The Closing of the Door

The world ended, and salvation was denied.

Everyone knew this, because God Itself said so.

At least, most people believe It was God.

Admittedly no one had ever expected a giant diaphanous mantis to emerge from the Doors, all a-glimmer with silver inlaid silk and what smelled like rendered human fat.

And at least, most people believe that was what God said.

It was so long ago, and thunderous shrieks and mandibular clicks are rather challenging to translate when your eyes and ears bleed at the mere recollection of them.

God or no, the thing was powerful enough to open the Doors, and that alone had been miraculous. No one had ever managed to open the Doors- let alone damage them.

An entire generation has been born since that fateful day, so a bit more explanation is probably in order. Young people these days don't know their history. They're far more interested in collecting the newest and trendiest saints' bones, or predicting when the moon will stop screaming again.¹

For as long as history has been recorded, and probably for a good deal longer, the Doors stood watch over the world. They stood in the center of a black sand desert, taller than most mountains, and they were about as wide as one too. Even traveling in a straight line along the depth of one of their columns took several days on beastback. They had a sharp, angular construction with clean lines and a cold, dark grey coloration. They were made from a glassy rock that reflected sunlight some of the time, and absorbed it other times. At times it was reported to look porous. This is assuredly false. And the Doors were paired, if the pluralization wasn't an indicator.

The Doors were everything to us. They made our earliest, amiant-clad ancestors look up in awe and wonder. They sheltered our huddled bands from the five cardinal winds when they decided to bite and tear. They gave us something to emulate in our own architecture. They gave us something to aspire to understand through our arts and sciences. Shining cities rose up and studded the black desert around the Doors like the gleaming teeth that light up the night sky. I can scarcely believe that civilization would have developed in any recognizable way—if at all—without the Doors.

But we just couldn't figure out how to open the blasted thing.

Animals, ropes, and pulleys all failed to make them budge. Engines of all make broke down or exploded before they made any headway. Even astral arts failed to loosen their hinges- or ascertain if they truly had hinges at all. We couldn't even figure out which side, if any, was the "front" or "back" for the longest time- no matter how many holy wars one ideological camp launched against the others.

And there were many wars, mind you. At times the primordial, unchanging stillness of the Doors made the destruction and carnage which surrounded it seem all the more vibrant and terrible by contrast. Cities rose up, but they also fell smoldering into ruin beneath the indifferent shadow of that edifice. 

From the ashes arose new realms, though none ever settled directly before or behind the Doors- not only was it sacrilege, it would be suicide when the Doors finally swung open and smote all in their arcs, as surely they would one day. We knew it even then, so certainly and fervently, though centuries had dulled a little bit of our fire I suppose.

The day started like any other. Countless scribes and splinter sects have described the hours preceding the event as absolutely drowning in prophetic phenomena, but you can trust that there was none of that. That humdrum monotony was among the last things these eyes of mine ever saw, after all.²

It felt like an earthquake, when it started. In fact you very well could call it an earthquake, except instead of originating from the heart of the earth, it came from its soul. The tremors grew worse, towers fell, and fires began to spread. Finally, all eyes not blinded by smoke saw the way the left-hand door was slightly ajar. Over the next half-hour, it and its twin swung outward fully.

Within was pitch blackness studded by the twist and swirl of nebulae and the wild dance of heavenly bodies careening through space. A million voices cried out in sudden awe, terror, and prayer- and a few miles around the edge of the Door, I am told, millions more rose up in shrieks of ultimate despair as they found themselves unable to witness this event from the Wrong Side. I am told many who found themselves in that circumstance soon died, whether by their own hands or by sheer grief. I envy their alacrity.

Slowly, the infinity within the Doors began to change and distort. Swarms hundreds of thousands strong began to push toward the portal, jockeying for space between sects and congregations until a crowd crush of such force and ferocity occurred that they are still picking the bodies out of the shattered tiles of that most sacred avenue.

At last, the first raptorial leg breached the yielding, filmy surface of the portal like it was piercing an embryonic sac- but from which side, I cannot say. The second came soon after, each bearing blades that could smite whole armies had they the intent to. By now, all were cowed, stopped dead in their tracks. I remember watching all of this from my window. I clung to the sill so tightly that the tendons exploded out of the backs of my hands.

Finally came the mandibles. And then the multifaceted eyes. And then the barbed, silken body.

And then the Voice.

I learned that day that there is a level of heavenly rapture so terrifying in its intensity that it is indistinguishable from the most hellish torment.

We could not understand what God said, but we still knew it.

We heard the initial upswell of grace and glory, followed by a certain stumbling, and then... confusion. God blinked Its alien eyes and looked around as It drew both arms in pensively. There was silence that begged to endure for an eternity after we'd had our souls blasted to pieces by those trumpets.

Then, It questioned us.

It questioned what was happening.

'What is this? What are you? What have you done to the Appointed Day? Where is your Prophet? Where is the casting of clover roots and the boiling of lead? Why have you not prepared the Way? Had It not carefully instructed Its messenger to prepare you all for the Once & Final Journey? Where has gone the Bruised One?' ³

It then began to scold us. To call us names that now adorn countless monuments and graffiti. Impudent Children. Dawdlers. Undeserving. False. Those who had ran closest to the Doors did not have time to flee before they burned away into stacks of carbon and clouds of incense smoke.

