They were born on the day of darkness, the day that the moons cover their solar brother’s face. Wisdom was that those born that day were cursed irrevocably. Their parents, in desperation, called in a wisewoman to see if the curse could be circumvented.

The sorceress lifted the children free from their sumptuous swaddling and inspected them closely in the moon’s light. At last, she turned to the anxious couple with a sad, composed face. “Your children bear the mark of Var,” she told them quietly. “The curse will mature as they do. In their eighteenth year, they will turn to beasts. They shall have no solace but each other, no fear but each other, all their lives through.” With that, she bowed her head and left. The king and queen looked at one another with streaming eyes. They named the twins Varrin and Varra, which means little sorrows, and christened them in robes of red.

The children grew and were so beautiful and gay that they seemed to give lie to their names. They were inseparable and spent hours riding or walking together. People whispered that two such children, obviously blessed, would never tempt the curse. Only their parents never dared to hope, for, as well they knew, Var affects even the blessed.

On the seventh hour of their eighteenth year, the children fell ill with a violent fever. Their parents sequestered them and prayed in the temple of Var until their hands and knees were raw. It was to no avail. At midnight, in Varrin’s chamber, a red hart trembled; in Varra’s bedroom, a black wolf snapped and howled.

The King wept and the Queen lamented; but there was naught that could be done. They set a royal seal upon the animals, that they might not be hunted, and set them free.

As long as the sun was in the sky, Varra would chase Varrin over hill and stream, rock and ravine, her snapping jaws inches from his fleeing hooves, until they panted foam from thei lungs and their eyes were dim with exhaustion. Her tongue hung from her mouth like a banner of blood. Sweat gilded him dark and shining under the harsh sun’s gaze. As soon as the sun set, they’d lie where they’d fallen until the terrible trembling passed from them. Soon they hated the sun and they hated life.

This continued for three years.

It came to be the day of the year where the sun’s eye never closes. Varra ran behind her brother until her breath wet his heels and they both tasted their own blood in their throats. She chased him further than any mortal yet had ventured, to the end of the world, where the gods had lived.

There is a field of flowers that grows at the edge of a ragged black chasm. In the midst of their chase, they suddenly slowed and stopped. They stood, amazed and aching for breath, with the flowers around them, and realized that they were in their human bodies.

And it may have been that they were as gods, being where the gods were, or it may have been that the beasts were still in them. They fell upon each other then, in a way that only siblings that are gods may do. The crushed red flowers were soft beneath them, and exhausted at last, they fell asleep.

The wind was bright as they awoke. They crowned themselves with the red flowers and went to walk by the ocean that splintered itself to foam on the black cliff. As long as they remained in the realm beyond the world, they were free of their beast’s bodies. They built a palace of rock on the edge of the chasm, and the sweet scarlet flowers climbed over it.

As they walked one day by the black shore, they came across a puddle of still water. Varra bent over it to see herself and though she threw her white hands before her in horrified denial, it was a wolf she saw in the pool stretching its harsh black paws to meet her. Varrin came and stood beside her and they looked awhile in silence at the image in the water: a wolf and a hart crowned with scarlet flowers.

It was also on that day that Varra felt a stirring in her belly.

From then, their joy was dimmed, their freedom belied. The child was born in due time, with a wolf’s teeth and the eyes of a deer. Tiny horns crowned her head, and her parents looked upon her with sorrow. They named her Nian, despair.

One day they were seized with a terrible restlessness. Varra walked for hours in the raw sea-wind and Varrin sat alone in the castle watching the waves break on the black rocks. Nian lay, singing, in the fields of vines and twined the red flowers into necklaces and garlands.

When her parents came for her, she lifted her flower-twined arms to them. Varrin put Nian on his shoulders and they set off. To their surprise, they remained human even as the black cliffs faded behind them, and they trod on green grass instead of flowers and knotted vines. The flowers which they had brought looked every day as if they had just been picked. They walked for leagues and leagues, uncertain of their path.

Somehow the land was not as they remembered it or perhaps their memories betrayed them.

At long last, they arrived at their destination. They walked into the great hall and were greeted with awed silence. None of the faces which turned to them in fearful wonder were familiar. A courtier bowed before them, and hailed them as he would immortals. It had been a hundred years since they had fled to the end of the world.

Varra turned her eyes to Varrin’s and saw her own thoughts there. Deliberately they stripped themselves of the red flowers. As quickly as the deed was done, she became a wolf and he became a hart and her teeth met his throat.

Varrin’s blood flowed over Varra’s black muzzle and into her eyes. She died of grief there.

Nian ordered that the bodies, human in death, should not be touched, but that an altar be built around them. This was done. With her own hands, she piled the bodies of her parents with flowers.

Nian rules as god-queen of Pale, taking mortal consorts to assuage her loneliness. Her children are born horned, with the teeth of wolves.