This is an in-setting work. It has a particular cultural, historical, and personal perspective and may or may not be factually accurate.
Twins of the Sun and Moon
By unknown
A story as told by the nomadic peoples of the Monumon. Other peoples throughout the Land of the Sun and Moon possess similar stories of mythical twins associated with celestial entities.In the distant past there were twins.The first of the twins was the One Who Cast The Sun In The Sky. His brother was the One Who Brings The Night With The Moon. Together they stepped down from the stars to protect those who walked on land, those with two and four legs alike, from the spirits that menaced them. In coming to the land they left their games in the cosmos, for the twins were a whimsical sort, prone to play tricks on one another, and on the other Ones. Perhaps this is why the other Ones cast them down.
The twins had between them a knife.
The knife was alive, toothed and fanged with a mind as sharp as its edge. This knife passed between the hands of the twins, yet its actions were equally its own, for it did not strike if it did not wish, and it could twist the grip of those who wielded it in directions they did not desire. The knife had no whimsy, only ambition. Yet it had served the twins well in the stars and so they brought it with them to the land. On land the twins saw evil spirits abound.
These spirits tormented the people of the plains, and the people of the coast, and the people of the desert. They caused disease and hunger and all manner of suffering. Where they walked, plants withered. Where they exhaled, fires raged.
The twins attempted to trick the spirits.
A land beset by such evil was no place for whimsy, and the twins could not abide it. They devised a plan to break the grip of the spirits. Proclaiming that they had walked out of the sea, they extolled the wealth of the Land Below The Waves. This, they said, was where all good things were. This, they said, was a place that had never known suffering. Naturally the spirits were intrigued. They had grown bored with the land. None there were shocked by the spirits now, only tired. Together the spirits dove into the sea.
For a time, the twins were successful. Their trickery having worked, the spirits left the people of the land in peace, and there were many years of celebration. The twins were exalted as heroes, which they were. Yet the spirits were no fools and after some time realized they had been deceived. They returned in force, scouring the land in anger. They destroyed the crops of the coast and they desiccated the bodies of the herds of the plains. They would not listen again to the twins. In desperation, the twins searched for other ways to defeat the spirits.
The twins turned the knife on the spirits.
Though they knew well not to trust it, the twins saw no other option. Taking the knife from its sheath, they let it loose to fell the spirits. This it did with great relish and abandon, twisting freely through the air and through the forms of those who were without permanent form. Soon the spirits were gone or in hiding. Yet even with its victory the knife was not sated, for it had tasted of the power it held on the land, power withheld from it by the Ones who lived in the stars. Soon it was twisting through the land in places where the twins had not directed it, attacking those of two legs and those of four and carving the land itself to pieces. Those who had not known of death, even with the torment of the spirits, knew of it now, for it had been brought by the knife.
The twins contained the knife.
Realizing their folly, the twins sought to contain the knife, but it was at least as clever as them, and could not be captured or restrained. Neither could it be destroyed, for it was of a material unknown to the land. The twins grappled with it and chased it and fought it, all without success. Finally in their desperation they threw themselves upon the knife. It could cut them and hurt them unlike anything on the land, but not without ease, and so was slowed down enough to be caught and forced back into its sheath.
The twins returned to the cosmos.
Injured, the twins gave a farewell to the people of the land, those of two legs and those of four, with great sadness and remorse and shame, for they had brought suffering worse than that they had attempted to stop. In parting they rose to the sky and rejoined the stars, One behind the moon and the other behind the sun.