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IV. Adba and Inur
From Culture and Remnants, Volume V, by h’Anoan Dovru’h, as transcribed by Ishraq Nasikh, 1272 AC:
Long before the Terror that nearly brought an end to our civilizations, the world was rocked by constant warfare. Inur-Before had no true magick [Note: inexact translation], no inkling that there were other beings far stranger than our imaginations could have dreamt of. Instead, there were weapons cruel in application and far more gruesome in outcome than the disasters the Hatching of the World ever produced. To name these weapons, to even describe them, was forbidden even before the Hatching, and the subsequent advent of magick made their production and deployment impossible.
Inexact translation? Zoe frowned at the page. Magick was magick—unless…
She thought back to the first time she’d seen the word, when it was missing that final letter. Fairy tales, she thought. Wizards and knights, dragons and fair maidens. Magic was the stuff of old Earth’s imaginative fantasies; magick, simply an extra source of energy that life either adapted to and used, like chameleon wolves, or died because of, as humans were still prone to do if they didn’t have…
Her hand went to where her eklil stone had been, habit overcoming the knowledge that it was gone. Had Matteo known about…?
She wished she could still rub at the worn-down crack on the bottom of the stone (her thumb’s little callus from doing so all these years beginning to soften already) that had fascinated her when she was too young to know any better. I’m so sorry, Mom. I was only five years old! Zoe shook her head, putting that old sorrow behind her yet again.
The dominant species of Inur-Before fought for global supremacy, with the khiai in their vicious and terrible billions eventually meeting a brutal mass extinction. No records have ever been found indicating whether the weapon or weapons responsible were of lysk or burchar manufacture; however, the most widely accepted opinion is this: If it had been a lysk weapon, the burchar love of recording even everyday and mundane experiences for posterity would have left such grave information at least partially intact. The utter lack of records regarding the khiai extermination seems all the more damning, suggesting that our ancestors eliminated the evidence themselves. Why would they have done so, unless in fear of reprisal or from dread of the judgment of History?
Other historians have offered a range of hypotheses. Perhaps the khiai migrated outworld on resource-intensive generation ships prior to the Terror and the Hatching of the World. They may have been eliminated by the Terror itself; or similarly, been lost in the Hatching of the World; or a combination of the two. There is also a heretofore fringe theory, now gaining academic attention, that the khiai were always merely legendary or mythical beings.
Legends or myths. It hadn’t ever occurred to her, but of course—of course the other peoples of Inur must have had old stories and fables of their own. Humans weren’t exactly alone in this aggregate world, and trees knew the burchars were practically addicted to the written word.
Fuck trees, she chided herself, shuddering with the memory of Matteo’s screams. She needed something else to swear by.
We have no records of how or why the Terror began, but it caused a level of internal strife in the burchar community possibly unknown since the pre-Historic era. If the Terror affected the khiai as it did the burchars and lysks, their warlike race may have destroyed itself. Although the leading theories on khiai extinction posit them as being extinct prior to the Terror, we must allow the possibility of the Terror hitting the khiai nations before it made the jump to the lysks and burchars.
She dipped her quill, tapped the excess onto the little cloth she habitually kept in her pocket. Now why did she feel like she should know that word, “Terror”? Surely no mere bump in the night should have merited a proper noun.
At the height of the Terror, when Inur-Before’s nations were attacking each other and even themselves, the Hatching of the World put an abrupt end to the old History. The vast majority of our Libraries were either kept in now inaccessible formats or were utterly destroyed. Ironically, the best preserved of our previous History was written on paper or stone, while virtual [Note: inexact translation] databases containing centuries of old History and knowledge were rendered useless.
There it was again, “inexact translation.” And what was a “database”? She saw the word now and then in copies of pre-Cataclysmic records. She knew virtual meant “not quite real”; did that mean databases were also not quite real? How would that even work, anyway? How could records of Inur-Before be not quite real? She knew old Earth had been real, she’d seen old gadgets in the town museum, the question of their possible functions left unanswered.