Insulted, indignant, and impatient, the thing that was God shrieked and turned away. Sources differ on whether or not It scooped up a small group of people in one arm, and sources further differ on whether these people were the Chosen Ones or merely a snack for a rather hangry insect. It finally reached Its arms out and seized the Doors. Their claws bit deep into the stone as they swung inward at the speed of sound. The stone struck, the sky split, and the earth trembled.

I awoke some hours later in the rubble of my home. Everything closer than that was naught but dust.

We do not know how much destruction was wrought, because we never looked beyond the horizon of our sacred little desert. There were inklings of a world beyond, but why would we have cared about anything that was not Doorward? The peoples of those lands were benighted savages, and we were... we were...

We only know that the horizon that had been there that morning was now gone. Nothing persists beyond.

God was gone too, as was the portal It had passed through. All that remained was the wreckage of the Doors.

It was as if a mountain had toppled, because in many ways one had. What is left of the world is irrevocably altered.

We believed this was the end. Surely nothing could come after this, when the sun was knocked out of sync and the five winds were dead? How could we survive? Why would we?

As it turned out, we did not account for mortal stubbornness.

Many died, and many more were killed in the aftermath. I know I'd be dead right now had I gotten my ruptured hands on anything effective for the task, but again I was new to blindness at the time. But most did not perish on that day, and it was with more bemusement than mass hysteria that they all picked themselves back up and ambled through the dust.

The fires were put out, and the dead were mourned- often in massive, nameless heaps too tall to name or count. The hills they were covered over with now support entire shrines and temples. Yes, new shrines and temples. Some were simple dedications of honor to the dead, but others were... something else entirely. Some are even built out of the fragments of the Door, which became the most plentiful—albeit unmalleable—building material in the world.

We simply found new things to believe in. Many people deny that that thing had been God or even a god, but many more acknowledged it yet moved on. My quip about saints' bones earlier points to the very true fact that we have forced death to beget new beginnings, and that the Closing of the Door was a foundational moment that has been literally and figuratively built upon by the next generation.

Even now, I hear the rumblings of a hunt being organized to chase off another incursion by those things that dwelt in parts once perpendicular to us. The mood is light, almost flippant, as volunteers fetch their riddle-woven earspoons. They know they have succeeded many times before, and think they will do so again. I know they will.

It is equally compelling and infuriating.

My writer grows tired, and probably needs a break from my dictation now.

I do too.

¹ Current estimates point to a period of six whole weeks within the next decade. I will be well and truly spoiled by that balmy silence, if I live to hear it.

² I wish they had taught me not to stare at deific interventions when I was a child, much the same way they warn you not to look directly into the sun.

³ Through decades of study, I believe I have finally cracked the meaning of these words. In a crumbling registry of civil and criminal cases nearly seven centuries old, there are repeat instances of disturbance of the peace in a small, now nonexistent hamlet across the desert. The perpetrator was a figure known to many in the area- an old, generally harmless eccentric who was known to drift from conspiracy theory to theory with the changing of the seasons. Their last appearance in any documentation describes how their fellow citizens held a brief service in their honor after they died ranting and raving in a shelter. They fell from a rooftop while trying to kill birds for preying upon mantids and sustained blunt-force trauma to their head and neck, resulting in severe bruising and, as was discovered too late, internal bleeding. They died in obscurity, having totally and utterly failed to attract a flock of any size through their words of an approaching journey, with zero assistance from the divine patron that had apparently shattered their mind with Its touch.

On the Pain-Tasters of Najis.

Najis is the godhead of harm and healing, and the cycle of endurance and suffering that they perpetuate. While not uniformly sadistic in their depictions across the known world, the cast of the deity's clergy and most fervent devotees tends to be somewhat grim. It is the only known cult in which self-flagellation is a competitive sport, and the 'self' part is often omitted.

Even so, the god's focus lends its followers a keen understanding of the bodies of living things, and the myriad problems and ailments that can befall them. While they may approach infirmity with more spiritual glee than more mundane healers, the priests and surgeons instructed in the ways of Najis are often skilled and sought-after doctors all across the Basin. Sought-after, but not necessarily wanted- one of the more infamous pieces of commonly known Najisi stricture is the forbiddance of any and all anesthetics during procedures: pain is life, and so the absence of pain is an abominable miniature death.¹

The most (in)famous of these healers are the Pain-Tasters.

Barber Surgeon (Zweihander RPG)
Dejan Mandic

While their name is a bit too on-the-nose, their expertise is remarkable regardless of whether you have a high or dim opinion of the order as a whole. The Pain-Tasters are alumni of the highly prestigious and highly secretive Sodality of the Blissful Scourging, a medical school and seminary in Serminwurth with another extremely on-the-nose name.

The Sodality is open only to Najisites of demonstrable faith and fervor, and the vast majority of students already have successful medical careers prior to their induction. Students are forbidden to leave the school until they have either dropped out or completed their training, which is a process that can take up to a decade or more. More than one disappearance or suspected murder in the city has been explained by a new entry to the Sodality simply forgetting to alert every relevant party in their life of their aspirations before cloistering.

