Sunday Scrawl #4: Hopekeeper

If I’d known what joy waited for me in my age, I would never have been so flippant with my life in my youth.

My audience gathers around the fire, thirty or so of our cavern’s children, mostly between the ages of three and sixteen, with a few adults nearby to keep order. I’m seated on a roughly-hewn wooden chair—luxury—while the kids sit on hide blankets, carefully placed to avoid a few puddles that must be spills from when this fire was used to melt drinking water earlier.

Pyrus, a nine-year-old boy who is one of my more engaged audience members, arrives at the fire just ahead of his mother, who smiles at me in thanks. She’s shivering. It’s cold up here near the entrances, but fires are only allowed close to the air circulators. We’re close enough to hear the oxen grunting as they turn the air exchange wheels.

Pyrus’s mother hurries off to go to one of the many meetings where people decide things, little things like how to grow enough food in the mushroom grotto or who to send on the next foraging expedition, and more pressingly who’s to blame for the things that have gone wrong and who gets credit for what’s gone right. It all used to seem very important to me, and I suppose it is, in a way.

Still. They let me watch the jewels while they go digging for rubble.

There’s a mild altercation between two four-year-olds over a crude crayfish toy made of five pieces of rope, and I decide to get started before my audience gets any more distrracted.

Hefting our old Sun-era lute, I strum two chords in a largely-unsuccessful attempt to get the kids’ attention, but they do the hard part for my by shushing one another.

“All right, I think it’s time to continue our little tale,” I say. “But first, let’s remember where we are, shall we? A long, long time ago, there was a magical fire called sunlight that covered the world and made the land warm without being hot. It was so warm that people didn’t have to melt water to drink. You could just drink it up off the ground. And the sunlight was so powerful, they say that even though nothing ever burned, you could look far away and see things as clearly as if they were on fire.”

Some of the younger kids’ eyes shine with wonder, while some of the older ones look skeptical. I don’t blame them; my grandparents’ generation must’ve been exaggerating. If the world had truly been that bright, we all would’ve been burnt to ashes. In reality, it was probably more like the light of many lantern bugs, but things are always sweeter in memory.

“And their days were different then,” I say. “The sunlight had a magical source, called the Sun, and it only spent half of the time burning. The other half of the time it was dark, but the surface stayed warm, and they used sunlight coming and going to mark when days began and end. They didn’t need to use hourglasses like we do now.”

“Now, on the surface, in the Sun era, there was a boy,” I say. “And the boy knew a secret, that the Sun was secretly a beautiful girl. And the boy fell in love with the Sun, and the Sun fell in love with the boy, and they were happy. But one day the Sun started to get sick and weak, and the boy told her that he would go find a way to make her better. And that’s where our story began.”

Some other tales survive, and have been partially passed on, but the Sun’s Song, created by a first-generation man who was young when the Sun was obscured, is my favorite by far. I’ve heard a few others, and they don’t make much sense. The Sun’s Song was written for an audience of people who, like me, have never seen the Sun, and tries to accomodate us, but there are still all sorts of little things that it’s too late to ask anyone about, like what the ‘horizon’ is, or what flowers actually looked like beyond being a plant with a color.

I don’t remember every line, every rhyme, so when I get lost I end up making it up until I can get my bearings again. It’s not hard, everyone’s always being called ‘fleet of foot’ or ‘noble-minded’. I’m certain that I’ve told these kids things about the Sun’s era that weren’t true, or that I misunderstood. And I wonder how much I’ve replaced of the original over years of repeating the story. I don’t know that it matters. For now, it’s all just words without connection to truth.

It’s important, though. The telling of the story is critical, even if none of the particular words are. The story’s ending is ambiguous: the hero gives medicine to the Sun, but it’s not clear if she’s already dead at that point. It’s strange; the poem makes a big deal out of the fact that we must not blame the Sun for vanishing, and it ends by asking the audience not to hate the Sun for leaving, even if it never returns, but instead to thank it for all the light it gave (the poem says light, even though warmth was obviously more important. It’s probably just easier to rhyme).

Now I’m one of the few who knows the Song at all, imploring children not to hate something they never knew. But it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter that the story hopes to return to a world I never experienced and never expect to. It doesn’t matter that I don’t remember the story’s words and don’t understand several parts of it and will never know what they meant. It just matters that the story hopes at all. That’s what I’m here to pass on.