RYE - Echoes of Devotion

Northern Ship/Archives/Interstellar Overview/Ayacmanik/Mochantia

Isendral looked down at the stack of tablets in her hands. They were all exactly the same size, fashioned of black obsinite and embossed with eltharin letters in gold. They were packed densely upon the tablet’s surface, neat rows of tiny words arranged with robotic regularity. If she focused, Isendral could feel the psychic impressions from the lizardmen who had constructed the tablets – it had been a massive kroxigor, following the dictation of a skink scribe, using a chisel the size of her torso to etch the words in with pinpoint precision. Neatly detailed diagrams, also in gold, accompanied the text, showcasing the efforts of the lizardmen to unearth the wreckage of the northern pole. There were speculative trajectories and hypotheses of how the crash might have played out, material analyses, and outlines of what the vessel they had unearthed might look like. It was a valuable trove of information for her to use in getting to the bottom of how her situation might have occurred.

It was also all in a dialect of LamEldannar so old that the root words were hardly the same anymore. Isendral sighed as she beheld the many meticulously-crafted tablets, all full of notes that would need translation. She’d meant to educate the lizardmen on how the modern Eldar script had changed in comparison to the one that they somehow knew, but time had simply … gotten away from her. How long ago had that been, anyway? A decade? Two?

Sighing, she lifted her eyes to acknowledge the skink that had delivered the tablets. “Do you know the mage Puum’kynzid?” The skink, a youngblood messenger who had been standing a few paces away, nervously tapping their foreclaws together as they waited, perked up at the question, nodding in response. ”Let them know that I’d like to speak with them,” Isendral said. ”If this practice of delivering information to me by tablet is going to continue, I’ll need to teach your people to write in a way that isn’t a labor to read. And if I’m going to do that, I’d rather it be time spent with someone I know.”

The skink chirped an affirmative and scurried off, and Isendral turned her attention back to the tablets. One in particular caught her attention – the transcript of a recording the lizardmen had found in the depths of the ship, along with a bevvy of annotations she resolved to read once the issue of translation had been solved. Only one word in particular had caught her eye anyhow, this one needing no alteration at all.

”Lauvanel…”

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Some lizardmen were known to be significant from the moment they stepped from the spawning pools. They might bear a mark of the Old Ones manifest upon their flesh, or be part of a cohort spawned in unison with mighty warbeasts, or even be among those rare few that stepped forth from the pools alone, the essence of an entire spawning condensed into one body by the incomprehensible will of the Old Ones. It was by these signs that the lizardmen watched for spawnlings of note, those who might play a larger part in the Great Plan than their kin.

Puum’kynzid, upon being birthed in the lizardmen’s 90th year on Mochantia, had not been one of those marked as significantly different from their peers, and was perfectly content with this. During their first decade of life, they had functioned as a perfectly ordinary example of the Ghyran priest template – confirmation that the slann had not erred in their design. They nurtured fields, healed wounds, and diverted herds of shambling razorteeth trees from approaching their home city of Aztlan, with every day largely being the same. It was only by virtue of chance that they had been brought on the expedition to Isendral’s mountain – another Ghyran priest had been slated to go, but had been ambushed the day before by an Ayacmanik host and sent into a healing coma after forcibly self-removing the parasites. The fact that they had been the one to first speak to the Eldar was, in turn, the result of equal parts chance and guesswork. ”She radiates Ghyran-aspected energy,” the skink herald of Lord Jozt-ghezin had chattered. ”Your magic is similar. Perhaps this will reduce the chance of hostility.”

It had only been the whim of the Eldar that ensured Puum’kynzid had lived through that encounter, and they had made certain to begin wearing charms of the Old One Xhotl upon their return to their home in Aztlan. Instead of ensuring a return to normalcy, however, Puum’kynzid’s acknowledgement of the Chooser of Destinies had the opposite effect, and only two decades later, they were informed upon their completion of a perfectly mundane wildlife cataloguing rotation that they had been selected to once again meet with Isendral and deliver a hefty stack of Mochantian wildlife information. The Sublime Communion had developed a predictive behavioral algorithm that postulated that since Puum’kynzid and the Eldar knew each other, Isendral would be less likely to harm the Ghyran priest. Before they left, they took off their necklaces and bracelets adorned with Xhotl’s symbol and replaced them with a ring of Quetzl, reasoning that if fate would not keep them out of these meetings, perhaps the Old One of invincibility would protect them when something inevitably went wrong.

