Luridian's Dream
On Titan they tell the story of Luridian in many settings. A tale of the Danu, it originated around their campfires, the voice of the story teller mixing with crackling flames and chirping daigots. A favorite told throughout their tribes, it inevitably spread beyond their spoken word and into the literate hands of the Fian. Self-stylized as the more civilized of the two intelligent species that call the planet home, the Fian still enjoy a good story. Soon Luridian’s name was being muttered at dinner parties, where the sophisticated in the room sipped on blossom wine and smoked algae embers, smiling at the cute tale while exchanging casual glances that subtly assert their intellectual skepticism. Now in print, Luridian and her dreams became a subject for the domes of academic halls, professors giving lectures on the origin of the story while students wrote papers on its meaning. Parents began to tell it at bedtime, their child’s covers pulled up tight to their chins, not daring to breathe as they hung on every word. The Fian took to it in a way that nearly made it their own. Yet despite their cultural absorption, the original is still told around the Danu fires by their skalds, and here is how they tell it:
Once upon a time, when the void was tame and its powers known, eleven planets danced in its orbit. These planets were barren and desolate, all except for two. On Danu lived the Danu, a hearty people of the earth, and on Nua lived the Nua, a spirited people of the sea. The Danu were not alone in the universe because they had the Nua, and the Nua were not alone in the universe because they had the Danu. Their two planets performed a cosmic choreography around each other and were sisters. The Danu and the Nua lived as their planets did, interlocked in a complex system of dependencies. The Danu were industrious and practical. The Nua were adventurous and creative. Both species commanded extensive knowledge of void powers and used rifts to communicate and travel between planets. They lived in harmony.
One day, on Danu, a baby girl was born and she was of both people. Her father was of Danu and her mother was of Nua. They named her Luridian. Luridian was a forbidden child. Danu and Nua, for all their intermingling, did not share children. It was thought to be impossible. She spent her young life not knowing her mother, hidden with her father on Danu. Her dreams started before she came of age, before she underwent the choosing. The first dream involved two birds. They were a black feathered species native to the forests of her homeland, often hunted by the larger and viciously taloned griffins. In her dream, the two black birds whirled together, higher and higher into the sky, until colliding and plummeting down to the ground. In a horrible betrayal, one of the two birds pulled the other under itself and thus survived the impact. She told her father and he told her dreams are dreams. The next day two of her friends, siblings, fell from a great height and the youngest died when the eldest landed on top of him.
As she grew, her dreams did as well. Luridian continued to tell her father about them until she came of age, at which point he said it was her duty to keep such musings to herself. The night before the choosing, when a Danu picked their place in the world, Luridian dreamed of the two trees for the first time. She was on a massive trail, on some unknown plain, walking and walking. Her mouth was dry and she could not remember how she got to where she was, only that she had been traveling for a long time. Out of the gloom rose two colossal trees. Both were uniform in make, one a deep bronze, the other a glimmering turquoise. They stood tall and proud, towering above the bare surroundings, regal and isolated. Luridian attempted to continue forward, straight between them. She made no progress. She decided to walk toward the bronze tree. The ground began running below her once again and the bronze tree grew in size as it approached. Curious, she attempted to walk toward its twin. The turquoise leaves swayed in the still air as it moved closer, the bronze tree now receding behind her. She once again made to walk between them. Her progress once again halted. Frustrated, she turned around and ran away from them. After a short while they appeared before her again. Stubborn in her refusal, she sat. As she did she became aware of the space between the trees and how she could see through the ground to their roots. Roots that coiled and wound around each other, deeply and intricately intertwined in permanent bondage.
Luridian woke on the day of the choosing and did not go. Instead, she asked her father where her mother was. Her father told her that she had died in childbirth. Luridian asked him again. He said that she was on Nua and that Luridian must not go looking for her. Luridian packed her things and left the next day. After many days and nights, such that she could not remember exactly how she found where it was she had gone, Luridian met her mother. She thought her mother would not know she had a daughter and was disappointed when she learned the decision for her to live on Danu had been a joint one. Her mother still welcomed her despite the danger. The Nua did not participate in the choosing. They carried out the roaming. While the Danu picked what they would be, the Nua wandered into their role, waiting until they slipped into an opportunity fit for them. Luridian was told by her mother that if she was to stay, she must commit to the roaming. Her mother made a ship ready to carry her daughter across the lapis seas of Nua, and on the eve before she was to leave, Luridian once more dreamed of the two trees.