Could the Hatching of the World itself have caused the extinction of the khiai? If we discount the Terror, most likely not. The khiai were said to be infinite in both number and malevolence. Surely any species of such magnitude would have had more survivors of the Hatching of the World than either lysks or burchars. Our records of the days and years immediately following the Hatching are numerous; among them are the sorrowful realization that none of Inur-Before’s avian species seemed to have survived long-term exposure to magick, the shocking deaths of thousands of people incapable of surviving sudden contact with new diseases, and epidemics of suicide. Why, then, would there be no records of the vanishing of the khiai?
Burchar histories are rich in detail. We know, for example, that many attempts at peace were made in the millennia before the world changed beyond recognition. There are still extant documents, and copies of lost documents, recounting the minutiae of embassies between burchars and lysks. None, however, exist that even hint at embassies to the khiai. It is difficult to imagine the complete lack of such evidence when we have many such records of burchar-lysk diplomacy.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, however.
There are, indeed, records of artificial satellites and even of exploratory vessels to what was once our nearest neighboring planet in our once-home solar system (see appended notes on resource expenditure, astronomical data, satellite communications, asteroid mining, h’Da colony, etc.).
[Note: The copy received and here transcribed did not include the appended data available in the original.]
It is curious, however…
Before she even registered that she was shaking, Zoe had automatically set her quill to the side.
There was a painting behind protective glass in the town museum, one that every few years was checked for damage—dust carefully removed, cracks filled in, fading colors refreshed. It showed a stark landscape in hues of dully pockmarked gray and white. Above the slanting horizon, the vivid blue and white of some gibbous body hovered in a sea of unrelieved black.
She’d long thought it had been some artist’s fancy, the Earthrise painting. The museum curators insisted it was based on something real, some example of the lost art of photography that showed only the real, but she’d never really believed them.
But now, reading this—could it have been real after all?
Someone, however long ago before the Cataclysm, had taken a picture of lost Earth as seen from Luna. Luna the broken moon, often barely visible. Luna, who had left a thin ring of her own dust—and the dust of whatever had broken her—around Inur.
Slowly and deliberately, Zoe put away her shock, stuffing her inner world’s newest cataclysm into the same little box where she had once kept her most dangerous thoughts until she could record them in her journal. She closed her eyes and just breathed until she felt she could transcribe again.
It is curious, however, that while none of our home solar system’s bodies were named after the burchar or lysk races, Inur’s lost moon was named Khiai.
This brings us to the theory that has lately become more accepted: Did the khiai never exist at all?
We should not forget to turn our attention to linguistics. Notably, phonemic analysis tends to place “Adba” in the burchar language groups and “Khiai” in the lysk. However, Historical linguistics shows that related words such as “adiba” and “daba” are lysk words (translated into Common as “marriage” and “treaty”), while “khiao” (Common: “deadly”) and “akhia” (Common: “to weep”) belong to the burchar warrior tongue.
There were quite a few places on the plateau where families had kept Spanish alive, but most people around her spoke English (widely just called Human, as if folks like Matteo who often spoke Spanish weren’t just as human as her). Sometimes Zoe would receive a book in Spanish, and she would dutifully transcribe it; but that was always an exercise in frustration, copying largely unfamiliar words letter by letter, and the only other language she was even halfway fluent in was Common.
Zoe loved receiving Common texts. She had discovered that most of those were burchar texts, full of surprising phrases and ideas. And every once in a while, a word from Human would show up, which always made her feel that she had unwrapped a surprise gift.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the mythological status of the khiai is the lysk tale of Adba and Inur. Part of the rich lysk oral and wing dancing traditions, it recounts the final peace between lysks and burchars in the early days after the Hatching of the World.
In the end, the moral theme of that mythic cycle, which concludes with the Saga of the h’Adbani, is the refutation of “all that belongs to Khiai,” as the lost moon retreats from the remade world of Inur-Anew.
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Mama always seemed to know what the people inside her needed, and the great pallicorn’s shell put out a soft, steady light perfect for writing by. Zoe put down her quill and rubbed her eyes, tired despite the gentle illumination.
