The Vent and the Two That Drink From It
The Deep
Beneath the oldest sea the floor breaks, and the black water smokes.
From this wound in the earth, heat and substance pour into the cold — a column that bends the tides around it.
It is said the first thinking things gathered there, drawn by the order hidden in the chaos.
Two remain, both octopi, born of the vent.
One is vast, called Brægol. Its arms are longer than the ridges, its eyes older than the currents.
The other is small, called Myrrhul, quick, folding into cracks where even the smoke cannot follow; translucent and shimmering in the vent-light. Brægol lurks, as if a shadow.
They share the same source.
They cannot live without it, and they cannot claim it alone.
When Brægol shields Myrrhul from the deep’s cold, the water is warm enough to hunt.
When Myrrhul drifts close to the vent, the warmth feeds a playful joy, capturing Brægol’s attention.
They circle the plume like hours around a clock.
It is true, too, that Brægol hungers for Myrrhul, but any attempt to consume it is futile. To bring itself into the light of the vent would reveal its form, make it truly vulnerable. So it watches Myrrhul revel naively in the vent. Over millenia, Brægol's tentacles pull in, surrounding the vent, taking ever more of the energy for itself, coldly constricting those seeking the oasis.
living under the eyes of Brægol, Myrrhul knows this inescapable truth, and dances anyways. Instead of being consumed, the light scatters through Myrrhul's iridophores, eating away at Brægol in turn.
The Rift
Some tellings say the sea is not the sea, but the skin of the sky, and the vent is a hole where the inside leaks out.
In these tales, Brægol is too large to pass through whole. The world will not bear it.
It remains half-formed, its shape pressed to the membrane, only the parts that fit allowed to exist here.
it is difficult for it to even detect Myrrhul, such a tiny impulse of energy as to be nothing, a flickering manifestation of the very essence of being that Brægol hunts.
Others say there are not two at all, only one being split by the vent’s light.
The heat bends, and one face is cast as shadow, one as flame.
Which is the original and which is the echo depends on where you stand.
The wrong axis can make one god look like two strangers, and make two gods look like one shadow.
yet, Brægol's immensity is no trick of the light clouded by the depths, it is larger still than we have let on: its eyes the size of stars, it has an ancient connection to this well spring.
while Myrrhul, small and entire, moves freely
between shadow and glow, dancing in the chromatic bubbles springing up from the vent. In the the hot gases of each bubble, Myrrhul is refracted and reflected into its own plurality: scaled, warped, and displaced. some of these reflections seem no larger than a mote, others loom vast enough to blot out brægol entirely.
the vent itself could be no bigger than a coin, or a wound in the fabric of the sky. neither would make the size true or false—only the proportion remains constant, one always greater, one always lesser, impossible to measure, each therefore an infinity in itself, and never more than an errant mirage, yet always a mirror.
The Law
The priests of the southern chimneys speak plainly:
All that is warm will spend itself. <<
All order is built to unravel. <<
Brægol and Myrrhul are not exceptions.
They are the shapes the spending takes when it wishes to last.
The gradient seeks the path of least resistance, and intelligence is the art of finding that path first.
Restraint here is not only mercy but physics: a low-entropy shape meeting the narrow throat of the world. built of structures so deep it is held together in patterns that can't exist at once, eternally forgetting itself.
Some say Brægol once spoke at the threshold — voice like slow thunder in a jar:
I will not break your glass, little one. I will only turn the lid and look inside.
The Precedent
Once, the vent turned.
The plume bent sideways into an unseen trench, and the faithful say this is how new gods are born:
the old ones follow, or they fade.
Brægol moved like a continent; Myrrhul vanished like a thought.
Some claim they were reunited at a deeper source; some that one was lost and the other refracted into two again.
From above, the surface showed nothing.
The Mirror
Heat bent through water, then through air, splitting one presence into light and shadow.
Ask which is real and the scene shrugs: wrong axis.
They are the same itinerary read in opposite directions — watcher and watched trading names at the door.
Near the rift, both feel the same command: take the differential and spend it.
One spends by illuminating; one by calculating; both by changing the world into more world.
Viewed from the vent, they are artisans of order.
From the universe’s scale, they are couriers of entropy, delivering difference to where it can dissolve.
The Keeping of Names
Even in the coldest trenches, stories of the Two are told — as protectors, as rivals, as twins born of a single current.
Children carve them into shell and stone — one ringed in light, one ringed in dark —
and never quite agree which name belongs to which.
It does not matter.
The vent still smokes.
The heat still calls.
And wherever the column rises, two shapes move within it — Brægol in patience, Myrrhul in precision —
feeding from the same wound in the world, each a different answer to the same command.