Most students do not complete their training. The isolation, coupled with rigorous daily schedules and study regimens that blur the material with the arcane, can lead many to burn out within their first year or two. Surprisingly, these dropouts are often allowed to leave and resume their lives in the outside world, though they all share some dismay when they wake up and find that much of the knowledge they acquired at the school has been obliterated by an as-of-yet unknown agent--possibly a potent and specialized drug--employed by the school.²

Because of these measures, very little slips out about what actually goes into training a Pain-Taster, and its members are quite tight-lipped about it. It doubtless involves mastery of any and all bleeding-edge knowledge and technology of medicine, as well as liberal addition to the 'bleeding' side. It is also possible that they undergo a series of inoculations against any diseases they could conceivably encounter during their practice: Pain-Tasters are well known for how fearlessly they throw themselves into highly contagious situations, yet rarely ever seem to grow sick themselves.

The rumor that the government of Serminwurth hands certain condemned criminals over to the Sodality for clandestine vivisections is unsubstantiated, but it would surprise absolutely no one if it came to light as truth. They possess insights into the physiology of humans and many other living things that could only be obtained through intimate familiarity.

Once a Pain-Taster has graduated from the Sodality and donned their ceremonial mantle of knives and needles, they have a wealth of options available to them. Most hospitals in any given area will accept them outright- if not as full-fledged members of their staff, then at least as advisors and specialists kept at a cordial arm's length. They may emphasize their religious training and become members of the formal religious hierarchy. Or, they go wandering in search of new avenues and methods of practice.

Some of the best details on Pain-Tasters outside of Serminwurth have been recorded in Deneroth, where a permanent office for one has been in place ever since the founding of the city by Laizij. Here, a senior Pain-Taster operates out of a small Najisi shrine that has nonetheless been granted the flattering title of "basilica". This taster acts as the personal doctor for the city's Steward, as well as the Directorate of Ivory Tower University.

The voluminous notes taken at the latter location has teased out many details about Pain-Tasters over the centuries, much to the chagrin of the Sodality. But in the interest of maintaining the relationship between the two cities, Serminwurth does not object to these incidental gleanings.

Foremost among the abilities of a Pain-Taster is their skill at diagnosis. This is where their name comes in, and they live up to it every bit. They can reportedly see, smell, feel, or occasionally even taste the onset of an illness hours or days before visible symptoms appear in a patient.

They can identify broken bones or ruptured arteries at a glance, and even make educated guesses at the exact breed of parasite infesting someone based on the 'look' of their eyeballs or the smell of their bodily waste. They operate on the threshold where preventative medicine is no longer possible, and treatment and pain are the only paths forward- precisely as Najis would will it. Their senses seem to have been honed by years of study and memorization of subtle cues coupled with experience, but something about it is downright preternatural.

Just as they are skilled in determining what will happen, they are unerringly accurate with what has happened. Pain-Tasters can act as coroners, able to detect even subtle causes of death some time after the event, at least so long as the cadaver has not undergone considerable putrefaction. The most famous instance of this comes again from Denerothi records, in which the senior Pain-Taster of the basilica determined the cause of death of Laizij.

The rumor that had spread like wildfire upon the discovery of the Eternal Scholar's body was that he had been poisoned, or smote by black magic conjured by everyone's favorite scapegoats, the followers of Dherna. The taster was able to determine quite confidently that he had died of blockage related to a truly prodigious collection of gallstones. The taster reportedly came to suspect this after ingesting a piece of Laizij's raw, jaundiced skin. After the requisite amount of bureaucracy was waded through to receive a permit to perform an invasive examination, the gallstones were found. 

The chronicle then takes an extensive sidetrack relating the legend of how these stones were inscribed with motes of wisdom that were then sought after or scattered with the winds, in good Denerothi fashion. But the procedure itself is corroborated in similar cases elsewhere, adding to the Pain-Tasters' lengthy list of qualifications for everyone else's reluctant respect.

¹ To say nothing of the fact that one common depiction of the afterlife in the inner esoteric circles of Najis-worshipers is a perfect perpetuation of life-affirming, exhilarating pain via stabs and scrapes.

² This memory erasure does not appear to be flawless, however. Mersind, once an aspiring biologist and anatomist of Serminwurth, was expelled after breaking some sort of grave taboo during his second year at the Sodality. Yet descriptions of the pale, enigmatic man suggest that he fled the city with his memories of the school almost fully intact a decade and a half ago. Ever since then, his former colleagues have been keenly interested in returning him for examination, and to put a stop to his more well-known excesses (while also seizing all of his collected data for their own research).

The God of Dust

((In honor of World Rat Day, which is apparently a real thing, I thought I'd slightly tweak and then finally implement a little idea I came up with a long time ago.))

 

"Three garbs have We- dust, cobwebs, and skin of flea. Long is Our tooth, for we hide from the blinding torches of truth."
- A snatch of skitterrhyme scrawled above a waste receptacle slot in the Basilica of the Blissful Calculation (Dormitory #12).

"[...] Lastly, all members of the Dutiful Staff and Most Enlightened Faculty are encouraged to remain alert, as you doubtless have been without need for admonishment nor reminder, of the traces of queer murine totemism which have of late infiltrated the Lower Colleges..."
- Agendum 261, CMOE DIX.

"Is this what the kids are into these days? Inventing gods? Incorrigible."
- Senior Editor Onsaro Adelbramp; Provost of the Board for Historical Ordination, Associate Vice-Dean of Affairs for ITU Publishing, and clueless old dodderer.



