Luan, part 1

Luan parts / Сказка / Читателей: 11

Инфо

1.
At the beginning of everything, or rather before it all began, there was only the ocean. It could have been a world ocean, but since there were no other worlds yet, it was a world.
If there were already worlds that could border the ocean, it would have had shores and a center, but it was boundless and therefore the duck did not look for a special place, but laid an egg where the idea came to her to do so.
To her disappointment, the egg immediately began to sink and disappeared into the bowels of the ocean.
Not sad for long, the duck laid an egg one or three more times, but each one suffered the same fate.
Then the duck realized that it could not do without a nest. For a long time she searched in the vast ocean for material to construct one, but found nothing.
Then the duck began to pluck the down from under its breast feathers covering a small patch of ocean with them. When there was enough fluff, the duck wove herself a nest, where she laid three eggs and began to hatch them.

2.
At the base of the rock, a black-green sea of thousand-year-old redwoods raged. The giants spread their roots-legs around and gradually filled the entire valley. Multiple roots-fingers intertwined into ropes, and only the long-legged Luan Nyao strode importantly, not noticing the obstacles. Over endless years, the roots have become accustomed and petrified.

The name Luan Nyao applied to the entire family of phoenixes, from which this bird came.
Moreover, she was Luan, like all phoenixes, not only from her world.
Immediately after her first birth, her mother, Si Wang-mu, the Queen Mother of the West, named her Jinji, the Golden Hen, and in all non-ceremonial situations, everyone, including the bird herself, used it in relation to her.
Sometimes she noticed the scurrying living creatures inhabiting the labyrinths of the roots. They called themselves buddha, but they were too small to be of any interest for her - taken without a fight, like eaten without spices - and therefore she carefully avoided the possibility of stepping on them. Every time one of them happened to be too close, the memory of his smell haunted phoenix for several minutes, and she did not like this, preferring to be a hunter in everything.
The hunt was wonderful in every way! In the languages of aromas and dreams there are no images sufficient to convey the feeling of absoluteness that you feel when you fall like a spear into the ocean for another killer whale for breakfast! “Well, okay. I will ask Silex to add it! Probably in the language of dreams. Feeling breakfast in dreams... this has its own charm,” she thought, flying up to her nest, which, as if by chance, blocked the only passable road to the Amber Palace of Huang Di at the peak of the rock. Sometimes she saw Huang Di himself, walking in a marvelous garden, but always as if in the fog or like a fog.
The Needle - an incredibly tall column of translucent quartz, turning from bright green to whitish-foggy, with the aroma of melt water and fallen leaves, splashed out from the light-absorbing blackness of basalt, merging down a yellow spit of a river. During the long days of summer, the peak bathed in the sun’s rays, piercing the sky, and at night, as if sprinkled with the sand of stars, she enjoyed the silence of the Milky Way.
Silex was a goddess and, by a very long-standing agreement, during her visits to this reality she used the body of a red and green bird as her avatar.
In one of other realities, Silex was one of Huang Di’s wives, and her dreams, as well as the memories of those dreams, interested and intrigued Jinji. She had seen people in them many times. She herself could not understand why she so wanted not only to learn more about people and look at them, but even to show herself. Whenever she asked permission to visit that reality, the goddess answered that peace was not yet close in the World and she was sad about it. The bird did not enjoy making Silex sad, she enjoyed hunting, sounds and dreams. She stopped asking. Everything except hunting can wait!

3.
When the ducklings hatched from the eggs and grew up, the duck taught them to weave nests from fluff and lay eggs in them. In order not to lose warmth and closeness to their mother, the ducklings connected their nests to hers.
When the new babies hatched, the same thing happened again.
Soon or later, they formed a small island from their nests.

