Vali is the Bunun word for the sun and, in the tradition's best-known myth, names the searing celestial being at the centre of the sun-shooting story. In the first age there were two suns that shone by turns, leaving no night and parching the mountains; when a couple's infant, covered only by a withered leaf against the heat, was transformed into a lizard, the bereaved father took his eldest son to take revenge. They shot one sun in the eye, wounding and dimming it. The wounded sun is then transformed into the moon (buan), establishing the alternation of day and night. Vali thus stands at the boundary between a destructive cosmic force and the ordered, life-sustaining sky that follows its humbling; it is a mythic numen of the sun rather than an anthropomorphic deity.