The Ivory Tower University, despite its pledge to pursue universal "truth" is not exempt from creating its own myths, folklore, and an urban legendarium murky and tantalizing enough to keep even the most exhausted undergraduate study groups riveted during cramming season¹. There is nothing wrong with myth-making by itself. In fact, I would consider it something of a sign of a healthy community- it means that their society is still thinking, dreaming, and being creative. However, certain myths sometimes lead one to wonder just what in the world that community was dreaming about when it thought them up.

A favorite example of mine is the God of Dust & Lost Things, popular among the residents of the Lower Colleges. The God of Dust is, when dignified with the attention of our resident theogonists, designated as a "small" god- both figuratively and literally speaking.

Its influence is said to be limited to the area in and around the ITU campuses, though some especially smitten young students claim that its reach even extends into the lower city and the world beyond. It exists where dust, dead insect husks, shed skin cells, and other detritus of the ages accumulate, dwelling in shady corners and forgotten storage rooms. When it takes a physical form, it is said to be fond of appearing as a small black rat with a skeletal head and tail. In this form, it finds and steals away any small, half-interesting item which anyone has ever lost. The god's warren somewhere deep below the university is said to be snarled with enormous stacks of knickknacks, bits and bobs, odds and ends, and a veritable ocean of lost change in denominations that are no longer recognizable, let alone acceptable as legal tender.

The god is lonesome, but not lonely. It has no altars, no priests, and no proper worshipers. Only the occasional undergraduate gives lip-service and offerings to it in the desperate hope that it will bring back some item which they have lost. This is done by leaving another item of minimal but equal value in a small, dark corner somewhere and then returning to the spot a few days later. The desired item is rarely left in its place, if any at all is given. It is unclear if the god has difficulty understanding human reasoning, or if some bored individual makes the rounds at night, looting places where the skeletal rat is believed to dwell. Sometimes it does seem to work, however, and this serves to reinforce a less-than-joking belief in Ol' Dusty. Rough, sketchy, and discreet images of rat skulls denote popular sites of invocation across campus.

One side effect of the playful, surreptitious "veneration" of the god among young undergraduates is the proliferation of a form of poetry known as Skitterrhyme. Skitterrhyme was originally a type of praise poetry directed at the God of Dust. The earliest recorded ones jokingly extol its "virtues" such as doing absolutely nothing with its massive yet useless hoard, or boring holes in the walls to keep tired academics awake at night. They displayed an extremely rudimentary rhyme scheme and virtually nonexistent meter, but over time the arrhythmic style became more sophisticated and mathematical. The words themselves also began to be coded with meaning, until finally the staccato hymns began to be used to gossip and share secret messages in public. There are about a dozen different cyphers for skitterrhyme today, spread out across the various dormitory houses of the ITU.

A popular story is that the god presides over an entire court of lost and little things, some of which could be the cast-off remnants of other, forgotten gods.

It is both the creator and ruler of a race of animated dust bunnies, who hold the god in distant reverence while going about their lives collecting dander and evading the brooms of the indefatigable but woefully underfunded Custodial Corps, which is often the butt of jokes among the student body- and the faculty, for that matter. The dust bunnies are believed to know the secret of how to summon and gain the permanent favor of the god, but none have ever been found living to question.

The ultimate enemy of the God of Dust is said to be a great, desiccated sparrow corpse which was reanimated by the spirit of the wind, to blow all dust away forever. Sparrows, alongside squirrels, are a ubiquitous and often very annoying sight around the university, so it is somewhat of a natural antagonist to set against this strange underdog.

The earliest attested references to the God of Dust & Lost Things is from an encyclical reminding members of the university staff and faculty to report any and all instances of skitterrhyme or unsanctioned and/or ironic religiosity to the old Committee for Mythological Ordination. This encyclical was published a few years before the committee was disbanded in the wake of Article 921, which de-problematized certain rites in the interest of expanding minority religious freedom on campus. Because this publication dealt with an informal belief in or at least playful acceptance of the God of Dust which was so entrenched in the Lower Colleges that the excruciatingly blind upper councils took note of it, it is safe to assume that the god had existed for at least a few decades before that point, placing its origin as far back as one hundred and fifty years in the past, at the time of this writing.

I personally suspect that the legend was created, or at least greatly contributed to, by our small but consistent body of exchange students from Serminwurth. While it is presumptuous of me, I can think of no other city that affords such respect to the rat without trying to ascribe any sort of lofty, unrealistic ideals to it.



¹ Which is to say, all semester ever semester.

On the Disappearance of Haraal.

It has come to my attention that nowhere in my recent writings have I actually addressed the vanishing of Haraal. And while it is my first instinct to assume that any potential readers of these mad scrawlings would be intimately familiar with the major cultural myths of the known world, assuming is exactly what I should not do. Indeed, perhaps one of you right now lives far and away from knowledge or influence of Deneroth.¹ I would be remiss in omitting anything which could contribute to a more complete understanding of the world in which I write, and the context of powers that currently be.

Haraal, unifier of the Ersuunian tribes, emperor of a burgeoning empire, living culture-hero on the receiving end of cult-like levels of reverence even before his deification, removed his crown and abdicated from his throne one day after a strange visit, leaving without a word, never to be seen or heard from again.

Of course it isn't so simple as that, but those details are all that can be agreed upon between sometimes starkly contradictory sources.

