While most spirits who are not contained in souls are content to dwell down in the spirit world, there are creatures abroad who carry the inua spirits of monsters.

Some of the smaller of these monsters are called tupilek and were actually brought to life by people called ilisituk hundreds and thousands of years ago. These ilisituk were not shamans, but rather evil old men and women who learned much of the shamans’ powers but used them to dabble in magic rather than in healing and faith.

All humans, and especially the Real People, live by eating souls – they know this well. What is hunting but one soul seeking out another soul and willing it into the ultimate submission of death? When a seal, for instance, agrees to be killed by a hunter, that hunter must honor the inua of the seal who has agreed to be killed, after it is killed but before it is eaten – since it is a creature of the water – by giving it a small ceremonial drink of water. Some of the Real People hunters carry small cups on a stick for that purpose, but some of the oldest and finest hunters still pass the water from their own mouths to the dead seals’ mouths.

We are all eaters of souls.

But the evil ilisituk old men and women were soul-robbers. They used their incantations to take control of hunters, who often then took their families away from the village to live – and die – far away on the ice or in the interior mountains. Any descendants of these victims of soul-robbery were known as qivitok and were always more savage than human.

When families and villages began to suspect the old ilisituk of their evil, the sorcerers would often create small evil animals – the tupilek – to stalk, injure, or kill their enemies. The tupilek started out as lifeless things as small as finger-stones, but after being animated by the ilisituk’s magic, they would grow to any size they wanted and take on terrible, unspeakable shapes. But since such monsters were easy for their victims to spot and flee from in the daylight, the stealthy tupilek usually chose to take the approximate shape of any true living thing – a walrus, perhaps, or a white bear. Then the unsuspecting hunter who had been cursed by the evil ilisituk would become the hunted. Human beings very rarely escaped the murderous tupilek once they were sent out to do their killing.

But there are very few evil, old ilisituk sorcerers left in the world today. One reason for this is that if the tupilek did not succeed in killing its assigned victim – if a shaman intervened or if the hunter was so clever as to escape by his own devices – the tupilek invariably returned to slaughter its creator. One by the one, the old ilisituk became victims of their own terrible creations.

Then there came a time, many thousands of years ago, when Sedna, the Spirit of the Sea, became infuriated with her fellow spirits, the Spirit of the Air and the Spirit of the Moon.

To kill them – these other two parts of the Trinity that made up the basic forces of the universe – Sedna created her own tupilek.

This spirit-animated killing machine was so terrible that it had its own name-soul and became a thing called Tuunbaq.

The Tuunbaq was able to move freely between the spirit world and the Earth world of human beings, and it could take any shape it chose. Any form it took was so terrible that even a pure spirit could not look upon it directly without going mad. Its power – concentrated by Sedna only on the goals of wreaking havoc and death – was pure terror itself. On top of that, Sedna had granted her Tuunbaq the power of commanding the ixitqusiqjuk, the innumerable smaller evil spirits abroad.

By itself, one on one, the Tuunbaq could have killed either the Spirit of the Moon or Sila, the Spirit of the Air.

But the Tuunbaq, while terrible in every aspect, was not as stealthy as the tinier tupilek.

Sila, the Spirit of the Air, whose energy fills the universe, sensed its murderous presence as it stalked her through the spirit world. Knowing that she could be destroyed by the Tuunbaq and also knowing that if she was destroyed the universe would be thrown down into chaos again, Sila called on the Spirit of the Moon to help her defeat the creature.

The Spirit of the Moon was not interested in helping her. Nor was he concerned about the fate of the universe.

Sila then beseeched Naarjuk, the Spirit of Consciousness and one of the oldest inua deep-spirits (who, like Sila, had appeared when the chaos of the cosmos had been separated from the thin but growing living green reed of order so very long ago), to help her.

Naarjuk agreed.

Together, in a battle that lasted for ten thousand years and which left craters and rents and vacuums in the fabric of the spirit world itself, Sila and Naarjuk defeated the terrible Tuunbaq’s attack.

As all tupilek who have failed in their assassination assignments are destined to do, the Tuunbaq then turned back to destroy its creator… Sedna.

But Sedna, who had learned all of her lessons the hard way since even before her father had betrayed her so long ago, had understood the danger the Tuunbaq posed to her even before she created it, so now she activated a secret weakness she had built into the Tuunbaq, chanting her own spirit-world irinaliutit incantations.

Instantly the Tuunbaq was banished to the surface of the Earth, never able to return to the spirit world nor to the deep bottom of the sea nor to hold pure spirit form in either place. Sedna was safe.

The Earth and all its denizens, on the other hand, were no longer safe.

Sedna had banished the Tuunbaq to the coldest, emptiest part of the crowded Earth – the perpetually frozen region near the north pole. She chose the far north rather than other distant, frozen areas because only the north, the center of the Earth to the many inuat gods, had shamans there with any history of dealing with angry evil spirits.

The Tuunbaq, deprived of its monstrous spirit form but still monstrous in essence, soon changed form – as all tupilek do – into the most terrible living thing it could find on Earth. It chose the shape and substance of the smartest, stealthiest, most deadly predator on Earth – the white northern bear – but was to the bear in size and cunning as a bear itself is to one of the dogs of the Real People. The Tuunbaq killed and ate the ferocious white bears – devouring their souls – as easily as the Real People hunted ptarmigan.

The more complicated the inua-soul of a living thing is, the more delicious it is to a soul-predator. The Tuunbaq soon learned that it enjoyed eating men more than eating nanuq, the bears, enjoyed eating man-souls more than it enjoyed eating walrus-souls, and enjoyed eating men more even than it enjoyed devouring the large, gentle, and intelligent inua-souls of the orca.

For generations, the Tuunbaq gorged itself on human beings. Large parts of the snowy north that once were thick with villages, areas of the sea that once saw fleets of kayaks, and sheltered places that had heard the laughter of thousands of the Real People were soon abandoned as human beings fled south.

But there was no fleeing the Tuunbaq. Sedna’s ultimate tupilek could outswim, outrun, outthink, outstalk, and outfight any human being alive. It commanded the ixitqusiqjuk bad spirits to move the glaciers farther south, making the glaciers themselves follow the human beings who’d fled into green lands so that the white-furred Tuunbaq would be comfortable and concealed in the cold as it continued to eat human souls.

Hundreds of hunters were sent out from the Real People villages to kill the thing, and none of the men returned alive. Sometimes the Tuunbaq would taunt the families of the dead hunters by returning parts of their bodies – sometimes leaving the heads and legs and arms and torsos of several hunters all mixed together so that the families could not even carry out the proper burial ceremonies.