Leikan

"Once, the storm was whole." -Unknown Too long ago to fathom, two forces rose from the first tempest, neither mortals nor gods, but something older: The first voices of thunder and lightning. One was Raizan, whose thunder drums could shatter the spine of the sky. The other was Leikan, whose bolts carried the weight of judgment, each strike a violent release that purged chaos from the air. Though born of the same flux, their natures were opposed as they carved the world evenly between them. Raizan's path was to rend and scatter, to let chaos sweep the land clean from above as he broke empires and stripped mountains bare. Leikan's was to bind and measure, to bring the wildness of the tempest into a form that would preserve rather than consume. In the first days, his lightning shaped the coastlines, and his stillness let the earth grow calm enough for life to take hold. This symbiotic pact was born not of trust, but necessity, for if there is thunder that bludgeons the skies, there must be lightning to cut through the madness. And when the land of Tya had formed in full, when their clashes had sown enough turmoil and tranquility in equal measure, they ceased fighting and split the dominion of the realm. Ages passed. The land grew quiet. The pact held. Raizan withdrew to the skies, his name fading into prayer and rumor. As for Leikan, he laid himself on Tya's coast, keeping close watch on the earth his bolts had shaped. Centuries of tides and silt disguised his vast body as a scattered chain of isles known as the Basilisk's Tail, where the hair on the necks of seafarers would stand on end as they navigated its shallow waters. Only those who knew the oldest songs understood: the islands were his bones, the reefs his mane, the wind itself his breath. He would not rise again unless the world's balance shattered. The warning came to pass when Uzimo fell and the eight drums of Raizan thundered once more, for the war between the Arbiters and Valderon created a void to be filled with chaos unbridled. The sky's drums pounded without pause, and storms no longer turned with the seasons, but tore at them. In answer, the chain of islets shook themselves free of the earth, with Leikan rising once more, violet eyes ablaze with reckoning. His nature is no servant's. His lightning can heal as swiftly as it wounds, his tempests can shelter as well as shatter. Against Raizan's destructive thunder, Leikan answers with the only electric force that can stand against it. He is the seal that cannot be broken, the law that even the tempest must obey. His storms march like armies, his hooves ring like war drums, and his lightning spares nothing once judgment is cast. The storms you and I fear, those we mistake for hurricanes, squalls, and cyclones... these are the returning clashes of two titans in the skies of Tya, neither granting quarter nor seeking it.