authorized borrowing

[namesthesky]

Aya is little used to having the opportunity to set her own priorities, but she likes it. She's not hurting for any material resources, and the organization of the attic would produce those more than anything else; and she has this entire bookshelf closer to hand. So the attic, which may or may not contain ghosts, languishes; and she steadily works through the book collection. Right now she is on the third in a series of myths from the old religion; this volume is about Aelare, the trickster.

Comments

[pythbox]

Aelare has the most interesting stories.

She (or just as frequently he) appears in a bewildering variety of forms, although the commonest are the fox, the magpie, and the young man or woman with sparkling eyes. Most of the longer tales concern her venturing out into the world to make mischief or dispense gifts depending on whim and the behaviour of the recipient, but sometimes there is a shorter verse or tale about some (un)lucky soul who enters Aelare's domain and comes away embroidered with strange magical effects, with or without meeting the trickster responsible for the change.

Almost every time Aelare is introduced in any of these, it's with some new story about his or her origin. She was born in a sea-storm when the world was young, and flew around the world twice trying to build a nest to keep shiny stones in, and wherever she lingered she left magic in her wake, and that is why she takes the shape of a magpie in this story; in that one, he was the first person to walk into a magic, and it ate him up and made him part of itself, and that is why he takes the shape of a young man. And on and on. The most any two of these origins can agree on is that Aelare either came out of a magic or made them all.

Perhaps that abundance is why one of Aelare's many titles and epithets - alongside simpler things like "the copper-coated" (as a fox), "the yearning one" (mainly as a magpie), or "the gem-eyed" - is "the one who is born a thousand times".