Literature in the Spiral Empire

Each subsidiary of the Spiral Empire has a long history of drama, poetry, and prose, exploring a variety of themes. As writers and poets began to travel from country to country, styles, tones, and moods began to mix, creating new eras and distinctive forms of writing. The most influential and beloved works are collected here.

## Seprum Republic

### Ancient Henesia

#### Ermes

Ermes features prominently in Henesian myths, plays, poetry, and stories. Ermes is generally a man born in Alsiné to Deinos, the god of poetry and writing, and a human wifere or woman, generally named Lyra or something similar. His silver tongue, a gift from his father, gets Ermes into and out of numerous scrapes. His exploits include:

* Defeating a bull-headed monster in battle by getting its horn caught in its own chainmail armor. In statues in and portraits, Ermes often has a large horn on his left side as trophy
* Saving a caravan from attack in the Forest with only a dagger and drum
* Seeking out a moirai in order to learn the date of his death, which allows him to take incredible risks during future stories
* Defeating a Seprum senator in a game of chiefs
* Proving an augur at Delphyn to be a fraud and freeing the oracle Delpha they had trapped in their manor and later marrying her
* Convincing the reaper who came for his wife's soul to spare her for three days in perhaps his most famous story

Ermes is recognizable by his short dagger, a gift from a moirai, his mother, or Delpha; the horn of a bull that he uses to call for aid in times of need; his clean-shaven face and golden skin, used to represent demigods in art; and a green and blue color scheme.

#### Fall of Kings

The Fall of Kings is an hour and a half long play for six main actors and a chorus. It is one of the first to use the Theíron style, wherein the chorus spoils the ending of the play and important plot points at the beginning. It is a popular dramatic construction for folklore or historical stories when most of the audience likely already knows the story. Theíron, an Ancient Henesian playwright, claimed the dramatic irony could produce tension and humor even for stories people had heard hundreds of times before.

The Fall of Kings tells the story of three kings, each of a different Henesian city-state. When they took the throne, each on the same day, the first king, King Klostis, was visited by a young girl who told him he would kill the person he loved the most. The second, King Lachtes, was visited by a woman who told him he would be killed by the person who loved him the most. The third, King Atrope, was visited by a stooped old woman who said he would kill and be killed by the same person.

King Klostis identified the woman who visited him as as a dirae, sent to lead him astray. To that end, he decided not to fight his fate, knowing it would only bring ruin, and sought out love without fear. King Lachtes thought to turn the prophecy to his advantage. If no one loved him, he could never be killed. To that end, he made himself a tyrant king, inspiring rebels and fighting them himself without fear they might harm him. King Atrope refused to believe his fate. He took an oath of nonviolence, swearing never to kill anyone, including animals. He refused to even eat meat and banned executions in his lands.

As he aged, King Klostis found a woman he loved dearly, but every time he felt himself growing closer, he was struck by a gruesome mental image of killing his lover and then himself. Haunted by the thought, even in his dreams, he asked his partner to leave the kingdom and never return and his lover obeyed. Strengthened by his resolve, he decided he no longer needed love to be a good man and a just ruler.

His lover traveled to Lachtes' city, where she told her story to the king. King Lachtes laughed at the folly of such a man, for if he knew who loved him the most, he would kill him and have done. He had so long trained himself to be cruel, he saw no other way forward but to send the lover back to Klostis, with King Lachtes as his guard. On the way, they were captured by rebels, who took them to Atrope's territory, knowing the king was too pacifistic to fight them off.

When Klostis heard what had happened, he though his lover dead and killed himself by drinking poison, fulfilling the first prophecy. His death left his kingdom in ruins and the new ruler sought to consolidate power by invading Atrope. They destroyed the rebel encampment on the way, taking King Lachtes as their own prisoner. The king taunted his captors, daring them to kill him when he knew only the person who loved him most could. In retaliation, the ruler cut out his tongue and eyes. Distraught, Lachtes killed himself, fulfilling the second prophecy.

The lover escaped in the confusion and fled to Atrope's city-state, bringing with her news of the invasion. Atrope realized he would be forced to give up on his vow of nonviolence to protect his people and could not bring himself to do so, opting instead to kill himself, fulfilling the third and final prophecy.

In some versions of the play, the lover is explicitly played as a dirae, profiting off the ruin she sowed. In others, she is played as a third victim of fate, force to act trigger for the destruction of three men. In one controversial version, King Atrope uses the lover's knowledge and realizes his fate is to kill himself. If he cannot escape fate regardless, he opts to fight for his people, forsaking his vow and killing the dirae when he throws off the shackles of his destiny. Critics argued this rather loses the meaning of the play.

