[centre][colour=lightblue][h2]Solumna Breathes into Creation[/h2][/colour][/centre]

The cold winds of the north swept up into a frenzy, wisps of snow encircling the icy pillars that dotted the landscape of the frozen realm of Naschya. Their dance crept south, carrying with them the snow and the cold, their frigidity calming into a cool breeze as they crept further south. Along with them were carried the seeds of a new forest, great pine trees with bark as black as a cloudy night sky growing up beneath this great wind, the trees' nettles greeted into the world by the cold and decorated for their arrival with hoarfrost and snow. Solumna breathed, and from her breath he built a new realm: the Black Woods. A land to shelter the far north of Naschya from what might lie one day to its south, transitioning Solumna's homeland into the affairs of the rest of the continent. The Naschyan winds would cull any trees that tried to colonize the farther north, stunting them and keeping the Black Woods in their place, defending the snowscape from its neighbours. These trees would be the first forms of life created from Solumna's fingertips, and he cried his frozen tears and shaped with her cold hands each detail of them, the first mortal matter the solitary god would ever forge.

[centre][img]https://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/800-winter-boreal-forest.jpg[/img][/centre]

Where the breathe came, life followed. All manner of beings of the forest sprung up from the earth, their next of kin naming Solumna their grandfather, the frozen deity's power birthing them as it birthed their home. Lynx and hares chased each other throughout the tall black pines, leaving faint tracks behind them as their trotted, marking the ground here with signs of life for the very first time. The ice goddess did not forgive these creatures of his cold embrace entirely, their land only just warm enough to live in, and many of their kind forced to sleep the winters away, lest they perish as the Naschyan winds come rolling in to cull the Black Woods of life too abundant or prosperous. The Black Woods would be a place where life could survive—not thrive. For their suspicion of creation, Solumna could not begrudge the paradise they knew they could create to exist so close to their own appendages of ice in the frozen wastes of the north. The silent deity would not permit the subtlest inklings of life to exist so near to her, to condemn into the background any disruptions that could one day shake their home.

The shaping did not end. Solumna deigned to create another land, a more hospitable place, beyond a chill-river that would divide the Black Woods definitively from what would exist beyond it. This river, the Kepsis, would mark the northern border of Solumna's third creation: a nameless place of sullen hills, sprinkled with low-lying marshland to break the plane. These swamps between hills would feed into each other through interconnected underground rivers, an entirety ecosystem beneath the hills, connecting Lake Amelia with the shores of the ocean. Eels would rule these subterranean rivers, their fresh water also populated with fish and hardy plants, the caves and dirty walls they tunneled through to reach the great lake and the ocean coated with moss. This nameless place of mud and muck, uninviting but non-hostile, would be the after breath of Solumna's second song of creation; here, farthest from them, could life hold the greatest sway over the land.