The Migration Cycle
"The Migration Cycle" is an informal title given to a vast body of chants and folk tales which follow the tracks The Stenza take during migration. Many pieces center on iconic landmarks, usually of the form "Migration discovers and explores a cool-looking landmark". They are told in one order as migration begins, and in another order on the journey home, as a verbal map of the landscape.
Purpose
The Migration Cycle serves as a verbal map to key locations along the Stenza's customary migration routes, as well as filler stories to help pass the time. The cycle both prevents people getting lost, and allows them to find their way back should that happen anyway.
Historical Details
History
The Migration Cycle is probably as old as chant and storytelling, although the paths and landmarks are much older (and have been known to the Stenza and their ancestors for much longer). It's hypothesized that many of the tales that later featured Migration originally featured Jeshra, although it's all but impossible to know for sure. What is fairly certain is that the more modern forms, featuring Migration in the active role, were mostly codified by the time Stenza began to build permanent settlements around the Ice Flats.
There are two unofficial categories within the Migration Cycle: the fixed and the mutable. The fixed tales feature the landmarks, often recounting their discovery and exploration by Migration (the Snow Pup), who is usually described as being immensely and incessantly curious (it's implied by these tales, too, that Migration first set out the safest paths before teaching them to mortal Stenza). The mutable tales are time fillers, and can be about nearly any subject. When recorded, these have provided snapshots into what the Stenza thought about relevant historical goings on (such as The Lean Years, the Battle with the Stone Menace, Unification, that new-fangled space travel, and so on). Children commonly spend their time on urban legends and childlore (often about the Snow Pups), which also seems to serve the purpose of perpetuating children's mystery cults. Mutable tales have been used to reliably date all sorts of historical events from the lives of notable individuals to the first tellings of certain stories, and many elements of later Khe'drakha have been found to originate here.
Space travel led to an interesting phenomenon: a near-instantaneous development of another set of fixed stories. The backbone of this new map borrowed heavily from travel songs and covered a lot more ground, accounting for all the planets in the solar system, and every system the Stenza know how to reach. These tales often feature Migration haunting ships' cockpits or navigation rooms, or both, still displaying insatiable curiosity.
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