#### Aeol and the Sandy Beach

The story of Aeol has been told and retold so many times, there is no canon version. A few details remain the same in the majority of versions, including important names, the setting in Ancient Henesia, most often Hellen, and the importance of sand.

King Liam was a proud and just ruler of Hellen. During his reign, food was plenty and the people rejoiced. Pleased by his ability, the gods granted him an unnaturally long life but did not bless his son, Aeol, with the same. As he aged, he watched his father maintain the strength of his youth and vowed to take revenge. One night, after his father stayed up late entertaining nobles and commoners alike, Aeol crept into his room, slitting the throat of the single guard inside. He could have killed his father swiftly while he slept, but he wanted the man to know where his death had come from, so he woke him first, then struck a mortal blow to his stomach and left him to die alone.

However, in his haste to flee the scene, he did not realize he had tracked sand into the king's room, sand from a private beach that only a few select nobles could access. As palace guards secured the building and delivered the king's body to a priest for the final rites, Aeol returned to his father's bedroom and picked each individual grain of sand off the floor and bedsheets, tossing them out the window. A servant found him thusly and called for help before he could kill her as well. He was executed on the day of his father's funeral.

In punishment, the gods set him an impossible task to occupy his afterlife: using but a single pair of tweezers, he moved a pile of sand, grain by grain, from one beach to another. When he finished, he had to move the sand back, and back again, for all eternity.

Even in modern Seprum, an impossible or never ending task is called Aeolian. Black Hand Helvius Torcana once described surviving senate meetings as "an Aeolian task," and Grey Hand Alexis Acrux called one particularly slow execution "morbidly Aeolian." The word is often used by those who have never even heard the original story.

### Ancient Lykos

#### Drunken Revelry

On the first day of the reign of Pharaoh Pharuk, he hosted a great night of celebration, drinking, and feasting, which culminated in the ritual slaughter of a white bull to feed the gods. Generally, the gods' food went uneaten over night and was distributed in the morning. That night, the god Imen ate the entire bull, washing the meat down with two barrels of beer.

The next morning, when traditionally the pharaoh walked from the palace to the temple of Deinos, Pharuk found Imen lying face up on the thoroughfare, completely naked. Recognizing him as a god, Pharuk offered him clothing and shielded him from view of the onlookers. Then, he coaxed him into his bird form and carried him into the temple, where Deinos appeared to critique his behavior. Though Deinos had not intended to bless Pharuk's reign, outsiders only saw the god's form, they could not hear his words, and the people celebrated Pharuk for receiving the favor of a powerful god. Grateful to Imen, who had been barred from the world of the gods, Pharuk gave his bird form food and a space to live in his gardens for his entire reign.

When rebels attempted to overthrow Pharuk many years later, Imen at last shed his bird form and beat the the rebels back. Seeing Imen returning to his human form, now fully clothed, Deinos accepted him back to the realm of the gods. Imen declined the offer, married Pharuk's child, and fathered a long line of rulers, scholars, and warriors.

#### Three Sisters

The three sisters are three trees between Lykos and Dhi that stand taller than the surrounding Forest. Two are beech trees and one is a baobab. There are variety of myths surrounding the the trees stretching back almost three thousand years, possibly further on Planar A tablets. The generally agreed upon myth is that the three trees were once stars, which Lykans considered beings, in the same way djinn and nymphs were beings, who were exiled for feeling emotions, which star culture forbid.

The three sisters became humans for a time but found the experience disorienting. Their aloof nature made the other humans wary and they quickly realized none of the sisters were human. They fled into the Forest, where their bodies were eaten but their spirits took up position in three trees near a volcano. They grew taller because they missed their star friends and siblings and wanted to rejoin them, but this longing was a sign that they still refused not to feel emotions and the stars refused to take them back.

## Daekon

### The Scholar and the Boat

A scholar from Kyong arrives in a backwater provincial town, searching for a rare species of frog that only croaks during storms. He hears their distinctive sound and asks a farmer to sail him across a river to get a better listen. During the boat ride, he asks the farmer all about her life and is shocked to discover she cannot read. She retorts that she can read the weather and currents a good deal better than the scholar can, and he laughs at her for thinking this knowledge is as valuable as anything in the Kyong library.