4.
- Peter, what happened at the beginning? - asked Janus.
- In the beginning there was a beginning, - the youthful interlocutor answered patiently, without letting the metamorphoses of his name distract him.
Following his nature, Janus looked in both directions and smiled with satisfaction:
- Jew, and it all started there? - followed by a new question.
- No, - Jupiter said thoughtfully, enjoying Janus’s verbal play, -it all started much earlier.
- Your answers are still very foggy, are you going to build a castle on the sand with them? Who do you prefer to be today?
- Your discretion is legendary, Kind Creator! Peter is too proud today, let us stay with Jew, - and answered the supreme god. - You are right. Before everything began, there was gloom in all. The darkness was absolute and self-sufficient until she discovered the first thought within herself. By a fateful coincidence, it turned out to be chaotic.

“What a strange dream,” Luan thought; reviewing the sensations of memory of the memory, she received from the goddess during her last visit. Silex was preoccupied with something and told one of her minions that for every Buddha there will be Lao Tzu. The phoenix saw buddhas many times while walking in the forest of even for her giant trees, but she still could not find out what or who Lao Tzu was - she did not dare to bother the goddess with questions, and she had not yet encountered it in her dreams. Thinking about something divine, saying goodbye, Silex gifted the bird with three new scents and for each of them - a dream!
At first she was a little too excited and therefore completely forgot to ask the goddess for a sufficient image to convey the feeling of absoluteness that she experienced every time during the hunt. After the goddess left, the bird was a little upset about the missed opportunity, but after taking a closer look at the first dream, she decided that that image could wait its time, because now it was more interesting to master a new one.

5.
At first, the down island was thin and light, so much so that in its vastness the ocean did not notice it and the ducks that settled there at all.
New generations of ducks began not only to expand the boundaries of their island, but also to thicken its depth.

6.
The silence exploded into silence with the silence.
Even minimal manifestations were of maximum concentration, with complete involvement, while absolutely nothing moved or happened!
Jinji, for all her closeness to the gods, had never plunged into such contradictory sensations. It is good that she always treated everything new like an experienced hunter and never took unnecessary risks, and therefore very carefully sniffed one of the new scents.
Walking proudly through the ancient Sequoias, she tried to correlate the new sensations with the images she knew, but she could not find one. Over many centuries and visits, the goddess had never shared anything similar with her.
“I will have to find an opportunity to ask the goddess for many new images before chaos decides to get acquainted with me,” she decided for herself unexpectedly and after walking for some time she thought, “For chaos, it was too orderly, but for order... In what sensations one becomes familiar with the chaos? Chaotic?”
After concluding to hold off on exploring the chaos further for now, the bird decided to return to the nest. Landing, as usual, with one paw on basalt and the other on quartz, she felt her unity with both manifestations of the goddess, enjoying the fleeting knowledge that just as basalt and quartz are two manifestations of one principle, so her red and green plumage are two manifestations one color. After she could never understand how green could be red and vice versa, but at the moment of landing, all that mattered was the knowledge that this was so.
Forming an image of a familiar sensation, Jinji drew attention to someone else’s thought among her own. She might not have paid attention to it at all if this thought had not smelled like melt water.
“My thoughts usually don’t smell,” - she thought, sniffing, - “Chaos is as foggy as fog is chaotic. Chaos is as orderly as order is chaotic. Does this make the order foggy?”
Looking into the garden, the bird saw Huang Di walking with one of the court poets.
“Could that thought be divine?” - The bird thought as she headed to the nest, - “Silex’s images and dreams are always flowing like sand, his thoughts are so vague...” - she giggled, realizing the play of images and words.

7.
When there were enough ducks, the mother duck began to form new islands, tying them to the main island not completely, but only on one side. From the new peninsulas, they have built the first boarded pond, in which young ducklings learned to swim in safety and hunt the fishes that started to appear in the ocean.
For the first time in its entire existence, the ocean felt limited! The added impulse of un-freedom has not yet formed into a feeling, but has already appeared. The ocean did not storm much about that and with pleasure surrendered to observing the universe emerging in itself.

