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When the elves first emerged from the long dark, they saw holiness in everything the light touched.
It was a world seething, crowded, filled to the brim with gods. Everything was alive in the dawn times: every river, from the smallest mountain stream to the lazy deltas where the seabirds mourn, had a name. And every row of mountains and every copse of trees, a voice.
She was there too, in the beginning, on every slip of wind. She was no jealous tutelary god confined to a single village. The benefits of being nowhere: she was everywhere, swifter than the frothing white foam of the Istandaartha, more everlasting than the peaks of Bakhonu.
The fisher elves, late of the plains by Rosiro, called her Chjaltse’o, and prayed to Her for breezes in their sails. The elves of the Western Fens named her Eselethaho, and threaded the boughs of their trees with prayer flags in Her honor. And to the cave dwellers in the caverns of the Badlands she was simply Tsaliu, The One with Swift Wings. Perhaps she had a single name once, long ago. But that is not a story anyone living yet remembers.
Millennia passed, and as the elves fought and loved and died and lived, the stories they told changed, and the gods changed with them.
Some gods were forgotten while others merged, and the domains of those that remained expanded to meet the needs of their worshipers. Where once there were more gods than stars in the sky, there were now only seven. The star empress and her celestial consorts, the thrice named goddesses of the earth, and her. (Some yet remembered the eighth, but few would speak the name, for there are tales even storytellers will not repeat.)
And so it was that she came to encompass not only the wind, but also the quiet fall of snow, and the men and women that braved it, and the stories they carried with them through the cold winter nights.
***
Csevet first met her as a child, in the stories his grandmother Penzhu told him as he and his brothers huddled around the fire during the long days of Winters past. Penzhu spoke in a rich baritone that seemed entirely too large for her tiny frame, and her milky eyes were still sharp enough to notice and summarily thwack any boy unlucky enough to be caught stealing rosemary buns from her oven. Csevet adored her.
She told him all the tales she had inherited from her own grandmother, and many more besides. She told him of the phoenix Eithu that kept court on the highest peak of the northern mountains, and the seven dragons and their pearls from the depths of the Chadevan sea. She told him of all the great heroes and heroines: Lisethu and Corivero, Hanevis and Beltanthiar, and many others besides. “Once upon a time, there was a hero,” she would say. “A hero who has done a hundred and one wondrous things, a hero who changed the Elflands forever. Don’t you want to know what happens next?”
And in every story Penzhu would make mention of her, even if only as a throwaway line:
A snow maiden fair as dawn with holly in her hair and snowdrops at her wrists–
A courier with icy eyes, bedecked in ribbons red as winter robins-
A sudden startle of snowfall, gentle on the fir boughs-
A rush of winter air, the cold that cuts like smoke and the pared scent of juniper on chapped lips.
Once, it occurred to Csevet to ask why. He frowned and tugged at Penzhu’s shawl with pudgy fingers until she deigned to notice him. “Why dost put her in every story?”
Penzhu offered him a smile. “They are her stories to begin with, michen. It is only polite.”
***
Her worship was common among the couriers, her favored children on the earth. They wore red ribbons in her honor, and braided the manes of their mares with silver bells that sang in the wind. Religion was not fashionable at court, but on icy roads and windswept mountain passes the opinions of marquesses and dukes seemed to be faraway things of little import.
Even so, Csevet did not pray to her- really, truly pray- until Eshoravee.
The cold bit through his leathers as he climbed the switchback passes to the manor, the snow on the path making each footstep treacherous. Each gust of wind buffeted him, entreating him: “go back! Go back!”
It was not a warning he took seriously until later, while fleeing for his life from the rage of the duke’s son.
It hit him, as he ran, that no one cared for lowly couriers; if he were to die here his body would remain, alone and forgotten, beneath the granite walls. No one would know. Only her.
And so he prayed, out of desperation and a furious hope. Not with the cold calculus that Cstheio’s prayers, nor the supplications of Osreian nor the demands of Anmura, but instead in the language that she knew best. The language Penzhu taught him. The language of stories.
“I will live,” he panted as he rushed through the halls, the laughter of the Duke’s men a horror behind him. “I will live past this night; I will do a thousand and one wondrous things. I will change the Elflands. Don’t you want to know what happens next?”
His lungs burned. His eyes stung. His legs were a footfall from failing.
And then: the faintest breath of cold on the air.
He followed it to the servant’s quarter, to the scullery, to the roof.
He fumbled his way down the mountainside the next morning, sick and weary but alive. Behind him a bitter wind blew leaves to hide his path.
***
Csevet met Maia a decade later and felt a peculiar thing in his chest: hope mixed with dread.
This precious, beautiful boy was too kind for the capitol.
He stood at the bow of the airship as it approached Cetho and prayed. “His reign will be long and prosperous,” he whispered to the wind. “He will do a million and one wondrous things. He will change the world. Don’t you want to know what happens next?”
The night of Edrehasivar’s coronation, snow fell like absolution over Cetho.
***
How does a wind goddess become so much more?
Imagine every story ever told. Some last and some fade. And those that last are often changed, subjected to a curious leeching effect as they take on meaning and form beyond the original telling and move in ways the first teller never intended nor dreamed of. So it is with gods.
For after all, are not gods just stories? (Blasphemy on two fronts: “just stories?” the priest growls. “Just stories?” the storyteller asks?)
In the beginning, there was a snow maiden fair as dawn with holly in her hair and snowdrops at her wrists–
No.
In the beginning, there was only the unfeeling chaos of the void, and two small bits of dying star touched, and created everything-
No.
In the beginning, there were stories.