Isendral’s reception of the collected wildlife records had gone well, and Puum’kynzid again returned to Aztlan, turning their attention to the manifold ordinary tasks that availed a Ghyran priest in the City of Growth. They even put their charms of Xhotl back on after a decade or so, once their life seemed to once again have become comfortably pedestrian, their moment of notoriety over and done with and it was once again safe to bear them.

The next day, a Terradon rider arrived from the Kanyon restoration project with a report that Isendral had personally requested Puum’kynzid by name, and that they were to fly post-haste to attend to the Eldar, and to expect mental communication with the lord slann Ulha’up on the way to brief them on certain topics the Communion wished to extract from Isendral. Additionally, they were to report in person to the temple of the lord slann Ahi-Mun before they left, where an ‘addendum of particular importance’ was to be entrusted to them. Putting on a show of confidence they did not feel at all, Puum’kynzid obeyed the missive and ventured into the viridian pyramid of Ahi-Mun, muttering prayers to Xhotl under their breath that the elder mage-priest simply wished to send a personalized message to Isendral.

Upon exiting the pyramid of Ahi-Mun, Puum’kynzid foisted their Xhotl charms off on the closest skink they saw, and took up an oar at the city’s temple of Ayotzl before meeting their Terradon courier. If the Old Ones had written their destiny to be this way, the prudent thing to do would be to ensure their soul was safeguarded when they were inevitably torn to pieces by Isendral’s plant monsters.

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”…and so you can see how the conceptual associations shift back and forth over time when it’s laid out like this. A word’s meaning cycles with the generations, oscillating from more to less ancient as souls from different eras die and return. The glyphs your people use are so old they’re hardly even in circulation anymore – everyone from those eras has grown tired of incarnating.” Isendral waved a hand, melding the different rows of glyphs she had conjured in the crystalline wall of her home – the sets she described as older were indeed significantly different from their more modern variants, only bearing a faint resemblance in places.

Puum’kynzid nodded. “A logical outcome for a society comprised of spawnings that are disconnected from each other,” they noted. “Without a living continuity of those who have experienced the originals to serve as examples for those who follow, the imperfection of warmblood memory ensures gradual distortion over time.”

Isendral raised an eyebrow. ”You mean to imply your people have never forgotten anything? I find that hard to believe.”

Puum’kynzid shook their head. “Nothing alive is immune to entropy. The language the Old Ones gifted to us is not a living thing as your LamEldannar is, but neither is it subject to the death of being forgotten, for it is not a learned thing. We are made with the knowledge of it upon our tongues. What is not taught cannot be changed.”

Isendral’s face twisted into something related to sadness, though it was difficult to tell exactly what. ”And that which is fixed can never grow.” She gestured, and underneath each set of LamEldannar characters, a set of Saurian pictographs grew, each of them exactly the same as the other, so that as one proceeded down the presented timeline and the letters of the Eldar shifted and changed like a living thing, the lizardmen glyphs stayed perfectly preserved, never changing from their original form.

A silence grew between the two for a time as both pondered the wall of language, each of them drawing their own conclusions from what they saw. Eventually Isendral breathed heavily outwards, and the glyphs vanished as the wall became translucent, displaying the landscape of strange artificial trees on her continent below. ”Perhaps it’s for the best that you not know what it means to be like us,” she said, and the view shimmered and shifted, now displaying one of the still-untouched stretches of Mochantian jungle, just below the canopy, where a network of branches, vines, and feelers intertwined with each other to form a second forest floor high above the ground. An Als’woogen clambered across a branch in the foreground, its wide eyes darting back and forth with narrowed pupils - a telltale sign that an Ayacmanik was using the creature as a host. ”My previous attempts to impart that lesson seem to have gone less smoothly than I would have hoped.”

Puum’kynzid walked forwards and joined Isendral in looking at the creature. “The Rangdan,” they said, using Isendral’s word for the Ayacmanik. “They are why you came to this world?”

The Eldar’s face softened, and her eyes grew distant. ”Yes,” she murmured. ”This world was meant to be theirs, given time. I - we - made them as a … commemoration,” she explained. ”Or a culmination. There is no one word in any language that can fully encompass what they symbolized and were meant to be. It no longer matters anyway.” She rested a hand lightly against the wall, and thousands of kilometers away, the golden fur of the Als’woogen parted in a hand-shaped pattern, the warmth of Isendral’s palm suffusing the creature with reassurance. ”He is gone, and I’ve seen no sign of him either here or in the halls of the gods. What we began will never be completed.”