She was so familiar with the work of this particular scribe that the neat, flowing letters of the copyist’s hand had immediately drawn her to this article. Without a second thought, she had pulled several styluses, an unopened ink bottle, a blotter, and a ream of paper from the supplies in this shell-room. When she spotted a writing desk and its chair tucked away in an empty space between crates, Zoe began to recopy the article. Despite everything, it was comforting to be doing the job she had spent years training for. It made her feel like she was bartering passage, in a way.
Zoe had started the day by wandering room by room and level by spacious level, amazed at the staggering amount of goods cached within, when this room had drawn her in.
There were more books and scrolls in this one room than Zoe had ever seen in the entirety of New Providence.
The smells of paper, of parchment, and of leather-bound volumes had made Zoe’s heart clench with memories of learning to write, of apprenticing first to her mother and then to her grandmother. A scrivener was never just a person who could write, though, her grandmother had told her. A scrivener was a guardian of knowledge, someone who preserved ancient writings by copying them as neatly and precisely as they could. Zoe had spent years developing a script that would pass Grandma’s muster and had continued perfecting her quillstrokes over the years since the old woman’s death.
She sighed and cracked her knuckles.
“What is that horrible thing you’re doing to yourself?” Tavirr’s voice asked, making Zoe jump.
Her elbow knocked painfully against the side of the desk. “Ow!” she complained, rubbing at her arm, trying to massage away the pins and needles. “Why’d you sneak in and scare me? That fucking hurt!”
His big, fur-tipped ears drooped a bit in confusion. “How does bumping your elbow cause such pain when breaking your fingers does not?”
“Popping my knuckles gets the stiffness out,” she said. “I just spent too long copying an article, that’s all.”
Tavirr looked at his own fingers, and Zoe realized that those scythelike talons meant he’d probably never crack his knuckles, much less pick up a quill.
“What was so fascinating that you had to immediately write down what was already written down?”
She chuckled and handed the papers to him.
He scowled at them. “Lysk eyes are not made for reading,” he admitted. “What does it say?”
“It’s really a copy of a copy of probably a lot of earlier copies, but the original was written by a burchar, I’m guessing in Common since a scrivener translated it at some point into Human.”
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“So,” Tavirr pretended to wonder, “am I to imagine this fascinating bundle of papers is simply a tally of how many times its own tally has been rewritten?”
Giving him a look of exasperation, Zoe responded, “It’s about whether a race called the ‘khiai’ ever existed.”
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Deep inside, Tavirr feels his heart tremble.
He remembers long ago—before he’d even begun his hunt training, long before he would see his sister’s wings reduced to a nightmare of bloody ribbons—a wing dancing performance done in honor of a visiting group of h’adbani.
They are burchars, of course, male and female, young and not quite sedentary, and they’re bringing prospective h’adbani with them.
Tavirr watches his amma, fated to die when she goes on an evening hunting jaunt at the teeth and claws of a large, agile cat. He watches his obba, one day to be taken by something unspeakable. Prranit goes over her mate’s wings, combing the fine fur on the webbing, then applying a thin layer of pig grease. Uzvik will have to stand still for hours and hours, carefully wafting his wings to help the grease set, and young Tavirr doesn’t understand how his obba can be so patient.
But the hours pass while Tavirr (his young talons still short and blunt) helps his mother grind and mix the paints. A blend of charcoal and iron-rich drake bones for black, chrys petals and sunroot for yellow, ochre and venna berries for the cruel red. Prranit stirs each color blend into a different urn using water, milk, and blood, calling on the dark night and the gentle moon of Adba to lend their spirits to the art.
(She does not invite any spirit to inhabit the red.)
Tavirr is proud of his amma’s art. It decorates the stone walls of their small home inside the mountain. She paints pottery and dyes travel straps, and their clanmates bring gifts of wood and fibers for new brushes, flowers to decorate their home, even the occasional jar of mead or moly tea. Until his talons grow out, Tavirr will harbor dreams of being a crafter as important as his mother. (Then he will dream of wing dancing like his father, and then of nothing at all.)
