The Litany of Creation

The Litany of Creation belongs to a genre of Khe'drakha which deals in mytho-history and the stories of gods and heroes. From a completionist perspective, it fills in one of the "gaps" in a complete history of the universe, with the other being the "ending", so to speak. (The Stenza themselves believe the end of the world won't be for millions and millions of years. But, they don't plan to go down without a fight, either.) The Litany itself covers the events from the beginning of the expansion of the universe up to the formation of Mudewei and the evolution of Stenza civilization, and so requires several days to be told in its entirety.
A complete standardized version of the Litany does not exist; each clan maintains a version with the details they deem most important. Usually, only a few broad strokes are consistent across each: Iradae and Lan'tha are the two gods who remained behind (commonly "at the center of space") in order to generate a star system from their bodies, in which Mudewei was eventually formed and the Stenza eventually evolved. Sometimes a clan will tack on some tales of its famous pseudo-mythological heroes, people who were known to have existed but may have had their deeds exaggerated to fit the suitably dramatic khe'drakha form. Otherwise, each version of the Litany can go long stretches without sounding like any other version in existence, and this has had two notable consequences:

1. The remarkable flexibility of the Litany allows the teller or chanter to slide in lines or whole stanzas to convey specific messages, without breaking flow or losing meaning.
2. Members of the Clan of the Lost have been encouraged to, if possible, maintain the version from their clan of origin. This has preserved versions that would have otherwise been lost.

The second point has had an interesting consequence of its own: In a field of rock on Azor, Tzim-Sha ordered Ta'zhen to commit to memory as much of a version he remembers as possible. Ta'zhen now knows three days' worth of the Litany, amounting to most of the opening stanzas recounting the birth of the universe, and in the event of her capture she is able to use this as a timer in order to ride out the window in which any information she could be tortured for would be useful.

Type

Text, Religious

Medium

Oral Tradition / Word of Mouth

Myth

The Creation of the World

Location

Mudewei