Puum’kynzid hesitated a moment, grasping at a turtle-shaped charm hanging from their neck, then spoke. “This person you speak of,” they said, watching Isendral carefully for any sign of a reaction. “They were your mate, yes?”

Isendral looked at them, her dark emerald eyes unreadable. ”His name was Ysumar,” she said, ”And I’ll speak no more of him for the time being, at least not directly. Shall I explain why we came to this place instead?”

Puum’kynzid nodded, unwilling to break the subtle tension that now pervaded the room and risk saying the wrong thing. Isendral breathed out, closed her eyes, and seemed to shrink in upon herself. “It began in a time of ruin,” she said, her voice somehow bereft of the subtle undercurrent of power that had accompanied it up until this point, “With an act of love.”

Her eyes opened, and everything changed.

Where an Eldar had stood, a being of flesh and blood and bone, a goddess in physical form, channeled by faith and prayer and devotion, looked down and smiled. The world stopped its motion as the attention of Isha, the Everqueen, Eternal Mother, Lady of Tears, She Of The Garden, was brought to the confines of Isendral’s quarters, the faintest fraction of her warmth and benediction falling upon the room filling it to bursting with spiritual nourishment. The walls bloomed, crystalline material taking on color and shape derived from a hundred million worlds, flowers of every shape and size imaginable blooming and growing and filling the air with a sweet nectary scent that was soothing and invigorating and nurturing all at once, a fragrance that could sustain a dying man for a century.

Puum’kynzid staggered back under the sudden outpouring of spiritual force, falling to one hip and shielding their eyes as they looked up at Isendral - at Isha, who seemed to stand at a dizzying height as the dimensions of the room and the confines of material space began to matter less and less. The goddess shone with the purest, most brilliant light, illuminating a field of luminescent, softly-glowing grass that stretched out to the horizon underneath a sky of infinite gemlike stars, far more in number than any night sky Puum’kynzid had ever seen.

”In long bygone days, the galaxy was laid to waste by the wars of ancient powers,” the goddess said, and the sky was engulfed in flame. A full half of the stars in the sky shattered like glass, their tiny fragments scattering across the black void. Clouds of smoke billowed across the heavens, and flame rose from within them, shining with foul iridescence as it left streaks of tainted space across the heavens. The light under these affected stars changed, taking on a sickening aura that was physically repulsive to look upon, and the blooming grass wilted and shrivelled under their malevolent gaze. ”The laws of the earth and heavens had been broken, and as the flames of strife guttered out, consuming themselves in their last attempts to keep burning, they left nothing but ruin in their wake.”

The sickening smoke and foul radiance spread, and the field became a barren waste as the grass died and turned to ash. The sun rose, and shone upon the earth with a warmth that was somehow diminished from what it should have been - paler, more insubstantial. The earth dried and flaked under its gaze. Isha stood, a lone monolith, looking upon the arid, crumbling earth with a sadness that could not be measured in mortal terms, and spoke, her words a mere whisper that carried themselves to Puum’kynzid with perfect clarity. ”It was this world that my family was left in, alone where once there had been others to guide and converse with us. Those who came before were gone, their only legacy a festering wound that would never heal. It was up to us to correct the harm that our forebears had done, and fill the world with life and love again.”

A second figure joined Isha between one moment and the next, broad where she was slender and wild where she was calm. He was swathed in shadow by some trick of the light and could not be seen, but was undeniably male. The two looked in each other’s eyes and joined their hands, and soon after, lips and other things. Foliage bloomed around them as they joined in intimate union, and vitality seemed to spread out from the site. A shower of rain filled the earth with moisture, rendering it soft and pliable, and small shoots of green began to poke their fronds from beneath the soil, quickly growing into a new field - not so luminescent as the one that had come before, but it shone with a vibrancy all its own.

Time passed.

Isha and ________ stood underneath a great tree and looked upon what they had made - a child, one that had the softness of its mother’s eyes and the lean strength of its father’s frame. It laid in the slumber that preceded true life, fully-grown yet lacking the spark that would allow it to wake. A child not only of essence and concept but of flesh, one that could bestride the world and ensure it would never again fall to ruin as it had before.

Isha and her partner joined hands once more, and dug their nails into each other’s palms until their commingled blood dripped down onto the quiescent child. It flowed and flowed, the essence of their life pouring out of them, and the child’s breath quickened as theirs slowed and faltered. A true child could not be created without an investment of the self, and here and now the divine couple gave everything of themselves to birth their heir, their bodies becoming translucent and fading into nothing as their child opened its eyes, gazing with newborn innocence upon the verdant garden that had been left for it.

