The Dream of Umr

Taken July 21, 2020 over Lake Tahoe

The Sundering of Flesh

Before all things, there was the sea.

Still and dreamless, without wind or wave.

In that silence floated Umr, the Dreamer.

Her thoughts stirred the dark.

Her longing split the stillness.

And in that longing, she dreamed of a world.

Not shaped by hands,

but by her own unraveling.

When she understood her yearning,

Umr acted without hesitation.

She tore herself asunder.

Her flesh split and festered,

and from the rot existence itself was born.

Her bones became mountains.

Her blood pooled into rivers and seas.

Her breath became the winds,

her skin the forests,

her teeth the stones.

All that lives, and all that decays,

was born from her willing god-death.

Thus is she called the Sundering Flesh,

the Corpse-Seed and the All-Mother.

But her death was not clean, nor complete.

From the wounds of her body rose a raven—

dark as the void before light,

birthed of her decay.

It is the First Scavenger, the Spawn of the Rotmother,

the Eye Between Worlds.

It feeds, and so the rot deepens.

It watches, and so time flows.

Its heavy, mourning eye blinks in slow rhythm,

and so the moon waxes and wanes.

And still, beneath all things, the All-Mother rots.

And still, above all things, the Raven watches.

The Birth of the Gods, and of Mankind

From Umr's body rose the gods.

The first was Maugr, formed from her ruptured heart.

Tidemother, Blood Unending,

she is in the oceans, in the veins of those of flesh,

and is present for every sacrifice.

Then came Brelg, gouged from her tearing stomach—

Beast Beneath Skin, the Ever-Gnawing,

he is hunger made flesh.

Sytha rose up then from her collapsed lungs,

the Whisper-Walker, Breath Without Body.

She is the wind through the stones,

and the breath in your lungs.

From her splintered ribcage came Vorth,

the Ribs of the World and the Unbroken One.

He binds structure to the bones of the world.

From Umr's festering brain slipped Eltha,

Prophet of the Corpse-Mind, the Wound that Sees,

goddess of dreams, madness, and prophecy.

In the space left in the hollow of her skull grew Nhur.

He is the Black-Eyed Watcher, the Silence that Waits.

Brother of Eltha, he is the god of death, of memory and thought.

Cazra crawled from her decomposing womb,

Mother Mold, Bloom of the Womb-Rot.

Her domain lies in transformation and decay,

and that which begets life.

From Umr's rotting tongue sprang Velthir,

the Whispering Tongue, Sigil-Born,

god of thresholds, of magic and knowledge.

At last, from her now-blackened blood, came Zirn,

the Veil that Watches, the Cloak of the Rotmother,

found in shadows and night, knower of secrets.

And when the Flesh-Gods encountered the world,

Eltha, the Dreamkeeper, felt it—

the last shiver of Umr's dream,

still lingering, formless and fading.

She gathered those echoes

and brought them to Brelg.

"Give this dream a body," she said.

Brelg, ever-hungry,

molded the rot-that-is-flesh into two shapes

and gave them to her.

Then Eltha carried them to Velthir,

who inscribed runes into the hollow flesh,

and spoke a secret name into each heart,

and whispered:

"You shall be Thyra."

"You shall be Thren."

And thus we were born,

not of womb, but of dream.

Not of blood, but of word.

Not of beast, but of name and breath.

So Eltha is the Weaver of Final Echoes,

Brelg the Shaper of Dream-Flesh,

Velthir the Gifter of Names.

And we are called Dream-Flesh, and Echoes of Her Final Thought.

The Waning of the Flesh-Gods

But all things end, and all things return.

In the final days,

the Raven shall cease its blinking.

The moon will hang, full and still.

This is the Last Watching.

The gods shall bloat on their own echoes.

They will forget the dream that bore them,

and in their forgetting, they will wane.

The seas, red with Maugr's memory,

will rise beyond forest and fang.

With salt and silence,

they will begin to unmake that which had been made.

Mountains will crack to the core.

The breath of the world will falter.

Flesh will turn on flesh—

and Brelg, hunger reborn,

will devour his kin.

No voice will remain to speak the world's name.

And Umr, mother of the rot-dream,

will be washed away—

her bones carried into the tide,

her dream reclaimed by the deep.

Only the raven will remain.

It will not cry.

It will not blink.

It will walk the shore that should not be,

its bright eye fixed on the horizon.

Waiting.

Waiting for the next breath to stir the water.

Waiting for the dream to begin again.