heart of his flesh was beating in the Temple of the Creator.
«Who is the creator of this world? Who is the true builder of the primordial life? And are these stars really souls? And who created them, and why are they still so far away? – Unrestrained thoughts disturbed the mind of the shaman, and at that hour he inadvertently noticed how the Great Fire began to slowly circle the western edges of Pangea, and darkness began to fog its eastern halls.
And immediately after the darkness, serenely bending around the Earth, as if deliberately hiding behind its coherence, a pale silhouette appeared. He slowly walked around Her camp, brightening with its essence the darkness of the eastern lands of the human world. «The moon that illuminates the hunting trails in the night!» the leader agreed.
The Warehouse of the Moon shone dazzlingly from the radiance of the Great Fire. And the shaman for all the lived moons of the moon has not seen such a guise! The dark side of her gray camp, which was not touched at that hour by the rays of the fiery luminary, was cut by high rounded ridges. They appeared to Roshan as giant scars and inspired thoughts that something was disturbing the Moon for thousands of moons…
Seeing all this, the shaman realized one consideration that worried him and other shamans: the Great Fire and the Moon, as relatives of Pangea, were and circled around Her in the night abode and succeeded each other day and night. But the sages bequeathed other knowledge to their descendants: the ancestors repeated that the children of Alak knew them, as Zavrin saw the Great Fire go into the water. As if Pangea was creating a fiery luminary at the horizons of raging water elements on the other side of the world. It was as if She was escorting him along the vault above Her abode to the northern shores of the fair-skinned ancestors to the same restless waters, so that the perfect lands would not be incinerated by the heat of the Great Fire. So that the Great Fire cools down by dawn and warms the expanses again. And in his absence, She lifted the Moon from the same water, so that Her creations could rest from fishing and see dreams, and in order to calculate – to become wiser and gain strength. Those observations turned out to be inaccurate, but the sages were only right in that they noticed variability in the Moon and in the fiery star and in the sky of stars the movement with time.
Reality was moving farther and faster away from the gaze, but at the same time, Roshan stopped feeling the movement of the essence of the soul – as if Pangea herself rushed away from the reincarnated essence of the shaman…
Soon the Moon and the Great Fire noticeably circled the Earth. The fiery become clung to the other side of the human world and no longer cast any light on Her warehouse visible to Roshan. And the pale luminary shrouded the lands of Pangea with a shadow, and the leader realized that there – on Earth – in the expanses of Her abode, night had come. Roshan watched the mesmerizing performance one more time, and his thoughts about the idea of unity returned to him. The shaman strained his gaze and turned the essence of the spectacle back. And not far away, a fiery mixture of newly appeared elements appeared before him…
***
Fiery fragments filled the stellar abode, and at that moment it seemed to the leader as if he had fallen under a fiery rain of blazing stones. Boulders flying towards them left behind clots of white smoke and shining dust, and Roshan’s gaze, darting from side to side, avoided collisions with boulders and gradually approached the newborn star. Sometimes the essence of the soul did not keep up with the frequent stumbling of stones and cut through their red-hot barriers. Permeating the vision of stone warehouses, the shaman felt the malleability and incredible ardor of their red-hot body. And it seemed to the leader at that hour that they were not stones at all, but something else and completely unfamiliar. Roshan has not seen such stones either in the abode of Pangea or in Her unities!
The closer the incarnation of the soul approached the manifestation, the hotter the night became. Very soon, the course of the essence turned out to be close to the fiery nature, and the shaman was able to discern the essence of the mysterious manifestation.
The confluence of flame and blackness, having filled the vision with its grandeur, seethed in front of Roshan. The leader saw how clots of fiery elements rushed about in the coherence of the stars. And they were similar to the elements of the Great Fire, but the essence that was hiding under the flaming exterior was unlike anything seen before. The black, in some places with blue insides constantly changed its restless shape – it became elongated, then more rounded, as if something alive was hiding under a fire-breathing cover.
At times, with a roar and crackle, the star spewed ardent fragments into the abode of stars. Not soon cooling down, its fruits turned into those very alien stones. And the stones scattered across the expanses of the night, and some followed their offspring, as if they were kept nearby by an unknown force.
Soon the shaman drew attention to the fact that the star itself gradually approached the gaze. The leader was momentarily filled with confusion, and the essence involuntarily rushed to the side so as not to collide with the fiery element. The essence of Roshan at that hour resigned itself to the heat of the fiery appearance and began to soar nearby, as if seeing off the course of the newborn manifestation. Behind the star, like a tail, continuing its warehouse, a long train of fire, smoke and red-hot boulders stretched. And the tail stretched far into the abode of the night and dissolved there.
The shaman contemplated this obscure phenomenon for some time, and then realized what was happening, but suddenly the vision began to shake. Roshan began to hear disturbing voices, and the red star that was blazing in front of his eyes suddenly shattered into fragments. The leader focused his gaze more strongly, and human silhouettes appeared in front of his vision without skin and hair…
Bonfire – second night
The whole day in the village there was only talk about a flash in the night sky and a star being born. Both old and young discussed the newly appeared sign. Kindred eagerly awaited news from the Temple of the Shaper. Most of all, young descendants chatted about what had happened. They expressed their assumptions about the manifestation to every adult and elder who passed by. A lot of chatter went to Varna. He spent the whole day with teenagers in the training arena, and the young constantly asked the craftsman various stupid questions: «Why did the star light up?», «And when will it go out?», «Will there be more?”… As if Varn lit the heavenly stars and deliberately did not say anything about them!
There were also those in the settlement who had not even heard of the heavenly miracle. They were sentinels who changed their posts in the first half of the night. But the children immediately broadcast about the mysterious glow to their ignorant fellow tribesmen, and by the onset of twilight there was not a single relative left in the camp who did not know about the revealed star.
As soon as the rumble of daytime living creatures ceased, the women led their children on araucaria to huts. All the boys were told to get ready for bed, even though they asked them to stay at night with the elders to fuss with the Totem of Flame and at the same time look at the bizarre particles of hot resin and the glow of the red star. Only future hunters remained to help build the Fireplace – those who were admonished by the second hundred moons.
With the advent of dusk, the first stars lit up. The cloudless sky adorned the night luminary, and next to the Moon, turning the gaze of the sentinels on itself, a mysterious phenomenon also shone… The first people lit the lights. Some of the elders, at the call of Hord, descended from the caves. Night has come.
In the Pavilion of Flame, as usual, there was a noise-din. The tribesmen gathered in crowds around the refectory bonfires: women cooked meat dishes and treated them to young and old people, youths, led by Ana and Varna, erected a fire totem. The fry were
