Argan Argar Myths I

Daughter of Darkness, Son of Night

Long, long ago, before light fell within Wonderhome, the uz knew bliss.  Kyger Litor, Great Mother, walked among her children within Subere, the perfect darkness of the deeps.  All was cold, and dark, and damp: the best sort of place for uz. Even hunger was unknown; though trolls ate, of course, they did so for pleasure, not from need.

Though the deep darkness seemed without limit, some trolls sought to clamber through the passages of Earth to other worlds.  Some even traveled far enough to reach the end of the Darkness, open portals to a very different place, with many fine things to eat but the great hot Painbringer hanging forever in the dome of its empty Sky.  The trolls who ventured to the border of Light found a guard waiting: Xentha, the Night, daughter of Subere, Granddaughter of the Primal Darkness Nakala, whose veils shaded the gates of Wonderhome against the Painbringer’s glare.

Sometimes Kyger Litor invited Xentha to feast in her halls, and sent Karrg and his sons to take her place warding the gates of Darkness.  The Night shared tales of the strange things she perceived from the shadows cast by the Painbringer’s glare, of movements in the heavens and strange deeds in the court of the Solar Emperor.  At one Night Banquet, while the gods of Darkness shared Vee Morala’s Dream Mushroom Tea, Xentha stood up and uttered this prophecy:

“With day’s breaking,
Dawn plunges into Darkness.
The Day of Wonderhome
Brings the grief of the Uz.

Vanquished, conquering mothers
Stamp Earth with teeth and tread.
Every land will taste the tears
Of their grief and triumph.”

She sat again, and said no more before departing the Mother’s hall. Xiola Umbar said such worry was natural for a mother expecting her first birth, and everyone but Kyger Litor was surprised, for none had heard that Xentha had taken a mate.  The prophecy of Xentha worried Xiola Umbar all the same.

Night watched as the first storm winds disturbed the Solar Emperor’s reign and the planets warred.  When Vivamort led two Storm gods to the gates of Darkness she felt the dread of her mushroom-vision rise, and she sought to bar their way.  The trickster Eurmal was frightened by the darkness; Vivamort groveled, fearing his treason to the Celestial Court was discovered; but grim Humakt looked blindly into Night’s darkness, and spoke a few quiet words.  The Night relented, and permitted the three gods’ passage.  When they recrossed the gates of Night the surface gods bore Death with them, and carried it out into a sickening world.  She was watching when, not long after, Grandfather Mortal passed her gates into the Underworld, and knew then that the doom of the uz was nearly come.

It was Xentha who brought first warning to the Great Mother of the Solar Invasion.  Broken and bloody, weeping in his agony, slain by the sword Death in the hands of the Storm King, Yelm the Painbringer marched into the deeps and transformed Wonderhome into Hell.  The gods and spirits of deepest Darkness, with all the grandest and most ancient trolls, gathered into the First Army of Darkness, with the Mother herself at their head, and barred the way of the advancing Sun at Hanroo Field.  The battle was terrible, and the slaughter unimaginable.  Whole kinds of troll ended at Hanroo Field.  The Mother herself was wounded, and Korasting Mother of Many was too maimed to flee.  All the strength of the uz failed before the burning might of the murdered Sun, and they fled, weeping and ashamed.  In the end only Xentha defended their retreat, veiling their backs from the piercing rays of the weeping Emperor.

The uz fled their conquered home through the gates of Night, and spilled out over the surface of a darkening world.  Though trolls had traveled the surface while the Sun ruled, the sounds and smells were all strange, the people were incomprehensible, and few uz had ever needed to use their eyes before.  Though the surviving gods and heroes of the uz prepared to lead their people out across the new world, they were confused and afraid.  Worst of all, the first children born to the uz on the surface were smaller than those born in Wonderhome and they arrived only in ones, twos and threes, not litters.  The nurse-priestesses said it was because Korasting was wounded and still trapped below in Hell.  It was then, as the heat of the first sunset faded from the surface realm, and the first stars winked alight to the eyes of uz, elves and men, that Xentha, the Night, gave birth to her first child, upon the surface of the Earth.

She appeared among the uz, tall as a Mistress but leaner, with only a single pair of breasts--she was nearer the new uz than the old, and everyone said she was different from before the Sunset, a new mother come into her full power with the first fall of Night across the Earth.  She held a single baby troll, her only child of that pregnancy.  She carried him through the first great camp of the uz upon the Earth, and the people clicked and hooted in wonder, for the god-child looked back at them with eyes and sonar, as aware as any adult.

When a great grandmother stumbled on the march, still pained by burns from Hanroo Field and wearied by the heat of the pale New Sun low on the horizon, her whole clan halted on the march to mourn as though she were already dead.  Xentha carried her child to the great grandmother’s side, and he set a tiny hand on her massive shoulder.  “We are home,” he said, and gestured towards the distant, darkening vault of the sky dome.  Staring at the far stars, the grandmother rose with strength renewed--and her clan rose with her, their mourning lowing transformed to high shrieks of joy.

When the march happened upon a host of humans, shaggy with furs and slick with their own blood, battling things that oozed and skittered and laughed as their died, Karrg and Zorak Zoran roared for blood and slaughter--but the baby held up a tiny hand, staring intently with his blinking eyes.  “Those are friends,” he said, and though Zorak Zoran did not care, Karrg had learned to heed wisdom, while Boztakang had reached the same conclusion without needing to be told and nodded approvingly.  The trolls fought the Chaos monsters, which proved the best way to make friends with those humans and their god, the Storm Bull.

Xentha called her baby Argan Argar, the Son of Night.  He was the first king among trolls, lord of men, friend to elves and beast-men, who wedded the Earth and marshaled the armies of Darkness against Chaos.  Those stories, too, shall be told.