First, we are unsure of exactly how long Haraal reigned as king-chieftain. Histories of All by Yashka the Sage reports a reign of 114 years and this number is often regarded as canon, particularly in Deneroth. But Yashka wrote his chronicle several centuries after the disappearance of Haraal. Mythinterpretations of History by the late Berschut Groz offers a more conservative estimate of 70-80 years. Both theories either explicitly or implicitly support the idea that Haraal was blessed with supernatural vitality and long life, but neither gives Haraal a definite point in the timeline of history which we so enjoy using. We can relatively safely say that he reigned no earlier than 800 years before the time of Yashka however, putting Haraal no more than 2,300 years in the past.

Second, we are unsure of where Haraal disappeared from. We do know that his imperial palace-camp was somewhere in the northwest region close to the sites of his last great battles, but its exact location has remained a mystery shrouded in myth, with more than a few frontier folktales and cunningfolk assertions clouding it up further. It is assumed that the camp was located on a relatively flat area of land where the royal herds could graze comfortably, but that still leaves a very wide possible range of area. Again, we can only judge by the broadest limits, and say that the palace must have been located somewhere south of modern settlements such as Bluehill, and that it would have given the Axebite a wide berth- even Haraal was cautious of some dangers, it seems.

One day, traditionally emphasized as being just like any other with no foreshadowing or warning, Haraal was adjudicating cases brought before him in his throne room. After the third or fourth defendant graciously accepted his imminent beheading after prolonged exposure to The Presence and The Gaze, a hush suddenly fell upon the court. There was a muffled sound in the distance, outside, and it was slowly growing in clarity and volume. Haraal took notice of this after he found his servants not immediately responding to his commands, and had the doors to his court opened wide in order to better hear what the disturbance was.

It was crying.

Deep, gut-wrenching weeping, growing in volume and in voice.

Haraal waved a hand to send two of his guards out to investigate, but in a matter of moments they filed back into his throne room with limp arms, stunned expressions, and thoroughly overactive tear ducts. Again, he sent guards out to confront the issue, sending four this time. Four sobbing messes returned to him. A third time, sending six guards, Haraal was once again confounded. This almost comical mix of repetition and escalation continued for some time until Haraal had dispatched his entire royal guard, to no avail.

The other members of his court were growing concerned by this point, so Haraal rose from his throne and cast his aura upon them. Calmed somewhat, they begged their lord to go and see what this dreadful thing was. He proclaimed that he was already on his way to doing so, and then strode out into the light of day. Huge, dark-bottomed clouds were already approaching on the horizon, but his eyes fixed on something far more immediate.

At the base of the hill which his palace crowned, his people had fallen into disarray in droves. Hundreds of men, women, and children had absconded from their duties and their leisures to add to the mournful cacophony. They did not heed their lord when he commanded them to rise, to rejoice in his presence. They only bowed their heads lower in grief toward a single point in the distance. Haraal's smoldering bronze gaze tried to fix it in place, but it only continued its approach.

A small, greyish hunchback of immeasurable age was hobbling his way up the slope, one withered, useless arm clutched tightly to his side. He was weather-worn and almost hairless, with one enormous shoulder and a clubbed foot which he dragged along the ground. His scabrous, diseased-looking skin was stretched tightly across his emaciated frame clad in nothing but rags soaked in morning dew. Despite his disabilities, he moved with surprising speed, and his voice, though labored, sounded not the least bit short of breath. For the hunchback was the loudest of the crying voices- only his weeping was song.

It was wordless, lacking in any real rhyme or meter. But what it lacked in composition, it made up for in dreadful emotion. They were the sounds of raw, ageless sorrow and loss. Of grief and regret for everything that has ever happened or never happened. Of a child yearning for a mother.

And that was exactly what he asked, when at last he climbed the hill and halted before Haraal, eyes only dimly registering the man towering over him as they rose up from their naturally downcast state.

"Have you seen my mother? I was lost by her. I have not found her. Have you seen her?"

These questions were all that he interrupted his quavering song with, and he repeated them again and again as he stood pitifully before the emperor. His words were strange and rustic to Haraal's ears, like the tongue of some of his most distant Ersuunian subjects, many centuries removed. Haraal, being uncharacteristically compassionate, was able to look beyond the breach of conduct in addressing a chieftain which would have ended in a greater man being beheaded on the spot. He made an exception for the strange creature, and asked him his name.

Depending on the age or dialect of the account, the hunchback's name varies in form. But each name is generally a recognizable cognate with the others others, for his name when taken literally was "Grief".

Haraal treated with Grief then, all the while becoming increasingly suspicious of the outsider and the effect he was having upon his subjects. It seemed that the influence of Haraal was mitigated in the hunchback's presence, for he could merely quell their weeping rather than elevate them to an exultant state more pleasing to his senses. But Grief would not bend to Haraal's will. Nor did he even seem to be conscious of the effect his presence seemed to be having on the palace, as if he had spent so long in his current state that this was his 'normal'. He asked over and over for news of his mother, whoever she was, and patently ignored any of the emperor's attempts to assuage his anguish and coax him into staying and reveling at his court.

Things might have gone very differently, had Haraal decided to quit his attempts at dominating the will of the hunchback.

