Yhi- Aboriginal Australian GodDeity"Sun Goddess"

The Awakening

Before Yhi opened her eyes, the world had no light. The land was already shaped, mountains and valleys and riverbeds cut into place, but nothing grew on it and nothing moved. Inside the rocks and beneath sheets of ice, Baiame had placed the spirits of every living thing, sealed there like seeds in dry ground.

Yhi slept in the Dreamtime, and the darkness held. Then Baiame spoke her name. She stirred. She opened her eyes, and light poured out of them in every direction, gold flooding across a world that had never seen it. The long dark broke.

Walking the Earth

Yhi descended. Where her feet touched bare ground, grasses pushed through the soil and flowers opened toward her warmth. Trees stretched upward. She walked the length of the land, and behind her the earth dressed itself in green.

But the plants could not move or cry out, and the world was still silent. Yhi turned to the caves. Her light reached into their deepest recesses, and the insects stirred: butterflies spiraled up toward her, and beetles scurried out onto ground that was already alive with roots. She went next to the frozen places. Her warmth cracked the ice, and fish swam free in the meltwater while frogs claimed the new wetlands. She crossed the open plains, and birds burst from the flat earth into a sky that had never known flight. Eagles rode the warm air, and songbirds filled it with the first music. Last, she reached the deep underground chambers. Kangaroos bounded out onto the grassy plains. Wombats pushed through loose earth into daylight. Every creature found a world already prepared for it by the stages of Yhi's walk.

The Gift of Change

Yhi gathered the animals and told them they could keep the forms her light had given them, or wish for new ones. Some were content. Others were not.

The seals wanted sleek bodies so they could live in the sea. The bats wanted wings for the night sky. The platypus could not choose at all. It wanted a duck's bill, then changed its mind and asked for fur. It added webbed feet, then a broad tail for swimming, and finally insisted on laying eggs. Yhi granted all of it. This is why Australian animals take shapes that seem to belong to no single kind: each one chose its own form when the world was still young enough to be remade.

The Promise

Yhi told the creatures she had to return to the sky. They were terrified. They had been born in her light and could not imagine the dark. She promised them: each morning she would rise in the east, cross the sky as she had crossed the land, and descend in the west. During the night she would pass through the underworld back to the place where Baiame dwells, and rise again at dawn.

Sometimes her path would bring her close and the land would warm into summer. Sometimes she would travel farther off and the old cold would creep back, frost settling on the ground like a memory of the ice she had melted. But she would always return. Every sunrise since has kept that promise.