, the empty spaces between you and earth.  Can you hear the stories, your stories?  Can you hear them in the campfires, in the scratching pens, in the throats of grandmothers, in the ears of children?

Listen.

Words from the Typist

My last story comes from Hindu mythology and is of the Moon Demon Rahu, and thanks to Professor Gibbs for directing me to this story.  I have been looking forward to this one since I first really started thinking about what this project would be, and its inclusion formed the basis of my frametale, namely, it gave it a way to resolution by allowing the Moon to tell a story about herself and to give a reason for her leaving the following night.  I really liked the idea of removing the storyteller at the end and leaving only the stories and those that had been told them, implying the continuation of listener turning into teller that began with the Moon hearing the stories from earth.

The story of Rahu itself is fairly short compared to some others in this book, and while that is partially to compensate for the heavier inclusion of the frametale in this section, it is also because I do not know enough about Hindu mythological characters to make educated guesses at the extension of the story that will not reveal my ignorance.  I could have tossed a few names out during the battle, but I chose not to as it would have been just that.  All I really added was motivation from the demons to steal the soma since the very beginning and the individualistic nature of the demons, but both of those seemed like very safe guesses at extrapolating the story since they are demons and they are known to behave poorly.