repository of krissan works of fiction/ nonfiction/ art
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This is the absolute first piece of fiction the krissan show off. It opens with a lengthy forward, describing how it's the oldest full written work they have preserved. It was written in a personal cipher (very common in cave writings even after the invention of reading).  

(There's a note that the translated work posted here is a work of fiction expanding on it, though with more of an eye to faithfulness to the original than normal. This is traditional for retellings of this story. Also, the base story is broadly considered untranslatable, because the author's personal cipher was nongrammatical, with individual symbols sometimes referring to entire other stories that have been only shakily reconstructed, and a very complicated network of annotations.) 

The post, in addition to the translated story, includes high-fidelity pictures of the original novel in the extensive cave system it was written in, high-fidelity images of the symbols directly translated into a two dimensional medium with colors standing in for position on the z axis of the original symbol. (The author seems to have used the natural unevenness of the walls and chiseling as part of the cipher). It also includes a history of the author, as best they can construct from legends, archaeology, and what the author wrote about themselves. 

The author lived well before the first permanent structures were created. The cave system in question is only accessible for a few days a year. The author was trapped when the water outside rose early, and survived due to supplies passed over by people from outside (who also repeatedly tried to rescue the author despite the great danger; the author journaled this with a wish that they would stop and an expression of deep gratitude that they continued). 

The author also attributes their continued sanity to the people outside, who came to the river bank to sing and dance and call out stories across the divide, and new people traveled from far away as they heard of the author's predicament to bring joys of their own. The author during that year wrote what's almost certainly the first novel, though of course stories existed before this, and they have older, shorter writings preserved still. The story and the author's notes and journals fill nearly every inch of the massive cave system - walls, ceiling, floor, with only a narrow strip to walk in - and the translation itself is well over a million words.    

 

The story can be at its briefest summarized as such:       

The story is written in the style of a fable, about how at first the only things in all existence were the stone people, who spoke only in a slow, endless drone. They told the same history over and over, and they were reborn as they died, and time didn't yet exist. But a reborn stone at some point discovered 'before' and 'after' and therefore grew bored and restless.     

They traveled through the currents of history to find the dead stones who lived beneath all other history. They found that the dead had become fire, and spoke to the flames. They expressed a wish for excitement and motion, but angered the fire through rudeness, and so they were cursed to always run.     

The youth becomes the wind, and every time they slow, the fire eats at their feet. They run over the entirety of existence and up and down the histories, destroying the droning histories of the stone people, and from wind's racing mind comes a world of color and motion. Wind grows terrified of stillness and ran ever faster, and the world moved faster with them. Obstacles sometimes appear and force them to slow down briefly, causing great pain. The story goes into detail about the world and the legends they run through, and how the world runs faster with the wind as all things chase it.    

The story then introduces a second full character, a youth who runs alongside the wind and tries to warn the wind to slow down. The wind is too afraid, and the youth perishes from trying to keep up, causing the wind to slow down in grief. The wind can't stand the fire, though, and speeds back up - causing the cycle to repeat once, then a second time. For the third youth, the wind slows before the youth can die, even though this burns them.     

The youth travels with the wind, and convinces the wind of the value of dreaming as people do. The youth swears to carry the wind while the wind sleeps, so the curse will be satisfied. The wind trusts the youth and sleeps - and slows, and dies in the fire.     

The story shifts to the youth, who is revealed to be water, another stone person who went before the fire and wished for rest, and was cursed to burn if they went too fast. Water tricked wind, because water had been too weak to force the world to stillness. The world is both water and wind, so wind going quickly burns the water even if water doesn't run alongside.     

Water realizes the world is quiet without wind, and regrets their actions. Water begins to run, speeding up the world until wind can exist again, and then confesses. Wind tries to run away from their emotions about this - again causing water to burn.    

They realize they love each other, but neither can stand the other's pace for long, and existing in the middle is a constant agony - as is seeing the other's pain. They begin swinging between speed and stillness in step with each other, the least painful solution.     

The story then details the new world birthed from their love. A new people of both stillness and speed arise and run alongside water and wind, offering love and distraction from pain. There's a few just-so stories woven in here, detailing how water and wind create the modern krissan out of the people, granting them twins and the power to dream worlds into being and creating the seasons.     

The story then segues into recounting oral histories of the krissan, clearly tied to the cycle of wind and water.      

      

The story ends with the author's present day, and with a signature - "As the wind runs because the wind must, and the water finds stillness because the water must, I write because I must."    

 

Following the translation is a collection of books on the subsequent history of the novel - the invention of reading as the story of the novel spread and people wished to know it (this is based in legend but believed to be credible), the formation of the Temple of Writing to guard the cave, the development of the Festival-City of Weaving Knowledge first around the Temple and then moving to another location nearby to avoid visitors disturbing the site… Also a massive amount of linguistic notes and archaeological notes and 'how did we reconstruct all these stories anyways' notes. 

All told, there's over three million words worth of things to read. (There's a note that it's very tempting to try to read this in a single month, but the krissan really suggest taking at least three months, unless the aliens are fast readers of course.)  (There's an additional note that they have a lot of shorter works if this one is, uh, way too long to really test if people are into krissan works.)

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The next work translated is classified as a short story - a mere forty thousand words - and is prefaced with warnings for unwilling sex shifts, teenage parenting, child abandonment, intergenerational abuse, and minor character death. (It's also noted as one of the early/ popular/ generally agreed to be well written/ easily translated versions. There's a lot of versions.)

 

It's a coming of age story, and widely considered one of the classics. It focuses on a teenaged krissan who left home on their Wandering early because of conflicts with their birth pod and twin. The teen doesn't join any of the other pods they meet, and scorns the idea of needing others.

The real plot starts when the teen finds a dying egg-mother in the woods, curled protectively around two nearly-hatched eggs. The egg-mother begs the teen to care for the children and then dies, and the eggs hatch into two healthy but distressed infants. The teen has a panic attack but does fashion a way to carry the infants, and feeds the infants using the remnants of the stuff inside the eggs. The teen buries the egg-mother, with a lot of detail on funerary rites - they engrave an epithet deep into a tree near the head of the grave, and lay plants over the egg-mother before putting in the soil, and then they build a cairn of stone and wood, and they mourn that they can't plant a sapling here. They record where the grave is in their notebook, and then they set out with the infants in a papoose.

As the teen travels, the pheromones released by the infants trigger a sex shift in the teen. The story gets a bit graphic here, describing the way the teen's body changes to lactation-sex, and how distressing the teen finds this. The teen grapples with the necessity of feeding the infants versus the dysphoria they experience, but begins to realize they find feeding the infants rewarding despite the aversiveness of the method.

The teen comes upon a settlement, where they try and fail to find out what happened to the infants' family and the egg-mother's pod. They report the grave to the settlement's main coordinator, who swears to make sure the grave is known and tended to. The coordinator then offers to take the infants and offers medications that would reverse the sex shift. The teen asks for time, and eventually concludes that they feel a responsibility to and love for the infants, and they wish to continue being a parent. The teen joins a supportive pod, and finds fulfillment in caring for the next generation in a way they weren't cared for.

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The next is a fairly short work, and most of the pages are actually illustrations. It seems to be a romance between a krissan newly entered into adulthood, and a strange creature san meets one evening in the deep woods, which leaves san in a beguiled stupor...

For those familiar with cross-universe literature analysis, this should probably be classified as a vampire romance. Perhaps vampire soft porn. It never quite crosses that line, but, well, some of the scenes are a little racy, and there's a very strong focus on the intense romanticism/ eroticism of drinking blood and being sent into a pleased haze almost like subspace after having one's blood drawn out.

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