The child stood, swiftly growing into an adult with the wiry muscle and long hair of its father, paired with the calloused hands and warm gaze of its mother. “Thus were our people born, and given stewardship of the earth,” it said, and cast its hand forth. Others of its kind came into being, springing forth from the earth or stepping from hidden places in the air. They built a great city in the distance, the work of a hundred years passing in moments as gleaming white spires rose between tree-lined avenues. It was a proud citadel on the horizon, the mark of this new people’s lordship over the world stamped on the skyline. “We repaired the damage left in the physical world, while our parents tended to the ruined heavens,” the child continued. They gestured to the sky, where starry outlines of divine figures, Isha and her husband among them, cleaned up the wreckage of the shattered sky, cleansing the taint the fire and smoke had left behind, and picking up the remnants of the shattered stars.

“This was the birth of our eternal duty,” the child said, and its form began to shimmer and change as the scene faded, the bounds of ordinary geometry beginning to reassert themselves. “One that continues to this very day.” The walls of Isendral’s home came back into view, still festooned with hundreds of blossoms, and the shape of the child resolved itself into the Eldar priestess. ”Just as our divine mother and father gave up their physical form to shape us as people, so too did Ysumar and I give our lives in turn. At the cusp of our lives, after having experienced a long and rich existence, we would find a section of the galaxy still bearing scars from that long-ago conflict and begin taking steps to heal it. We’d mend shattered planets, tame wounded stars and prevent them from irradiating their systems, eliminate space-time defects and prune any significant Orkead infestations, as well as any other troublesome legacies from the wars of the ancients. Then, we would choose a world, and shape a species – a people – that were able to tend to this area of space in our stead. And when everything was complete, he and I would give our lives and essence to ensure they were forever safeguarded.”

Puum’kynzid stood as the Eldar explained. A hand drifted to the symbol of Ayotzl around their neck – this, at least, was a lesson they could understand. “All things die,” they said. “You focused on shaping your death so as to accomplish something. This planet, the Rangdan, they were to be the centerpiece of your next cycle, then?”

Isendral nodded. ”This region of space is close to the edge of the galaxy, and was subject to much devastation in the Aftermath, as well as before and since. Its dimensional boundaries are thin, and the Sea of Souls bleeds through the veil with ease. There are other horrors that have festered here, ones that come from … other avenues, that Ysumar and I were to deal with before our work was complete – but the more important matter was to set the development of our successors on a suitable path for them to be able to properly manage this region. We agreed on that, even if we quibbled on what precise role they should grow into.

I believed that the great variety of environments and alien species they would have to deal with necessitated them taking the role of a guiding intermediary, harnessing the strengths of their peers for the benefit of all. Ysumar thought that the role of a guardian was more suitable, a species of hunters that would slay the great threats that would cause harm to lesser races. Nothing that had not happened before – our differences in perspective tempered each other’s flaws.” Her lips pressed together, and she blinked rapidly. ”It’s pointless to dwell on the past, however – whatever might have been is gone into the ether, and we can only work with what we have.”

Isendral turned to a nearby flower and spoke to it in a low croon, murmuring indistinguishable phrases and gently stroking its petals. The blossom swelled under her attention, opening wider and wider as something grew within it. With a final whisper, the flower dipped downwards, and a glossy indigo stone deposited itself in Isendral’s hand, speckled with flecks of sparkling white that resembled stars in a night sky. ”Take this to any place where your people look upon the heavens and expose it to a full moon’s light,” she said, handing the stone to Puum’kynzid. ”It is a record of the surrounding interstellar neighborhood. There will have been minor changes, as I last updated it some millennia ago, but nothing overly consequential – the broader shape of things has remained intact. Judging from your people’s rate of advancement, it won’t be long before you venture into the void, and it would be poor form of me to leave you wholly unprepared.”

Puum’kynzid looked down at the glinting stone. “The slann will surely send their thanks for this gift,” they said, tucking it into a pouch at their belt. Their mouth opened to speak again, and hesitated for a moment – and a moment only. Death is inevitable, their thoughts hummed, and the turtlebone charm on their neck grew cold. “They have bid me to give you one in return,” they continued, and reached into the pocket of folded space that Ahi-Mun had stitched into the spatial coordinates two handspans to the side of their right hip. They closed their hand around the thing within and presented it, and watched as the blood drained from Isendral’s face in an instant.

Glossary:

LamEldannar: The Eldar word for their language.

Rangdan - An Eldar word roughly meaning ‘one soul, many bodies’.