Sha'nin

Sha’nin

It is said that the first of the birds to hatch was Sha’nin, the bird whose Dominion is of the forces of change, that which is also called Ib’in. Ib’in which is more than mere transience, being that which both is not and yet could be. It is both change and possibility, and sometimes… emptiness, even darkness or shadow. Without it there could be nothing, and yet if it were everything, there would be nothing else. The Bird of Ib’in came to be in a new-formed world with a sun and two moons, the land and water, plants, animals, and the eggs of her siblings – though it is said they were in different places and hatched some time after. The Avesri did not create the world, but were sent to guard it.

Yet there was no one to teach Sha’nin, and she knew of no other beginning than her hatching. Much time would pass before her eldest brother would hatch. She taught herself language, or language taught itself to her. She didn’t yet understand her powers, but she could feel that she had them. She explored the world as flight also taught itself to her. Magic taught her to sense its presence. Magic was everywhere, and it was good; beautiful and so alive.

The ShadowBird Sha’nin chose for her dwelling the darker of Bennuma’s two moons; the gray moon Ionoth which is also called the Steel Moon, for its appearance like a lump of darkly tarnished steel which hadn’t quite been forged into a perfect sphere but had myriad random irregularities over its surface, the higher points of which shine silvery when hit by the light of the sun. Ionoth which can never be charted because the surface is always different. Oh, it never seems to change while anyone is looking at it, not really; but by the time one side rotates around and spins back to face the world, it will be different in some way, however slight – or sometimes entirely. Thus, making sketches of that moon has fallen far more soundly into the artist’s realm than the domains of naturalists or historians. Though some astrologers claim that certain patterns do have meaning, after all. Some peoples are more likely to believe this than others.

Those people who are called the Ibinri have long believed that Ionoth is where the souls of the dead go after they leave this world, that Sha’nin watches over them and assigns them to tasks in the afterlife. A long-standing tradition even claims that she is the one who gathers up and guides the dead to that afterlife. In more recent times, many other peoples have begun to pick this up and believe it as well; indeed, in many places some people had traditions of the Steel Moon (or of the moons in general) being the place of the afterlife even before they ever knew of Sha’nin, so it is not far off from what some believed already. Many other people have had beliefs that everything was created out of the forces of Ib’in and that when people die, their souls return to it. In this they are also – in their own way – not far off from the beliefs of the Ibinri.

Whether Sha’nin watches over the spirits of the dead or not, whether the Avesri are primarily spirit beings or not, it is certain that they either have or can take tangible forms and pass among mortal beings, at least for a time. Listen to a tale of one such occurrence: