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"The light is blinding, blazing, familiar. As your eyes adjust, you realise that you are walking upon a great globe of shining glass. Far above you, there is no familiar stone ceiling... Nor even a sky. Just a dizzying verdant expanse of upside-down jungle."[1]
The Skin of the Sun is an impression of the Sun that provides daylight to the skies of Parabola.
Incandescent[]
"Beneath the skin of dreams, behind the faces of mirrors, an orange sun sails in a fervid sky."[2]
The Mirror-Marches
The Skin of the Sun is a enormous, cosmogone bulb that sails across the glasslike skies of Parabola.[3][4] It is forged of iron and glass,[5] and it apparently bulges from the Parabolan skyscape itself,[4] sometimes resembling a massive lens.[6] As cosmogone is the color of remembered[7] rather than true sunlight,[8] the Skin of the Sun has an queasy, orange appearance,[9] but it is still capable of lighting and heating almost all of the Parabolan landscape. Only certain locations like the Moonlit Chessboard are not touched by its light in any capacity.[2][10]
Despite being in the realm of dream, the Skin of the Sun appears to follow a typical daylight cycle. As it sets, stars may appear in the Parabolan night sky, and a moon may rise to take its place. At first, the Parabolan moon might resemble a man, but at a second glance, it might resemble a sleeping, curled-up cat.[11][12]
The Coiling Spire[]
"The 'sky' around the sun appears to be glass, too. A giant glass dome from whose upper reaches the sun has bubbled forth. And above you - well, below you - an enormous, twisting stone spire stretches toward the ground, like an umbilical cord connecting the jungle and the sun."[13]
The Coiling Spire is a massive stone structure that spans all the way from the Skin of the Sun to the ground.[14][15] It has a winding ramp, with a groove carved within it from years upon years of serpentine transit and use.[16] Cosmogone is a color that is irresistible to the denizens of Parabola,[17] but the Skin of the Sun remains outside the reach of living Fingerkings, as they can never touch sunlight.[18] Thus, Fingerkings who feel they are nearing their end embark on a pilgrimage of sorts to reach the Skin of the Sun, a journey which apparently kills them permanently.[19]
The Boiling Sky[]
"This is not your place. This is their domain. They may allow your kind to trespass across the rest of their kingdom, you slumbering oafs, you mortal morsels, but not here, not the hallowed spire. Insolence! Blasphemy!"[20] "As suddenly as a stormcloud, a boiling stew of vast, interweaving coils has filled the sky from horizon to horizon. Somewhere in the boiling mass, fangs are drawn – long and sharp as winter."[20]
A Fingerking.
The Skin of the Sun and the Coiling Spire are locations of great importance to the Fingerkings, who consider them sacred.[20] As such, trespassing in these places without express permission from the Fingerkings can lead to serious trouble.[21][22] Both locales are guarded by the aptly-named Boil of Calamities,[23] an extremely powerful entity that appears as an enormous, spiraling serpent made of smaller, interwoven serpents, large enough to block out the sky.[24][20] This being protects its territory with ferocity and zeal,[25] and anyone who even steps within its purview unauthorized risks being hunted down with extreme prejudice.[26]
The Boil's reasons for protecting the Parabolan sun so fiercely are many; after all, it laid the egg that would become the Skin of the Sun, though the egg itself was heavily modified before it became what it is now.[27]
Sunrise[]
"This is Parabola. We found it in dreams and brought light to it. The ushabti were built to construct a new home for the Second City, where we could live forever beneath the skin of the sun. The night was the bringer of dreams and thus sacred to us. But this Palace was never completed."[28] "We will not see another day, for every day will be a night. Let every night, then, be a day, in dreams that stream with bright sunlight. Pray to the gods that rule the day. Pray to the gods that rule the night. Blow the glass, blow until it glows, and raise it high into the sky."[29]
An Ushabti.
Before the Skin of the Sun was created, it is said that the lands of Parabola were quite dark.[30] During the time of the Second City, the sisters of the Duchess sought refuge for themselves and the city's people in Parabola, away from the influence of the Bazaar,[31][32] after trapping the Masters within a tomb flanked by the Salt Lions.[33] The precise details of the Parabolan sun's construction are unclear, but it seems that the sisters modified the egg of the Boil of Calamities in its shell,[34] resulting in the egg presumably hatching into an object made of glass.[35] The citizens of the Second City then proceeded to construct and raise the Parabolan sun using a ritual involving glassblowing and prayer,[36] and the newly-born sun scorched the Parabolan landscape and melted the colors of the sky itself.[37]
Following the construction of the Skin of the Sun, the sisters then attempted to build a large palace for the citizens of the Second City in Parabola, so that they may live in sunlight once more.[38][39] Unfortunately, their plans fell through and the sisters were forced to flee, leaving the whole project unfinished.[40] Over time, the Parabolan sun began to break down with age,[41] growing cracks that leak cosmogone vapor.[42] Eventually, it may fail entirely, plunging Parabola into twilight once more.[43]
References[]
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