Recorded Across Generations.
For Those Who Come After.
One head, two bodies: a single serpent forked into two trunks from one skull. Where it appears, drought follows. Not as an omen it carries, but as the mark it leaves. It is a mouth that cannot be filled. Rivers sink, wells run dry, the last damp is pulled from the soil. Fields split into cracks, deep wells show their floors, and where a lake once lay there is only a ring of white salt. People look to the sky and wait for a rain that will never fall, not knowing the water never rose into the sky at all. Where did it go? Into the serpent. It drank the whole country down to scorched earth. Eat its heart and you take that power. Damp from the air, moisture from stone, ice from frozen ground, blood from a living thing: you reach out and the water comes to you. In the north, where hunters die of thirst on frozen plains, you alone are never thirsty. You drain all things, and quench nothing.
一头两身，一条蛇生出两具身躯，自同一颗头颅分岔而出。 它现身之处，其国必逢大旱。可这旱不是它带来的凶兆，而是它留下的痕迹。它是一张填不满的口。所过之处，河枯井竭，连土里的潮气也被吸尽。田陷成裂缝，深井见底，昔日的湖泊只余一圈白碱，风一过便扬起盐尘。人们抬头望天，等一场永不落下的雨，却不知水从不曾升上天去。水去了哪里？水在它腹中。它把整片大地，喝成了焦土。 食其心者，得它那份吸食之能。空气里的湿，石中的润，冻土里的冰，活物身上的血，你一伸手，水便离物而来。北地滴水成冰，猎人渴死于千里冰原，唯你永不干渴。可这吸食之能从不知足：你腹中越是灌满，喉间越是焦渴。 你取尽万物之水，却解不了自己的渴。
棲 渾夕之山 Mount Hunxi
有蛇一首兩身，名曰肥遺，見則其國大旱。