Life and death of Adelyn

Unlike many people think the gods are no eternal beings. Just like others they are born, they age and eventually they die. That's what happened also to the goddess of wind Adelyn.
Adelyn was born long before the people even existed. At first she was only the smallest breeze one could feel. Slowly the breeze grew stronger and became a wind and the wind became storm. Then the storm calmed and Adelyn was born.
She was the breeze, wind and storm. She played with animals and danced with the trees. She flied across the lands and seas.
Then one day the people arrived. They were curious little things, so much like animals, but still so different.
From all the gods Adelyn was most fond of this new species and the people adored her. They built shrines and temples in her honor and filled the land with wind chimes so that they could always hear her.
Above all those fancy buildings she preferred the modest oak tree planted in her honor best. She loved to circulate the leaves and watch the lives of ordinary people, while the wind chimes in the trees joyfully ranged around her.
All the happiness can only last for so long, and so The Great War  broke out among the people. Adelyn tried her best to stop the war, but there was nothing she could do. She couldn't stand to witness the horrors of the war, and retreaded to the wilderness.
After the war Adelyn wandered across the devastated land. Sadness swelled inside her as she witnessed all the grief people had done to each other. The tears she cried created tiny white flowers as they dropped to the ground.
To calm her mind Adelyn headed towards her oak tree. The old tree stood tall in the middle of vast flowering meadow. The wind chimes hung by people in her honor ranged in the wind, but this time there where weird tone in the rang of the chimes.
Instead of the familiar wind chimes in the tree Adelyn was expecting, she find the tree filled with desiccated bodies, as the people's adoration towards Adelyn had turned to hate, when she had abandoned them in the midst of the war. All of it was too much for Adelyn, and she decided to join the dead now inhabiting the tree.
Yet the winds still blow across the lands and seas, but there is no Adelyn to be heard. The storms still comes and goes, but there is no longer comfort found in those, only destruction and death. The meadow has now turned to plains and in there the ancient oak tree still stands high and strong, and from the leaves of the tree echoes the whispers and wailing of those once hung to the tree.

Date of Setting

Around the year 0 (after the Great War)

Related Locations

• Sacred plain

Related People

• Adelyn Goddess of Wind

Controversy over whether Adelyn died or not

It is disputed over whether the statement of gods being able to die is true or not. Some scholars state that there is no actual fact on the subject and there are historians supporting the theory claiming that the first part of the myth is later addition, as the interpretation of death of Adelyn started to became more popular. Later the myth itself doesn't state that Adelyn actually died and there are no other stories of death of gods. There is also the argument that, if Adelyn was the winds, then the winds should have stopped, if she had died. As there is still winds then Adelyn must be still living and she could return, if people will prove themselves. Others state that the winds were there before Adelyn and when Adelyn was born she just manifested herself by the winds and thus the death of Adelyn does not mean the end of the winds.

There are few interpretations of what happened to Adelyn:

The most common one is that Adelyn died.

The second most common is that Adelyn returned to the wilderness taking with her the dead bodies.

The third is that Adelyn left to the another world where the dead now lives.

The fourth one is that Adelyn did not leave the people, but only stopped to interacting with them.

Relations with other myths

There is some contradictions with the myth Life and death of Adelyn and other myths. In the The origins of the three nations it is stated that the gods and people first met when the two lands collided, but if Adelyn flew across the seas then she should have found people even before the collision of the lands. Also the origin myth states nothing of death of god after the war, just that the gods left people. This is also shown as proof that Adelyn did not actually die.

The myth is tightly related with the myth Curse of Sacred plain as they both describe in some part the same event. However that myth most often does not tell what happened to Adelyn after the curse/sanctification of the plain. This is also seemed as evidence that Adelyn did not die.