On the same plain the trees stood taller than before. Chromatic twins, the imposing plants looked unnaturally inorganic, more like structures than living things. This time another figure approached the trees. Luridian ran after in interest, wondering how the mysterious figure managed to move toward the center. However, as she caught up, the figure changed direction, walking instead quickly toward the turquoise trunk. Yelling in an attempt to catch its attention, she gained on it, her legs moving with surreal swiftness. As Luridian neared the figure she realized it looked familiar. She realized the figure was her. She watched herself walk briskly toward the embrace of the turquoise tree, its base opening to envelop her.
Luridian awoke in a sweat. She left without saying goodbye to her mother, the ship that had been prepared for the roaming empty and unused. She went instead back to Danu. A few days later, she dreamed her double approached the bronze tree. Furious, she turned around. And in her dreams, the double once again approached the turquoise tree. Desperate, she rifted to Urus, one of the nine harsh other worlds, where only nomads and exiles went. On Urus her double no longer appeared, but the trees now came to her every night. There was nowhere she could go to escape the choice. She raged at the dream. She ran in circles. She dug at the ground, clawing for the roots that writhed conjoined below the surface. She sat for long quiet nights in the middle of the barren plain, starring and refusing. Finally, Luridian sought help, not caring that in doing so she might betray her heritage. The scholars heard her dream and came to a simple conclusion: She must choose. While the Danu and the Nua depended on each other, they could not live together in the same being. This was causing a war within her, a war that one side must win. Luridian rejected their interpretation. She refused to choose. Her forbidden ancestry now discovered, the same scholars she consulted forced her back into exile on Urus. The dream did not go away.
Luridian lived on Urus until Dagda came to her. The god asked her why she had not chosen. She, not knowing she talked to a god, told him she did not wish to be one or the other, and there was no peace to be found in denying half of herself. The god accepted her answer and went away. That night her dream changed. There was a change in the air. Luridian began her walk toward the horizon, where the trees would appear, until she felt a buffeting wind behind her. Looking back, instinctive terror gripped her as she was met with the face of a burning storm of fire. It raced toward her and so she ran. The trees appeared, there were eleven now, nine others joining the familiar twins. These other nine were smaller and dead. Ashen white, no leaves grew on their barren branches. As Luridian watched, they began to fall to the wall of fire that was a circle enclosing with terrifying speed. Even as she felt the popping and sizzling of her flesh, Luridian did not choose. She ran for the middle of the twin trees and so made no progress, and the fire consumed her. Luridian awoke with a start. She felt a terrible coldness within her. She did not leave Urus that day, but waited for the night. There was no dream. She waited again, again there was no dream. After her third night of quiet, Luridian left Urus.
She went in search of Dagda, for whom she now blamed for the visions that had been a curse on her life. She found the god where he resides at the edge of time. Luridian cursed him for giving her the dream she was sure spoke of armageddon. Of a great and terrible storm that would consume all in its path unless… unless what? Luridian did not know. The dream was not a gift if it gave her no answers. Amused at her persistence, the god told her what she must do. After her audience Luridian found herself thrown back through space onto Urus, as if she had never left. Not stopping to wonder if she ever had, she left for Danu, for her father.
She found the god where he resides at the edge of time
Luridian went to the elders first, the scholars second, the people third. She shared with them the terrible truth Dagda had revealed to her: That the void would expand to consume the planet. They must escape to Nua before it is too late. Save what they can, everyone and everything. Now a wild thing, an outcast belonging to neither sister planet, no one would listen to her. Only Luridian’s father, the dreams of his lost daughter coming back to weigh on his soul, stood by her side as she pleaded with anyone she could reach. It was hopeless. She spoke of the end of them and they would not hear her. The date came and with tears in her eyes she waited, convinced she’d failed. A few Danu had finished sharing a laugh over the lack of the apocalypse when the sky darkened. There was a terrible sound, somewhere between a rush of air, and a deafening boom. The void, usually a far off swirling sphere of darkness, jolted forward, jittering with growing pains. The very planet shook and shivered as forces beyond comprehension tore through the system. Luridian waited for the fire to consume them.
It did not. It took Nua instead. Luridian raged at Dagda’s trickery, knowing what had occurred long before those around her realized what had happened. Their twin was no more. The Nua were gone, their planet, as well as seven others, consumed by the eruption. It was a loss so great, so incalculable, that many of the Danu went into denial. They were convinced it was a trick, some phenomenal conspiracy, and no amount of failed rifts, of lack of communication, of staring into the sky at the blank space where Nua used to be, seemed to be enough to convince those who could not bear to know the truth. Luridian knew. And she knew that it was her choice. The choice she’d avoided all her life, she’d made.
