Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

All year long, says the old Greek tradition, the world stands on a tree. Deep under the earth, deeper than wells and deeper than graves, the great trunk rises that holds up the floor of the living world — and all year long, in the dark down there, something is sawing it . They work in shifts, with crude saws and hatchets, hairy shoulders heaving: the kallikantzaroi — black, misshapen, mostly blind goblins, with the legs of beasts and the manners of monkeys — laboring with a diligence they show at no other task, because they have exactly one ambition: to cut through the World Tree, drop the earth into the abyss, and be done with creation altogether. And every year they nearly finish. By late December the trunk hangs by a sliver; one more day's sawing would bring everything down. And precisely then — at Christmas — the goblins hear the news from above, throw down their saws in a body, and swarm up into the world . For the Twelve Days between Christmas and Epiphany, the earth's m...