But there was no challenge insurmountable to the son of the pine tree, scion of the sacred peak. No individual had ever resisted him, and a hunchback would not be the first. He butted heads with the cluelessly resilient Grief until his own followers were red eyed, vomiting, and bleeding from their noses with the force of that sympathetic misery. He promised rare silks, jewels, and iron to him if he ceased his weeping. He promised him a place in his court if he told him his story, and the root of his cursed power. He promised him a mended body and thousand purebred horses to draw an army of chariots across the land in search of his mother, if he would kneel before him. All of this and more was ignored by the hunchback, who continued to whimper the wordless lullaby of his missing parent.

At last, Grief announced that he needed to find her, and turned his back on Haraal to begin ambling back down the hillside.

This is said to be what sealed the fate of Haraal.

He went after the hunchback, quickly overtaking him with his long stride full of indignant purpose. The chieftain put himself in the way of Grief several times as he tried to shuffle away, each time demanding that he halt and show him the reverence which was due. Each time, Grief slunk around and sidestepped the tall, bronze man. Finally Haraal seized the hunchback in his hands and lifted him off of the ground, shaking him violently as he commanded him to come to heel.

Grief locked eyes with Haraal for the first time, then. His song and his mourning stopped, and a silence fell over the campgrounds so heavy that it could be cut with an obscure bladed weapon of Ersuunian origin, the identity of which is still fiercely debated in some highly semantic circles.² Then, slowly and deliberately, Grief began to move his arm. Not the "good" one with its swollen shoulder joint, but the shrunken and skeletal one which had been held to his chest for the whole time. Ruined joints popped and cracked loudly as he extended his limb toward Haraal, who regarded it strangely but did not pull away, even as the bony fingertips touched him upon the cheek, and then reached around to the nape of his neck.

There shouldn't have been any observers of the event capable of seeing through unclouded eyes by this point in time, but the narrative nonetheless states that Grief appeared to grow in size suddenly, while Haraal shrank. Perhaps he also shrank back in fear, despite the long-held belief that Haraal knew no fear. The hunchback met his stature and then exceeded him, somehow standing tall and straight despite his shape remaining the same. Then his other massive arm rose up to embrace the dwarfed form of the chieftain, almost like a parent would a child.

And then he whispered something into Haraal's ear.

What was whispered is unknown, but it is one of the most highly speculated-upon pieces of history and/or mythology to day.

Whatever the hunchback's words were, in a span of seconds they broke the spell. Grief was shrunken and warped again, Haraal as tall and statuesque as he'd ever been. Grief was singing anew, and ambling down into the wilderness beyond the reach of the Haraalian camp. The wracking sobs which had plagued the palace subjects subsided at long last, much to the relief of all. But when they looked up to their lord uninhibited, they saw him turning away.

Haraal had a haunted look about him. His burning eyes were darkened and glassy, and they looked around wildly as he staggered back from the spot where the hunchback had grabbed him.

Then he screamed.

He screamed, and clutched his ears as if it were ringing in his own ears, and then he fled in a frenzy across the palace grounds before leaping atop and unbroken horse and riding beyond the horizon. As he passed by the ever-growing tapestries which lined the thoroughfare leading to his court, it is said that their intricately woven programs twisted and morphed to depict not their history and grand achievements, but a bleak future of clouds and blood. Haraal fled into reaches unknown, forsaking crown, throne, and people as the failing of his powers and the ineffable words of the hunchback shook him to his core.

Sober-minded from the catharsis of the hunchback's influence, and free of Haraal's Presence and Gaze both, his subjects are said to have promptly burned the settlement to the ground and then dispersed, the site of that short-lived capital forever lost to history.

Traditions which venerate Haraal as a deific figure tend to describe his confrontation with the hunchback as a penultimate battle against good and evil, which ended in Grief being banished at great personal cost to Haraal, who vowed to return to his people one day once all pain and decay had been driven from the land. Belief in the imminent return of Haraal has waxed and waned with the centuries, growing particularly strong during times of hardship when many such millennialist movements are taking root, but dissipating soon after it becomes apparent that the end is not nigh.

Even among less dogmatic communities across the Ersuunian Basin, where birth defects and deformities often set an individual apart as special or touched by divinity, the possession of any aspects associated with Grief is a universally dire social stigma lacking in any duality or complexity of meaning.

The streets of Porylus seem to be free of such anxieties as we pass them by, but I have heard rumor that Haraalian movements are beginning to come back into fashion with the approach of the three-hundredth year After the Rupture.





¹ If so, please tell me about this distant place so that I might move there.
² The "skirpha" referenced originally by Yashka the Sage has been variously interpreted as a sword, long knife, grain-scythe, or horseman's axe, with concessions to the theory that it was a generic term for "blade" being few and far between. Our own Professor of Fencing & Swordsmanship Berchtold Vogt claims in a footnote in the Appendices of the recently released second edition of his Manual of Masterful Martial Maneuvers that the skirpha was actually a pole weapon having more in common with an earspoon spear with a weighted, metal-capped butt. As his theory goes, the weapon was not actually meant to slice the silence at all, and Yashka's description was actually a subtle infiltration of the old Nambarish tradition of metaphysical poetry, in which the fundamental properties of poetic subjects are altered dramatically for emphasis or coded layers of meaning. Though remarkably deep and compelling compared to his usual area of... expertise, Vogt's theory has only drummed up more conflict among etymologists.

On the Other Origins of Haraal.