The storm picks up and their boat begins to take on water. It is too loud for either to hear the croaking of the frogs any longer and they are lost. When the woman realizes she cannot bail any longer, she tells the scholar they must abandon the boat and swim to shore. He reveals that he cannot swim. Recognizing that she took responsibility for the man when she offered to paddle him across the river, she remains at his side as their boat sinks and they both drown.

### Lover's Serenade

*Lover's Serenade* is one of Young Dae's later novels. He copies characters from his life into it almost verbatim, often changing their name characters only slightly to make lewd puns or other double entendres. The book features a strapping young woman, Ko (at the time, one line different from the character for Young's family name) Min (Young's generational character) Soo (Dae-soo means "resplendent eagle"). Ko attracts the attention of a man referred to as Mr. Jun, likely based on Kahn Jae, a man who frequently spurned Young's advances and whose name in the novel has the alternate meaning of "dusty, dry river bed." With her good friend and sometimes lover Mae Sung-soo (which, with Li, the generational character of Hyeon's, means "ethereal being of surpassing beauty and charm"), they trick Mr. Jun into giving his vast and poorly run estates to a monastery, run by Ka Fra (likely a mis-translation of the Lykan name Khafra), the sensuous, emotional, and often scantily clad Lykan monk, who lives in Fei for no particular reason and has little characterization beyond his "listening" eyes. Ko and Mae join him on Mr. Jun's old lands and proceed to go on a series of adventures in the sequels.

Notable other characters in the novel include ones based on three of Young's past lovers (whose names mean "empty mind," "unimaginative," and a rude word for a piece of anatomy). Ko also briefly has an affair with a Mauzji trader named Dai Zjing (an impossible name configuration at the time), saves a dog from a house fire, earning a life debt from the dog's owner, and defeats expert fencer Wei in a four-page duel, followed by a somewhat explicit thirty-five page romance and physical relationship.

*Lover's Serenade* inspired a whole genre of self-insert style novels, and authors often competed to come up with the most obnoxious, or inspiring, fictional names based on real people. As with many of Young's stories, the main character is a woman who shares many similarities with Young himself and suffers little in the course of the novel.

The novel was well received by all but critics and quickly became a classic amongst a newly literate class of lower-ranking aristocrats. For a time, calling someone Mr. Jun took to mean they were particularly unlikeable and boorish, and the phrase "he ought to donate his lands to a monastery" is used in Ju to this day to refer to someone whose romantic interest is not reciprocated.

## Mauzji Islands

The Mauzji islands have a long history of literature, much of it preserved in libraries, that stretches back centuries before the formation of the Makkada Sultanate.

### The Phoenix

According to Makkadi legend, every time a book is burned, a phoenix, a bird made of paper and flame, with calligraphy on its wings, is born. In the story of the phoenix, a young child accidentally burns down a library and is forced to collect all the phoenix eggs from the ruins and raise the newly-hatched birds. At the end of the play, she learns to read the words on their wings and rewrites all the lost books, eventually using money from selling phoenix feathers to create a new library entirely.

### The Monster in the Forest

The villagers came to the governor complaining of a terrible monster in the Forest, preventing them from collecting water from the leaves and salt from the roots. A diplomatic emissary was in town and the governor turned to the Seprum warrior first.

He said, “I am the best soldier in my legion and I wield a gladius enchanted by great magic,” and so the governor allowed him to fight. The warrior attacked the monster with all his strength and in the morning, all the villagers found was his sword.

A Kuan archer volunteered next. She said, “I trained for twenty years until I could shoot an arrow into the heart of a target from horseback at one hundred meters.” The villagers found her arrows in a tree the next morning.

The Dhi healer said, “Together, we are stronger than we are apart. Let the villagers band together and attack the monster as one.” Many villagers died that night.

The Ju diplomat said, “Why must they forage in this section of Forest? Leave the monster and go elsewhere.” But there was nowhere else to go where the monster could not reach them.

At last, the governor decreed that they would confront the monster themself. They selected tea perfect for a negotiation, entered the Forest, and asked the monster to sit down and speak.

The monster appeared and agreed to bargain. Through the night, they drank tea and chewed mint leaves. The governor learned the monster protected a nest of fragile eggs—it feared the humans would shatter them as they foraged—so the governor suggested the villagers halt foraging for a month as the eggs hatched. Then, the monster retreated further into the Forest and threatened humans no more.

### Ballad of Rashni and Elaia

The Ballad of Rashni and Elaia follows two women, one on Bakr, one on Assa, who use pigeons to communicate their existence to one another, eventually cobbling together a shared written language and falling in love, though they never meet in person.