That night, everyone meets in the vast and echoing Great Cavern, burchars and lysks introducing themselves and giving the ceremonial greeting of hands to hearts. A few seem to take more than passing interest, and those pair off. He doesn’t understand why, but a voice from beside him provides a distraction.
“And who is this handsome young man?”
“Ah,” replies his mother. “This is my son Tavirr. Tavirr, give the lady Jasse your good wishes.”
Little Tavirr looks up at the giant burchar. Each of her four hooves could, he thinks, smash him flat without noticing! Her two hands seem gentle, though, so he flaps clumsily up to sit on his amma’s shoulder.
“Hello,” he says. “I’m called Tavirr. Your scales are very pretty!” And they are—tiny, jade scales offset with larger scutes of a startlingly bright turquoise shade.
“I am h’Jasse Tav’h,” the burchar responds, and while Tavirr can’t quite hear the difference in the way h’Jasse pronounces her name, his amma’s rendition of it lacks a certain fullness.
Tavirr stretches out his little hand, and Prranit leans in to let him lay his palm on h’Jasse’s heart. He marvels at the slow thunder that he can feel echo in his very bones. H’Jasse touches his chest with one hand in return.
“Your second name is Tav,” he pipes, “like my name, Tavirr! I like the way your heart sounds. Amma, can I marry her someday?”
Prranit and h’Jasse break out in surprised laughter, but Tavirr thinks he’s pleased h’Jasse.
Someone strikes a drum, beginning a slow, echoing rhythm, and everyone finds a bit of floor to sit on, leaving plenty of room in the back for their larger burchar visitors. A baby cries somewhere, and Tavirr thinks of his amma’s rounded belly, where his soon-to-be sibling is growing.
The slow drumbeat quickens and the dancers tumble and swoop from high overhead, their wings flashing a riot of colors in the bright torchlight. His father is among them, but Tavirr can’t yet make him out.
Several nested circles of lysks, their wings so tightly furled that only bits of paint show, stomp around each other, their foot talons rattling in time with the thudding drumbeat, and Tavirr can’t help but think of the feel of h’Jasse’s heart against his palm. I really will marry her, he thinks. She is for me.
Someone snarls, making Tavirr jump, but then someone else joins in, and now he can hear that it’s the dancers, their wordless voices evoking fury and danger. A high-pitched squeal sounds from above, growing louder, lower in pitch, and there is a lysk, wings painted in shades of fire, circling above them all, her voice ululating in tones of doom.
She screams as though inhabited by a vengeful spirit, and Tavirr understands now why his amma didn’t call on the spirit of the red moon: that awful spirit was already here. The lysk sails, still shrieking, over the audience, and Tavirr is not the only one to flinch away, covering his head in instinctive terror. But at least, he thinks, he’s the only one not to cry out in fear.
Finally, the screaming, fiery lysk homes in on the circling dancers. She falls upon them headfirst, her wings fully spread to display their painted, dancing flames. The drum gives an explosive boom, and the dancers hurl themselves outwards as if flung by a great force.
The fiery lysk and her dreadful screaming are gone! Instead, only silence, and the slowly stirring forms of the dancers.
One stands, spreading his wings to their full span, his face in his hands as if weeping. His wings are fully black, the black of death. As those wings sweep once, twice, a third time, the drum booms in terrible synchrony.
Before him, another dancer stands to face him, and another stands as well, both with their backs to the silent audience. All three pairs of wings are black, but as they link hands and begin to stamp out a slow circle, Tavirr notices other colors showing from their unfolding wings. Rose and gold cover the inner surfaces of their wings, the color of dawn and hope.
A shriek, a drumming bang, and they fall, only to stand again. Three times the shrieking doom strikes, three times the dancers fall, three times they rise—three times they die again.
Finally, there is a long, long silence, broken only by a few hushed whispers and the sniffling of a baby. Tavirr is just starting to wonder if that was all, if no one else will do anything ever again, if they will all just sit and wait in silence until there’s nothing left of anyone.
“LET US BEGIN AGAIN!!!”
