Yawning Kris was ever so slightly cool.

He floated across the heavens of Rhaagm and similar civilizations, doing what he did often: sleeping, watching, and thinking. The fact that he was less than warm brought trouble to his ponderings. It meant one of a handful of things: an onset of portentous spirit, the birth of a new fellow Being of Old, or an extinguishing of a great many of his children. However, he knew that other signs would presage Olds being nurtured into their reborn existences, and that he had the count of his sun progeny of whom no more than a scant few perished each instant. Thus, he prepared himself to bear some kind of witness, and asked one of his burning children to make an account of his words and actions lest he temporarily slip the coil of awareness.

When the words came, they flowed on a level below conscious thought, but originating from a far higher source. They pierced the separating barrier of self-and-agency, tunneled through it, and left a smooth shaft into which ideas and images might be threaded. Yawning Kris became a bead, and the necklace which bore him along had so very many interesting fibers. The gestalt of one such fiber overtook his supernatural person and passed along a message, and that message he spoke aloud as suns do: with bursts of fiery decay and and concentrated radiation, magnetic theft, wide bands of potential energy converted to heat and absorbed by any observing entities.

“The Crone shall chase and find

That which she seeks to bind

And with its help unwind

A Purple wilderness.

An epilogue unwrit

Will fall into the pit

And this life mortal quit

And birth a breaking stress.

New Beastly Purple heirs

May climb thought’s winding stairs

And catch all unawares

With novel gentleness.”

When Yawning Kris declined into speechlessness again, turning over his own declarations and probing them for meaning, his witness child bore the message across facetary boundaries and urged other suns to remember. Look, it seemed to say in the intangible and unsymbolized grammar which passed between the singularity-spirits indwelling the core of many, many stars. Our father has spoken. Our father makes new declaration.

During the time between that moment and when Yawning Kris summoned the Herald - that messenger-hunter of all Beings of Old - the plurality of cosmos instances resounded silently with the consternated intrigue of stars… and the stars knew not what to think.