8.
“Silex has interesting avatars,” noted Huang Di, “Janus is the god of binary nature, to understand him Luan should get acquainted with her opposites. We need an ambassador to the river goddess Luo Shen, and the bird should open her eyes“.
She, being a phoenix, preferred fire in everything except hunting. Every time, plunging into the belly of the giant after another killer whale, a bouquet of contradictory sensations overcame her - almost panicked indignation from the knowledge that even she could disappear here, dissolve and not resurrect, since water is merciless towards fire. This was mixed with a furious indignation that she was outraged by knowledge that did not allow her to treat hunting without due respect, which was not logical. Added to that pair was the joyful anticipation of breakfast, the aftertaste of a feeling of absoluteness, the images of which had not yet appeared in dreams. The bouquet ended with a prize rose – sensation of lightness, which she was regaining while flying out of the water with her prey, allowing the weight of the ocean to fall from her feathers, shimmering in the sun from red, through green, to red! In those moments when she was no longer within him, but still soaked by him, she again knew about the unity of her colors. Shooting herself out of the ocean, like a reflection of the Moonbeam that conceived Huang Di, Jinji began her song, with changing languages, dialects and melodies, which she gave to the killer whale and the ocean on the way to the basalt ledge long ago chosen for breakfast.

“Every time I see Silex, or serve as her avatar, I feel her innumerability and the innumerability of her personalities, but at the same time, she always has one face. The emperor’s face is always changeable and it seems that he is looking in all directions at once.” - thought the bird, finishing breakfast. “He reminds me of the two-faced god from the goddess’s dream.”
Smelling the fog in her thoughts, she discovered among them a smile that did not belong to her.

Familiarity with the weight of the ocean turned out to be useful during the embassy to Lo Shen.
The river goddess, famous for her exceptional beauty, turned out to be lighter and more playful than her old acquaintance. After spending a lot of time together, first ceremoniously, and then, after getting to know each other better, in pleasant walks together, daughter of  Shennong, the first Yandi, began to understand that she would never be a friend to water, but with water she could find mutual understanding. When they said goodbye, they smiled at each other not only because etiquette required it.

What she plunged into was indescribable. It consisted of all possible sensations and even emotions, but did not have a single image. Not to mention the image, she could not even find a memory of such a thing.
“It is impossible to find mutual understanding with this, there is no understanding here!” thought the bird, walking in the redwoods a week after the first attempt to sniff the second of the aromas presented to it. “The first was chaos; the second was a completely limitless ocean. I do not know for sure, but I will assume that that ocean never knew not only the shores, but also the bottom! I wonder how long ago it was.”
“Even I don’t know this for sure,” one of the buddhas who happened to be nearby, answered her thought.
Taking a closer look at the person answering, the surprised Jinji noticed for the first time his fleeting but obvious similarity to Huang Di.
Having bowed respectfully to the phoenix, the buddha returned to his meditation, leaving the bird with more questions than she had before starting the walk.

9.
“I also have a certain duality,” the bird unexpectedly thought to herself. - “I refuse the World war, not showing myself to it until there is peace in it, but I love hunting.”
Sniffing the thought, she immediately understood its origin. Gradually getting used to the manner of communicating with the god - emperor, the bird turned its sensations into images, and the images into thoughts and, with all the rules of etiquette, left her thought next to the imperial one.
“I am by nature an unconditional pacifist, as the Demiurge made me, but he also created me as a hunter. In hunting there is no war, there is food and respect for food in hunting, may be love? I gift my food my song on the way to the breakfast.” - she thought respectfully in her answer and, becoming a little bolder, added to the thought, “more than that, how will the Emperor offer me to replace the killer whales in order to preserve their lives? After all, carrots are no less alive than the donkey that eats them.”

10.
- Would you accept Saturn as Kronos? - Jupiter asked Janus during another walk together.
- You look at everything from above, - Janus answered with a smile on every faces,  - and therefore you see widely, but flatly.
- Do you think that my view lacks perspective? - The Thunderer asked with false bewilderment.
- Not prospects, O great Lord of Thursdays, but the ability to assess correctly the depth. - Continuing the analogy, Janus answered, and said; - After all, there is another way.
- No one in the world of Kronos possessed your omnipotence to give up power voluntarily over his creation, - said Jupiter, losing his playful notes. - Your ways are inscrutable even to us!
- When I freed myself from power over the physical elements, the transformation of Kronos into Saturn turned out to be very useful. He was glad to give himself over to the grapes, and I got the opportunity to look and see, - said the young face.
(“Look and see,” the old man said at the same time).
- Behind your apparent duality, not everyone sees your essence, - Jupiter said with the respect of an equal.
- Darkness, thought and chaos, - Janus said thoughtfully. - Which of them is the third? - asked the young face.
(“Which of these is the basis?” - asked the elderly face).
(“Which of them is the third - a catalyst or a fulcrum?” - added third voice unexpectedly)
- You ask interesting questions, oh god of semantics! - Jupiter said with respect.

11.
“What a strange feeling,” Luan thought, “I seem to be able to see with one pair of eyes, but I can’t help but see the sources of other voices.”
“This is quite easy to explain,” the buddha closest to her answered her thought in the voice of Huang Di, “when reborn from Kronos to Saturn, giving the latter control over agriculture, Janus acquired Kronos’s knowledge of the finiteness of time. An elderly person sees the past. Aeternitas knows everything about eternity and its infinity. Who better than Phoenix will understand the continuity of time? She owns the young face and eyes through which you see the future.
“I’m going to assume that the third voice is the real one?” - The bird thought after listening to the buddha.
Smiling back, the buddha returned to his meditation.
“Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva. Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu.“ - Jinji thought a thought with the scent of fog.

12.
At first, the ocean’s populations were growing very slowly and each change affected only the world surrounding this change, but the more of the small, unrelated events happened, the more changes the Ocean began to notice in itself.
Slightly waving in different directions, Ocean noted that what pleased him least of all was that first feeling of infringement on his boundlessness. At that moment, the time began.
Time also turned out to be an interesting concept. Like the Ocean itself, it did not seem to be limited by anything, but he was able to determine for himself the point of its beginning. Did it mean that everything that has a beginning also has an end? Did he feel the end when his starting point appeared?

13.
“The recent visit of Silex was very interesting and productive!” - Having quickly become accustomed to the possibility of almost personal communication with the emperor, Jinji one day dared to break with etiquette and added a little emotion to her thoughts. She expected everything from temporary punishment to more serious consequences for that. Although the bird herself was of divine origin, she understood that the emperor was not just a god, but also a creator, and therefore even speaking through the mouth of a faceless buddha, he remained above all. Instead of uttering the expected words, the buddha’s mouth smiled and explained who Lao Tzu was. Since then, it was with this smile that she saw the Foggy emperor walking in the garden, surrounded by poets.
“What made you so happy?” - Having stopped meditating, the buddha closest to the phoenix asked.
“A lot!” - The bird blurted out, but remembering decency, continued in a more appropriate tone. “I asked the goddess to add the missing images to the language of dreams and now it has completely unique textural possibilities.”
“It will be interesting to hear new notes in your song,” the buddha noted with understanding, moving on a cushion of fog next to Luan proudly walking in the redwoods.
After returning from the river goddess, having landed in her usual place, the bird decided not to lose its sensations and now, with pleasure, changed the colors of its plumage from the original red and green to any that she preferred. One of her favorite pastimes was to chameleon colors to the surroundings, completely merging, but not dissolving in it.
“Besides the colors, you should play with light,” she discovered the thought with a foggy smell. After bowing back to the buddha, Jinji continued. “In addition to new images, the goddess gifted me several explanations for the scent of chaos. I approached it several times, but each time I did not get there. The goddess said that she shared it at that time out of absent-mindedness, but she was glad about it. It turns out that only few birds can sense such a scent, and since I was able to smell it, someday I will get it. I have decided not to rush.”
“For a fire, you show more patience than many expect. Your close acquaintance with water has done you good.” - said the buddha from the pillow of fog.
“Isn’t fog enough for the Emperor? Does the demiurge desire steam?” - with all the appropriate seriousness, but not without a hint of irony, Jinji left her thought next to the divine thought of light and, saying goodbye to the buddha, went hunting, changing her color to the brightest sun-yellow, that gave her the name.