(Click above to find this story on Facebook, or listen to the audio adaptation on YouTube.)

Quip’s Tale Part 1: The Gossamer City

-Subotal 22, Old Calendar-

It is not so difficult to believe that rabbits, who have an ear for many things, can hear the song of the moon. The truth is that anyone can hear it, but hearing amounts to very little unless one seeks also to listen.

Thus far have we spoken of the Great Wood and so shall we again, but there was another land in the early days, when Grandmother Hour herself was but a comely lass, and the Children of Time were hardly counted. The trees whisper of a time before even themselves, when all the Earth was salted by white. Our Great Mother would soon warm it up for there could otherwise be no life, but some patches, like those in the northlands, stubbornly remained throughout the generations.

Due north, across the downs and an emerald strait, the Great Wood thinned into a rolling moor. These lonesome steppes were inhospitable enough in the summertime, but in the dead season they became a trackless waste, traversable only by those who could outrun their own hunger. Despite it all, a gossamer city once rose up there to meet the sundered daystar. Constructed from blocks of solid ice hauled up on the backs of laborers, it glowed with the colors of the aurora. There were many ways into this place, but under the watchful eye of The Bearded King, there were precious few back out again.

The ”Bearded King”, whose true name is no longer known, was a descendant of the earthbound clans; a jolly people living in harmony with the ground, who forged from Her gifts all manner of art from tools to exquisite treasures. They came in two varieties—the bearded ones, stocky and bronzed, and the nimble goblinkind, with porcine snouts and amber hair upon their shoulders. Make no mistake: Though they looked different, they were cut of the same cloth and kissed into life by the same Mother, with the very same blood flowing through their veins. They lived as one, in peace in their cavernous halls, until a new age of ice made their heart-fires cool such that even their coals would no longer light.

Threatened by intense cold they fled to the surface, only to find they could no longer return for the permafrost below. Unused to the light and the wide spaces up above they floundered, squandered, then broke finally into paranoia and avarice. The bearded folk, who were less numerous but better organized, created a new history in which goblinkind were a different species; this division allowed for assignment of blame away from those who refuse to accept it themselves. The bearded folk took their siblings to task, subduing them, and made of them the backs upon which they languished in their new brand new city.

The ensuing kingdom was named ‘Barzan’. A certain tongue not yet known to the world would later call it ‘Borzoi’ (meaning ‘swift’), but there was nothing so fast about it yet, and we will come to that later.

Here was born to the king and queen a fair-haired son who wanted for nothing. He was stocky like his kin, but more willowy than they, for he was first in a generation who knew no toil save that which was done for them. He was a rare soul, for the silver spoon in his mouth soured not his taste for kindness, and he treated his goblinkind nursemaids with goodness and respect.

When the young prince reached the age of responsibility (such occurs before the coming of adulthood, mind, for learning to be a person comes before becoming one), he was given an animal companion to raise and train. He loved the puppy with all his heart—from the tip of her long muzzle to the gentle sway of her elegant tail—and seeing in her his whole world, called her after the Kingdom of Barzan itself. This name pleased the bearded folk, who, in order to curry favor with their king, so designated all the hunting dogs of the breed they considered finest. Thus came a tradition of associating the fine dogs of Barzan with their breed name first, and so and the prince’s companion became ‘Barzan Quip’, or for our purposes: ‘Quip the Borzoi’.

The puppy’s given name, ‘Quip’, resulted from the personal joy she took in yipping, quipping, snapping her jaws, and ‘speaking’ to excess. Those who were uncomfortable with so informally addressing the prince’s dog added their own syllables, creating such terms as ‘Quippance’, ‘Quippery’, or ‘Quiparahilda’. Some of these names are said to survive today, though only the most ancient spirits know where.

Quip the Borzoi grew up in a house filled with warmth and light, where the age of ice was as distant as the outer walls of Barzan. She acquired much knowledge from her goodly master, who was as sharp in learning as he was celibate in wrath. The two spent many nights in the palace library poring over histories, lore, and ancient grimoires by candlelight. In the daytime he took her to races and hunts for small game, where she did not compete except for her own enjoyment, with praise and the thrill of the chase as her rewards.

Quip became the most well-read among not only her breed but her species, and if you think that canines cannot read our words, you have yet but to know one like her.

It could have been considered a good life, but a beautiful yoke on the shoulders of others is a yoke all the same. The snows fell, and though Barzan’s walled gate remained tightly locked, the age of ice grew horns like steel.