Storytelling Week 9: Raven's Lament

They say the world is like a painter’s canvas, blank and empty, awaiting an artist touch to bring out the beauty calling from its expanse. This could not be truer than the world at its beginning. Then, the ground was only white where it was cold and brown where it was warm. The sun and moon shown upon an empty flat world. There was no life. However, it was world balanced on the edge of a blade, awaiting the right touch to fall into either absolute desolation or incomprehensible beauty. The day came where the world shifted, changing from its static circumstance just slightly enough. In the gaze of the moonlight formed a creature of shadows. It was like an ink dot upon unblemished parchment. Its feathers glimmered iridescent, throwing off colors not yet seen upon the world until then: blues, purples, and shimmering greens. Here was the raven, the first life upon an awaiting world.

As the raven took flight, he noticed there was nothing but flat empty expanse around him. It mattered not how long or far he flew. The only change was the shifting of brown to white upon the flat ground. After a time, the novelty of life wore off, and the raven decided to change its surroundings, he shifted into a form that allowed him to mold the world as he pleased. Then, he took up the earth and began to mold them into hills and mountains. He created great peaks and gentle hills, and where he took from the earth, ravines and canyons formed. As he continued his self-appointed tasks, water began to pool where previously it had only run unimpeded, turning into lakes and oceans. When the raven saw this, he was amazed, for he did not know that the rain that fell from the sky bright color beyond that of the sky. Now, the world was no longer flat, but the raven was still not pleased.

He saw the pale blues and soft greens the water had brought to the world. He sought to bring more color to the earth aside from that of the sky and of the ground. He started near the oceans. There he tore up the sand into fine particles where they were bleached by the sun, turning pale yellow. Then he went to the canyon. There at sunset each day, he took the colors of the falling star and painted them onto the side of the walls. He stole pieces from the rainbow and planted them into the ground, and there formed gems of every shade. Still, the raven was not satisfied. He went out and made grass grow upon the empty plains. Fauna that waved in the winds with colors from amber to emerald green. He shaped wild flowers of every species, from those that shown yellow to those that warned away with gleaming red. Even then, the raven was restless. His world was still incomplete. He continued to create. From his mind spouted great trees and creeping vines.

It is from one of this vines, that the world shifted once more. One vine continued to grow beyond what the raven expected or indeed knew, for he was busy elsewhere. As the vine reached maturity, a man stepped out from its bursting seeds. Curious, he began to explore the vibrant world in which he had been born. It took many days for the raven to return to this corner of the world, but when he did, he was greeted with the sight of man. curious the raven alighted in front of him and asked,

“Who are you?”

Raven by DoodleWithGlueGun
DeviantArt

Bibliography: Myths and Legends of Alaska, edited by Katharine Berry Judson (1911): source

Author's Note: I was inspired to write this story by the raven story about creation. I wanted to know what it was like for the raven before man sprouted from the vine. Granted in the original the raven had not created mountains  until later, or many other things that I attribute to him. It was interesting to me that the raven had such power of creation, but it took until man came out that he began to make animals. I suppose in my mind he did not know he could, because he was not aware that anything could work that way, he does not see himself as a animal but a part of the world.