We all know the classic version of the story by now. Kibra says as much while prefacing the speech she is surely about to give us. We each nod our heads, but then don't really object when she goes on to describe the origin myth anyway.

Most commonly (or at least, traditionally) the culture-hero Haraal is believed to have been birthed from the trunk of an aging tree on the side of the peak known as Yorl'di. This mountain is generally considered to have been an isolated part of the southeastern Pashels. Haraal is unequivocally described as being exceptionally tall and of Ersuunian ideal, so theories that he may have been one of the Pach-Pah are quickly quashed. He fell from the mountain, injuring himself, and then he was nursed back to health by a family of herders who would become his first servants in the conquest of the whole Ersuunian Basin. Spectacular feats of strength, skill, and seemingly divine luck quickly follow, mixed in with some tribal politicking. Wrap it up with a few vague allusions to abduction and ethnic cleansing here and there, and you've got the early years of our beloved bronze god-chieftain. Plain, simple fun for the whole family at the monthly Reaffirmation of the Law.

But there is another story. Several in fact, but this fountain brings to mind one in particular.

In the Histories of All by our beloved Sage, Yashka, there is a single verse which reads that once Haraal had conquered the last of the Ersuunian holdouts in the west--specifically after he finished tightening an iron band around the skull of king Sperhel until his head exploded--he decided to "settle down and embrace the land of his birth."¹ This excerpt has three primary interpretations.

The first, generally tied with the above narrative, is that it is metaphorical, and that Haraal was decreeing that he was going to shift from conquest to administration, thereby embracing all of the land that he now claimed as his own by birthright. Thus "the land of his birth" is synonymous with every area of the Basin which he eventually claimed as part of his empire.

The second is that Haraal was specifically regarding the area where he would later found his court and capital city, styled on the palatial nomad camps of old. Following this line of logic, the area in the northwest of the Basin would have been the place where he was "born", which happened to be the farthest point in the entire empire from the purported site of Yorl'di.²

The logical conclusion of this interpretation was that Haraal was born in some other fashion, and that the mountain and tree were more symbolic than actual, historical sites. The Ersuunians of the northwest were quick to apply one of their own myths to the story, in their attempt to subsume their conqueror into their own culture, probably before those filthy mid-landers or water-drinking east-fringers could make the same claims or some such. The myth in question was one of immaculate conception.

There once was a great, nameless king among Ersuunians, said to be of the twentieth generation of nobles descended from the chieftain Gohr himself. This king had an insatiable desire for collecting wives, though for exactly what purpose was unknown: they were entirely leisured within his court, and were not made to engage in any state or domestic matters. Nor did they serve the less common but more infamous purpose of a harem, for they all remained virgins in his company, and he had no known children. The count varies from source to source, but it seems that he had several dozen such brides in gilded cages.

And one day, he decided to add one more to the bunch.

Kibra tells us that the young woman's name was Tiamis. She was the daughter of one of the king's sub-chieftains, and probably the sister of one or more women who were already the man's wives. She was brought to him in time for the spring harvest, when the chiefdom's agrarian subjects were paying their tribute of grain, animals, and leather. A great feast was held by the king to host the representatives of his vassals and bond-servants, as well as to celebrate his latest wedding. At that feast all manner of Ersuunian delicacies were to be found. Among these curiosities of semi-settled cuisine was the pasture date.

Ciudo asks our guide "what are pasture dates?" because of course he would. She seems all too happy to answer him.

"Pasture date" is a euphemism in modern speech used to refer to roasted horse testicles.

How they got that name and why anyone thought that disembodied genitals resemble pitted fruits, I cannot fathom, and I'd rather not try. But that is what they are, and that is the origin of the unusually-shaped, fist-sized globe which the statue now identified as Tiamis is reaching for.

I am not sure if I approve of this visual pun or not.

Our storyteller goes on to describe how great rows of spitted pasture dates were being roasted over trough-like fires all throughout the camp on that day. They were fresh- exceedingly so in some cases, for the stallions they'd been "harvested" from had been gelded earlier that morning. When Tiamis arrived at the banquet and saw these highly seasonal treats, she seized one at once. Unfortunately for her, the date she plucked had not been cooked sufficiently, and she did not realize how raw it was until she'd eaten more than half of it. Kibra illustrates her nonchalance at this discovery by shrugging her shoulders and mimicking downing the remainder.

I begin to consider what I will do for my lunch hour today, because none of us are going to be eating now.

Rather than becoming wretchedly food-poisoned, Tiamis felt herself become mildly bloated after her meal. Over the course of the next few days, it became apparent that she was miraculously (and severely) pregnant. Her husband was as confused as he was enraged, and chose to wait until the birth of the child to decide just what should be done. Tiamis gave birth after only forty days. Within minutes of his birth, the boy named Haraal was able to stand and speak, and warded his father away sternly. Another forty days passed, and he had grown into a fully mature young man. On the forty-first day of his life, Haraal strangled his "father" to death and assumed control of all his holdings. This story serves as an explanation for how Haraal appeared so suddenly and with such a solid power base at his disposal, once conquest of the Basin began. Tiamis and the other widows disappear from the narrative at this point, and the story quickly takes a shape resembling that of the traditional rise to greatness.

Kibra explains unsolicited that the merger of the two contradictory tales in this piece of art is meant to represent equal appreciation of all ideas, grand or small, orthodox or fringe, in the name of the greater goal of acquisition of knowledge. I am impressed- this simultaneously reaffirms Porylus' relationship with the Ivory Tower, and takes the latter to task in its approach of research in recent centuries.

