Legends
Stories the peoples tell, whose truth no one can swear to.
Four creations
- The court tale, Before Names Were Given
- In the beginning there was Chaos; the spirits neither wanted nor knew. Then Morvan came from the west and gave everything a name. What is named learns its bounds. So the Breaking is a return: to name the world anew is humankind's duty. (The teaching of the Regency and of Geumseong.)
- The steppe tale, The Day Sky and Earth Did Not Speak
- The spirits are Earth's children; the Sky has no children, it only listens. People are guests, and a guest keeps the host's custom. Morvan broke the guest-right: he chained the host in his own house. So oaths are sworn under the Sky.
- The sea tale, The Sleeping Mother
- The world is the dream of a sleeping sea, Ane. One day Ane will wake and the dream will end; so the coast peoples always speak softly to the sea.
- The mountain tale, What the Stone Remembers
- First there was stone, and stone only remembered. Jade is the stone's thought; whoever touches jade hears what the stone remembers.
Kamka
The first shaman. Every line of shamans claims descent from her. Shamans believe that one day Kamka will enter a shaman's dream.
Bars Tegin's Wall
In the Hundred-Day Storm, Bars Tegin stood before his men, who had made a wall of their shields, and the wind lifted him to the sky; he was never found. The warriors' "wall that never falls back" comes from him.
Iluane's word
When the wave swallowed Velu-lahe, the coast's old shaman Iluane said a single thing before she died: "The Hatun grows tired." No one understood what she meant.
The Tablet Watch
At midnight the shards hum. Some Kıymıklı say they hear a voice inside the hum. The House of Records writes it down, the temples listen, the shamans beat their drums; no one knows what the voice wants.
The Endless Tower
The tower where the night of the Breaking happened. It stood ruined for three hundred years; now it is rebuilt every season and rises a little higher every season. Those who enter say old memories wander its floors; its gate is kept by the Nameless, whose faces no one remembers.