A Day of Dwelling

In the darkest days of the Old Scourge, when the Severance was young and the breath of the world turned to needles and the ground forgot its own green, there lived a hare named Evana and her seven children.

She made a burrow with her paws and her teeth and her back, pushing earth until her muscles burned and her nails bled. She packed the walls with straw and clay and woven roots. She sealed the mouth of the burrow against the knives of the wind. Inside it was warm. Inside there was laughter. Inside there were lullabies.

“Sleep, my seven,” Evana sang each night, “for the world is large and I am between you and it.”

And so they slept, knowing no hunger deeper than a skipped bite, no fear greater than thunder. They grew sweet and quick and kind, and Evana smiled to see it—then rose before dawn to gather, to patch, to mend, to carry. Monsters ground their fangs and claws in the dark above, but in the warren there was the soft sound of breathing and the rustle of dreamers.

As the cold deepened and the stores thinned, Evana learned the secret numbers of love: that one mother can be more than one body if she must. She took the night shift and the morning shift; she traded sleep for steps, warmth for watchfulness, her share for theirs. She lied with holy lies—“I have eaten already,” “The air is gentle today,” “The storms are passing”—so that their days would not be shaved down by worry.

But winter does not bargain, and the days of paradise were no more. One morning Evana tied her ears beneath her hood, laced her feet with strips of cloth, and whispered, “I will be back by moonrise.” She kissed each brow—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—counting softly as if counting were a spell. Then she climbed into the wind.

The wind took her promise and scattered it. Evana walked farther than strength, farther than warmth, farther than the safe distance a mother may go from her children and still be a mother. When her legs would not lift, she crawled. When her paws would not close, she pushed with her shoulder. When the storm grew teeth and set them in her, she kept one thing unbroken: a song, mouthed without sound, the one she had braided into their dreams since they were small.

By moonrise she did not return.

By moonrise of the next night she did not return.

By moonrise of the third the little ones, who had never known a world without their mother living in it, learned the taste of waiting. Hunger reached up from the ground and touched them. Silence sat where her body should have been. On the fifth night the oldest said, “If we stay, we starve.” On the sixth the smallest said, “If we go, we may find her.” And on the seventh morning they wrapped one another in the one blanket left, as if they could be a single creature against the cold, and they climbed from the burrow into the storm.

The world met them as it is. Shadow trees stood like broken spears. A well held only a circle of black ice. They found tracks that ended in a scatter of fur. They found a door torn from its hinges and a cradle overturned. They understood by degrees, as the snow stung their eyes, how much Evana had held back with her frail paws.

At last they came to the shell of a village. Wind lived in each room and sang through every crack. In one house a stool lay on its side beside a fallen beam, and in a cupboard there were three turnips and a fist of grain. Enough to live, perhaps two days, perhaps three. The seven looked at the food, at their shaking paws, at each other.

Then the middle child, the one with the softest voice, set the stool upright in the center of the room, as if the room had a heart and the heart must be given a place to sit. The oldest filled a bowl with the grain and set it on the seat. The smallest said, “This is where she will sit when she comes,” and no one was cruel enough to disagree.

“Sleep, Mother,” they sang, reversing the old words, “for the world is large and we are between you and it.”

They sang to warm the air. They sang to make a road of sound for their mother to follow. They sang to soothe what they could not touch. The storm pressed its face to the window and listened.

On the second night their song grew rough with thirst, when one of them sagged and another lifted, when one forgot the melody and the next whispered it back, the wind began to falter. It came as a hush along the rafters, as if something had paused to hear. The seven leaned on one another and kept the lullaby because they did not know how to stop.

The third morning was Martius the First.

And when the children, stiff with sleep and hunger, opened their eyes.

Evana was sitting on the stool.

Frost had stitched white into her whiskers; her ears were torn; her coat was thin. But her eyes were their true color again, and her paws were open. The lullaby broke into laughter and sobbing as they fell into her arms. She held them and counted—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—numbers turned to prayers.

She touched the bowl, the stool, the seven foreheads, and when they had eaten just enough to keep living, they carried the stool into the square and saw that the winter had broken, and the snow and the darkness were no more.

And in the warm sun they sat together, Evana and her seven, and the world remembered the Mother’s love once more.

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Eni Siverets - Professor of Terregor

Allow me to offer a humble commentary, as this remains one of my favorite tales.

The records agree on one point beyond doubt: on Martius the First, 1,289 B.A., the Great Winter ended. The drifts that had smothered the fields of Nervrass and the roads for six full seasons were gone by dawn, and the rivers freed themselves from ice. In every town, in every square on the Anvil Peninsula, bewilderment was recorded. The sudden thaw was no rumor, but definitively a matter of history.

But what interests me most is the tale that follows upon it, the one that has never quite been untangled from the thaw itself: Evana of the Seven. The story tells of a mother, vanished into the storm, and of her children who set a stool and sang her lullaby until the dawn. And it tells, too, that she was there when the light returned, seated, alive, among them.

The Cirices exalt this as "the First Dwelling", a miracle beyond question. They argue that no natural thaw could have swept so swiftly, and that Evana’s return and the world’s return were one and the same.

Yet whether one names it miracle or allegory, there is no denying what followed. From that tale, our Day of Dwelling was born. The stool raised in every square, the bowl placed on it, the lullabies sung, all are the echo of Evana and her seven.

And to this day, across three millennia, we remember that day not to plead for help or gain, but to give our gratitude and affection to the Great Mother, who longs only to walk beside us.