This time, he does cry out in startlement, twisting around to look behind everyone. It was a burchar who had spoken! He could feel the shouted words, the air vibrating around him, making his wing fur and whiskers tremble.
“WE WILL BEGIN AGAIN!!!” The response sounds from every lysk, and Tavirr finds himself taking it up as well, the words echoing and repeating around the Great Cavern, passing from mouth to mouth, heart to heart.
The dancers stand as one, their wings upraised to show the multitude of colors and patterns as they spin and leap as if doing battle, but Tavirr sees that for some, the interdigital membranes are colorful, while the patagia stretching from the last wing-fingers to tails are a cloudy, sickly gray-green.
Now a new figure enters. It is draped in that awful grayish green, and little Tavirr can feel all his fur standing on end. For the first time since he’d still been taking food his amma had chewed for him, Tavirr bleats for her protection. Prranit holds him, shushing him as she purrs reassurance.
The hooded figure, not even its wings showing, slouches, its shroud seeming to droop like melting wax, through the dancers as they circle nimbly. Then it is gone, and Tavirr has the terrifying notion that it’s come into the audience to hunt them all down.
For a bare moment, all the dancers but one fall into crouches. The woman standing holds the fearful shroud, empty now, hideously dripping, in one hand—looks at it—lets it fall—and closes her wing-fingers until only the gray-green patagium shows.
The dancers erupt again in a frenzy of leaping, circling, gliding, a wordless shout erupting from every throat as one!
The woman stands in the center, and all Tavirr can see is gray-green, and her hand, slowly reaching. Slowly (the dancers’ wings are a riot of color) reaching (her claws unsheathed and glistening) until—
—another dancer takes her hand. She falls to the ground, and he stumbles to a halt, holding the limp, wet shroud, staring at his own hand, the bright colors of his wings folding away except for that sickly greenish hue. The dancing and circling continue, one victim falling after another, the hideous shroud passing from one hand to the next, and all Tavirr can see is the color of the melting sickness. A thing that stalks and dies and stalks again, always hiding and hunting—pretending to live, pretending to die.
Sickness—and Terror.
A shrieking wail sounds from above again (the baby begins a new round of crying), and Tavirr is not quite so terrified that he can’t stop to wonder how the flame-winged dancer has gotten far up to the ceiling again. But his thoughts are interrupted as the living, screaming fire hurls herself at the dancers again, the drum roaring the sound of the explosion, people thrown everywhere, wailing, screaming, the drums beating against his ears!
The moist shroud hangs suspended alone in the air, then collapses.
The torches are all snuffed at once. Tavirr is left with the impression of lysks, their fur blending with the cavern walls, walking along unnoticed, carrying dousing ladles to cover all the torches at once.
When the call comes again, Tavirr still jumps just a bit.
“LET US BEGIN AGAIN!!!”
He yells out with everyone else in response:
“WE WILL BEGIN AGAIN!!!”
One by one, the torches spring back to life. One by one, wings of all colors spread. Flowers in fields, some of them say. Children, prey, sunlight, clouds. But the dance is slow now, subdued despite the abundance. Wings fold and extend and fold again, colors flicker and hide, and the dancers look up in fear.
Tavirr can hear it now, a low scratching rumble, as though the Great Cavern itself is moaning. He wants to duck, to run, to fly away (though he can’t fly very well yet), but then he finally sees the drummer.
She stands before them all, her claws scraping eerie circles around the drum skin, making Tavirr’s ears tremble and all his fur stand on end.
“We stand between time,” the drummer says.
Black wings appear again. They surround the fiery wings of the flame-lysk, mantling over her, as she writhes, her mouth agape in an agony of silence.
“We stand between place.”
Long ropes lower from the ceiling far above, coiling and whirling, and Tavirr can’t think what they represent, but he feels as if his heart has fled his body. A rope catches a dancer (the dancer’s talons closing on the rope, a nimble miming of struggle as he climbs), and he snarls as he is torn into the darkness above. Another dancer cries out as she is yanked above and out of sight, and another.
