Godskin

When the world was new, in the dark, weird places, far below the fields, and the caves, in the rippling shadow that hides behind stars, there were two children, linked by a cord of celestial flesh. One of them was a hard, clever creature, with a line of seven eyes leading from the tip of his nose, up over and all the way to the back of his head. His hands were long and sinewy, but sharp and cold, with sixteen fingers on each. His legs, he had three of them, were stout and burly, and ended each with seven flat prongs. His skin was dark like the sky, mottled with starlight, and he moved as the ocean moved, slowly and in his own time.

The other one was a fiery thing, with a single blind eye in the center of its forehead and one in each of its palms. She was quick like the rays of the sun, and cloaked in a skin of red, downy fur. It's voice was soft like the autumn, but harsh like the white cold of the snowy wastes, and the moon on a starless night. Her face was round, impossibly round, and her fingers were undulate and nimble, like spiders, each hand bearing seven. She was dawnlight and blinding. She held none of herself back.

The both of them revolted in its own sibling, and each pursued the destruction of the other. Both were bound by the cord of celestial flesh, so neither could escape the fury of its opposite. The hard clever creature was patient as the sea, seeking to turn his sister's strength against itself. The fiery thing was unrelenting and brutal, swift like a bolt of lightning. They grew fearful of one another, and each fleeing its opposite, the godskin snapped, scattering itself across the shadow.

The fiery thing, drawn skyward, fled out of the shadow, out of the world, and into the starlight, and the wind, and out beyond everything. Out beyond the howling darkness of the nightsky, and beyond the cold stare of the moon, and beyond the angry sting of the summer sun.

The hard, clever creature, drawn inward, went further into the shadow, past the furnace of the worlds below, into the soulless places, where no one dared dwell who was not as hard and weird as the lands therein.

The godskin, laying tattered in the twilight of their exodus, made man, and beast, and all else that is.