Week 9 Storytelling: The Raven

Image Information: A cliff image similar to what I image in my story, except darker. Source: WillowWanderlust

I grew up in three days. And from the very moment when I opened my eyes for the first time and saw the bottom of my pea pod swaying slightly in reaction to my fall, I knew that this place was different than where I had been before. Before I only knew colors, and the movement of shadows, muffled sounds, the vibrations from the outside of my pod, things that I experienced through a veil, something that I thought I would never get to experience firsthand. But here I was. Finally, here I was laying on the ground, skin to grass, the wind scraping over my shoulders, these weird bumps forming on my arms, my legs, the back of my neck. I grew up in three days. Laying there on the floor beneath my pod, feeling the earth on my skin, I grew up. My body changed shape, grew bigger, grew longer, and yet I did not move. It did not seem like moving was necessary for growth.

But once I was fully grown, I knew I had to move from my spot, move away from the little place of the Earth that I had made my own. And once I was grown, I pushed myself up and moved my legs in the first direction I saw. I walked until I saw others, others who were like me, who had too come from pods hanging from trees. The first man I came to told me that the first man who had fallen from a pod had become friends with a man who wore the skin of a raven. And this man had given us all the things before us now. He had given us the trees, and the hills, the rivers, and the animals. He had given us everything in this world that we could see.

“Look around, brother. Look around and see our inheritance.”

And so I left the village of pod men. Moved my legs and kept moving even through the changing of the skies, through the cycling of the darkness and the light that chased it away, moved until I came to a place where there was nothing else around me. The Earth now had an edge and I was standing on it, looking past it into the everlasting sky that stretched before me. The light was so bright it burned my eyes, and as I turned back I was startled by a voice.

“Welcome changeling. Have you come to see the world, little one?”

And all I saw were black feathers and a beak that was pushed up and off, light a hood. And then a smile.

Author’s Note:

This week I chose to model my story off of the Alaskan regional anthology, The Raven Myth: Raven’s Creations. A large majority of the stories from this unit mentioned this godlike creature called The Raven that could shed his skin and become a man. The humans were born from pea pods from the trees he made and when he met the first one, he provided it with everything it could need to survive in this world. But he began to get worried that the humans would kill all of his creations as their numbers grew, and this is kind of the part of the story that I wanted to focus on. I wanted to tell a story where The Raven is not quite as nice as he seems to be at the very beginning of his stories involving the humans. Not everything is as cut and dry as it is in stories sometimes, and I wanted to show a perspective where the Raven was not so forgiving or understanding and instead chose to deal with these humans in a more sinister way. (In case you were curious, yes, I am watching a horror movie as I write this.)