The changes on Danu were dramatic. Those forced upon a being unceremoniously sawed in half. And not only from the absence of the Nua. The planet itself began to change, as the void continued to lash out, the expansion having disrupted its fragile essence. Large black spires began to emerge, pushing crookedly out of the planet’s crust. Made of a mirrored surface that withered the life around it, they were a poison on the land. Choking mists appeared, rolling clouds of deep purple, they clung and engulfed, slowly melting anything caught within as if digested by the very air. The Danu people were not untouched either. The effects on the mages came first, the very day of the expansion. Their anomalies lashed out at them in gruesome and disturbing ways. From this sprang an illness of the mind not limited to those who had messed with void power. An inflection that drove one quickly to insanity, weighing on the conscious mind until it broke, pushed out screaming and thrashing, leaving nothing but hollow shells. Long distance communication and rifting travel became impossible. The Nua were gone, and the Danu began to see that as a mercy. Their planet was the cursed one, left behind to suffer, inflicted with cosmic rot. And then Luridian again dreamed.
Their anomalies lashed out at them in gruesome and disturbing ways.
She walked, as she had a hundred times before, but what greeted her were not the twin trees of bronze and turquoise. There was one tree left, next to it a dead stump. Both colors were gone, drained. Looking beneath the ground, she saw the roots of the remaining tree grasping at the dead roots of its twin with unreturned desperation, as if holding the hand of a dead man. A black sap weeped from the tree's bark, and the branches sagged, the leaves long since falling to the ground far below. For the first time Luridian walked toward a tree. She walked toward the dying thing and it rushed up to greet her. She thought that would be all, a grim view of her reality and a reminder of her naivety. But the dream did not end. Once she was close enough to touch the graying trunk, there was a sound, a loud explosion of rushing air. Luridian whirled around. There, from the nowhere she’d come from, appeared three more trees. Vibrantly colored, she watched in amazement as a leaf, the last leaf, flew from the dying tree to land on the middle of the three new.
They believed her this time. Not everyone, but many. It helped that the purple mists were becoming more frequent, the killing pillars larger, the insanity more widespread. When Luridian told the Danu they must leave, the majority of them acknowledged that, at the very least, they could not stay. Her tale of there being another planet, a new planet, that would arrive to become their new home, that lost many of them. Planets had never ‘arrived’ before. They certainly did not appear. Still, they got ready. The few that didn’t all had different reasons for staying. There are always those ready to face death. When the day came, they appeared, just as Luridian had said. Winked into existence. Three new planets. The astronomers would have been baffled, had they not recently watched the void, stable beyond memory, destroy nearly three times that many planets. And a rift opened. And Luridian led them through.
The rift dropped the Danu on Titan. The native Fian took their arrival in stride, their concerns more occupied with their recent planetary relocation. Newly nomadic, the Danu became the lost people of the beautiful new planet. In the early days plans were often discussed, plans to start rebuilding some of what had been lost on Danu. Something has always stopped them from acting. Some say it’s melancholy. They’re hindered by the ability to look up at the night sky, and see the small purple dot in the distance, a constant reminder of what they lost. Others say it is because of the last dream Luridian had, as an old woman. Of the rot spreading, reaching and grasping from the now desolated twin trees toward the new splendid additions, and how she watched them too succumb to the disease that the expansion had spawned. Whatever it is, the Danu are content now to survive. To survive and to wander and to watch. To wait.
the small purple dot in the distance, a constant reminder of what they lost
There are a few different endings to the story. The main discrepancy comes from the Fian tendency to leave out the mention of Luridian’s last dream, feeling it distracts from the overall story with an unnecessary ominous finish. Her last dream is a favorite addition among those who like the macabre suggestion, and knowing it as the ‘true ending’ is a right of passage among younger folk. It is included here, as it is present in the traditional Danu tellings. The reference to Luridian, the well known purple planet closest to the void, is thought to be a later addition. The name of the central heroine of the story matching is thought to be a translation error, as the Danu use an enunciation not represented well in common. This is reflected in the text as an apparent lack of distinction between people and planet, which is not the case in the oral tradition, hence my use of [the] Danu (people) and Danu (the planet).