Week 9 Storytelling: Falling to the Shadows

In the beginning, the people lived in the heavens. One day, the overlord’s son named Mazus was playing with the sacred jewel that belonged to his father. Mazus ran to the edge of the heavens where he slipped and fell to the shadows below. Phoenixes flying by saw a light coming from the jewel falling toward the shadows.

One of them said, “What is that light shining?”

Then another said, “I think there is a child falling with the light.” He then added, “The shadows will swallow him if we don’t help.”

So they flew to Mazus but the jewel fell out of his hands and into the shadows. The phoenixes laid Mazus on one of their backs and flew on.

They continued flying with the little boy with them. After flying for a while, one of them asked, “What should we do with him?

Another answered back, “We should take him to see the Queen of Peace in her castle in the sky. She’ll know what to do.”

They flew to see the Queen of Peace and asked her what to do with Mazus. She ordered a council with the other leaders to deal with Mazus and the jewel. After the council, she approached the phoenixes and said, “If we can get the earth, we might be able to create land for this child. He will not be able to get him back to the heavens to his father, but we can create a land for him to live here.”

The phoenixes took the queen and the other leaders to the place where they saw the jewel fall into the shadows. The queen summoned divers. The first she summoned was the dragon, the best of them all. He dove into the shadows and was gone for a long time. He finally came up with a gaping wound and told the queen that he didn’t see the jewel but the creatures below attacked him. He died moments later. Then she sent the pegasus. He was also gone for a long time and never came back so the others assumed him to be dead. The queen sent many animals to retrieve the jewel but they all died.

The Queen of Peace called in a distressing voice, “Who is capable of retrieving the jewel?”

Thestral that retrieved the jewel

Source: Wallpaper222

No one offered, until the thestral said he would try. He was a small horselike skeletal creature with red glowing eyes and giant wings. He was smaller than the dragon and the other creatures so no one took him seriously. The queen said to him, “Well, you try then.”

The thestral went down the depths of the shadows. A long time he was gone and the others began to say, “He surely has died. There’s no way he could have gotten it.

After a while, they saw a glimmer of light getting brighter and brighter. The thestral came to the surface and dropped the jewel at the queen’s feet. The queen picked up the jewel and began to chant something and broke the jewel into tiny pieces. She threw the pieces into the shadows again but instead of falling, they formed into islands and started to grow.

The islands grew larger, until they became as large as the continents in our world today. Legend says that when there’s an earthquake, it is because the Queen of Peace moves her foot. She continues to watch over the new lands from her castle in the sky. Mazus grows up in the new land and devotes his life to protecting the earth the queen made. The Queen of Peace gives Mazus his first black armor and bestows the title of Black Knight to him.



Author’s note:

This is from the Wyandot people. I based my story on the Creation of the World. In the original story, the shaman ordered his men to dig around the roots of the tree and when the men dug too deep, they dug a hole to the moral world. There the tree and the chief’s daughter fell through the hole. The tree fell into the water but swans saved the girl and brought her to the Big Turtle. The Big Turtle ordered animals to retrieve some earth from the roots of the fallen tree so that Big Turtle can make a new earth. However, none made it until the ugly toad went down and got it. The small turtle rubbed the parts of the earth on Big Turtle’s shell and his shell became an island for the chief’s daughter to live.

For my story, I kept the same story but changed the characters to fit into my previous story for my portfolio. I wanted to create an origin story for my character so that readers that read my other stories will have some sort of an idea of who he is and where he came from. The name Mazus came from my other stories. The Queen of Peace is another song title from Florence and the Machine that I liked and it felt appropriate since she isn’t a main character but she does have a more significant role than the creatures diving for the jewel. All my creatures are mythical and the thestral is a creature from the Harry Potter universe that I liked. They are used for transportation, but the only people that can see them are ones that have seen death. I didn’t add that aspect of the thestral to mine because so far there is only one human.

Unit: British North America
Story: Creation of the World
Author: Katharine Berry Judson
Year: 1917