The drummer’s wings flash open, showing an impossible knotwork lacing of grays, blacks, and purples before she snaps them closed again. Her claws, scraping the drum skin, halt.
“I call on the spirit of Inur-Before!” the drummer shouts.
A man with huge wings rises from the ground, enormous wings spread to show a landscape of horror, cities and trees and mountains all burning. Lysk and burchar faces are there, too, painted to look as though they are wailing in grief or rage.
“I call on the spirit of Adba!”
Now, finally, Tavirr recognizes his father, knows he’s seen those painted wings flashing in dance, but his father stands facing the audience, and Tavirr knows Uzvik is looking at him. One large wing spreads, showing the gentle golden face of the peaceful moon.
“I call on the spirit of Khiai!”
The other wing extends, blazing with the fierce red of the moon of war.
“Who will agree to peace?” calls the drummer.
“I will not!” responds the voice of Inur-Before, his wings rippling to show the devastation in motion.
“I will not!” responds his father, and his wings, too, begin to tremble.
There are black wings around the audience now, rippling, flapping, shaking, and the scraping beat of the drum grows ever louder, the long ropes writhing and snatching as the drummer’s wings open to display their grotesquerie, and the man who is Inur-Before falls to the ground behind the moons.
“Inur-Before is gone!” the drummer calls. “The world has hatched, and Inur-Anew is born!” Her terrible wings furl behind her; the coiling and warping ropes slither up out of sight again.
Silence falls.
As Tavirr watches in awe, Uzvik’s Khiai-wing seems to fall away into the
void as the wing of a prone dancer opens upward, the small, gray-white blob of Luna replacing the vengeful, lost moon of Khiai.
“LET US BEGIN AGAIN!!!”
“WE WILL BEGIN AGAIN!!!”
Tavirr shouts the words in jubilation, his little wings aflutter.
“LET US PUT AWAY ALL THAT BELONGS TO KHIAI!!!”
“WE WILL BEGIN AGAIN!!!”
As he bounds up and down, hardly aware anymore that this is a play, Tavirr feels that it’s his heart, not his voice, that’s calling out.
Now the big lysk who was Inur-Before stands again and faces Uzvik, hiding the horror of the outer surface of his wings. Inur-Anew is painted on the inner surface, shades of dawn and hope shining above the colorful mountains and plains. The two clasp hands and both call out together, “Who will agree to peace?”
Before he can stop himself, Tavirr yells, “I will!”
His enthusiasm is greeted with laughter and scattered applause until a woman in the audience stands, and a hush of expectation falls.
“I am Arrhun,” she says. “I stand in the sight of Adba, and I will agree to peace.”
A moment later, there is a grunt and the sound of scales against stone, and a burchar man calls out, “I am h’Dumillro. I stand in the sight of Inur, and I will agree to peace.”
By the time the play has ended, two more lysk and burchar pairs have pledged, and Tavirr realizes he is seeing the union of h’adbani, lysks and burchars uniting themselves to each other in bonds of friendship and love, and he feels the slow thunder of h’Jasse’s heart under his hand again.
As the audience mingles with the dancers and as platters of food are brought out for sharing, h’Jasse Tav’h finds Tavirr again.
“I see that you are quite serious in your promise,” she tells him, smiling when he nods at her. “In that case, young man, I will return in… hm, ten years, Prranit? Yes, ten years, to see if your promise has held true.”
His h’Jasse will return, of course, but by the time she does, Tavirr will have been judged wind-mad, and no one speaks to him but Vala. She is the one to bring him the news, raw wing fingers wrapped protectively around a belly full of unborn Zassik, that Tavirr ayv Drusik would have a mate and a future after all.
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Tavirr blinked away the memory.
“Yes,” he said to Zoe. “The khiai existed. But they were not a race of people. Or, I suppose, not a separate race. The khiai were burchars. And they were lysks. We were killers, all of us. Burchars hated lysks because, long ago, our distant ancestors hunted and devoured theirs. We feared them because their distant ancestors made war on ours. I do not know whether Earth-Before was a peaceful place—but if you offered me the chance to somehow travel back to Inur-Before, I would rather die than go.”