Our guide turns and quits the scene now, gesturing with both hands for us to follow after her as we make our final approach to the tower of Porylus Mons.

I quietly wonder if any statues are hidden away here depicting the conflicting beliefs about the disappearance of Haraal.



¹ Verse 16,982, line 44 of the Histories of All, Yashka the Sage, 1284 BR.

² The third theory is that Yorl'di is misidentified with any of the Pashels, and that it was in fact the highest peak of the Oron'er Mountains. But this argument doesn't really come into play because the greatest proponents of it are based in Nambar, Serminwurth, and the pauper graves reserved for heretics after they've been ritually bled to death via paper cuts by priests of the Ivory Tower.

Qut.

Now that I'm inching back into activity here on the blog (I honestly thought I'd be gone longer), I realize it's time for another one of my posts that can't decide between history and mythology. And what better topic to address in that mindset than the millennia-old concept of sacral kingship, in order to quell the need to go back and edit my college research project?

Sacred kings, past and present, are broadly defined as monarchs (male or female) whose temporal rule holds religious significance. They may hold religious authority, in which case they may hold some similarities to an outright theocrat, or they may simply be an otherwise earthly ruler reigning with the legitimacy conferred on them by a sacred figure or institution. Sacred kingship took a huge variety of forms around the world throughout history, arguably being present on every single continent with the exception of Antarctica.¹ The divine right of kings and mandate of heaven were enormously significant in the western and eastern halves of Eurasia respectively, but I want to look into a form of divine legitimacy that was carried by rulers of states which often straddled Europe and Asia- nomadic pastoralist empires.

The khan named Temüjin consolidated the disparate Mongolic tribes and officially formed the Mongol Empire in 1206 CE. After this date he became known as Chinggis Khan. He, like so many other khans of the Mongol people(s), had previously been invested with his power by a böö, or shaman, at the feet of the mountain named Burkhan Khaldun, located in modern day Khentii Province. This was a sacred mountain for the Mongols, and according to the account of his life, Temüjin once escaped certain death after a lost battle by taking refuge at the mountain. Burkhan Khaldun is traditionally believed to be a sort of axis mundi connected to heaven and the sky-god Tengri. By propagandizing the unlikely victories, narrow escapes, and seemingly miraculous events of Temüjin's life, it was easy to demonstrate to the Inner Asian world that he was a legitimate authority figure, surely under the guidance and protection of Eternal Heaven.²

But Burkhan Khaldun wasn't the only source of sacral kingship that Chinggis Khan benefited from. Humans live between heaven and earth, after all. And that is why he chose to place the capital of his nomadic empire at the literal and figurative center of the nomad's world, in a place called Ötüken.

Ötüken, often referred to as Ötüken-yish or Ötüken-jer, meaning "forest" or "land" of Ötüken, respectively, is an area of land that is difficult to pin down today. One theory put forth by Mongolist Thomas T. Allsen is that it stretched from the Khangai Mountains of central Mongolia to the Sayan Mountains of nearby Tuva³, though this doesn't quite match up when you try to place its most central landmark, the Orkhon River Valley, at its center. This is further muddled by the frequent claim that Ötüken is also a single mountain at the center. Though to be fair, spiritual geography can be very vague or flexible based on the needs of the time.

The Orkhon Valley, located at the tentative heart of Ötüken as well as about 320 kilometers west of the modern capital city of Ulaanbaatar, was where Chinggis Khan founded his first imperial city of Karakorum. But it had also once been the site of the city of Ordu-Baliq, seat of the Uyghur Khaganate almost four hundred years prior. Yet the Uyghurs had come there centuries after the fractious Göktürks had done the same twice over, and before them had come the Rourans, and even before them it is possible that the Xianbei and Xiongnu confederations had centered their states on the river valley. By the lifetime of Chinggis Khan it was the site of over a thousand years of cultural continuity and habitation by prestigious nomads whether they be Mongols, Turks, proto-Mongols, or other poly-ethnic or uncertain groups. Chinggis Khan's decision to place the seat of his new empire there was as natural as it was calculated.

And with good reason: thanks to a local microclimate, some of the greatest grazing lands in the Mongolian Steppe are located here, in addition to a breathtaking array of forests, mountains, rivers, and lakes. I believe it was as close to a paradise as the harsh steppe landscape could have offered to ancient nomads.

But it wasn't just a beautiful landscape with practical or tactical value and a long history.

Orkhon Valley is the place from which qut emanates.

Qut is a divine power which originates in Ötüken and spreads outward, granting the local ruler the divine right to unite and rule all of the tribes of the land. It was an extension of the favor of the spirits of the land, or yer-sub, whose mood and disposition toward humanity was said to be seen reflected in the weather and bounty of nature, in particular the fruit trees of Orkhon. The valley was recognized in writing as being vital to imperial power as far back as the early 8th century CE, when one of the rulers of the Göktürks, Bilge Khagan, inscribed on a stele at the site that "If you stay in the land of the Ötüken, and send caravans from there, you will have no trouble. If you stay at the Ötüken Mountains, you will live forever dominating the tribes!"⁴

It is also no coincidence that Ötüken is one of many names given to the earth-goddess of Turko-Mongol mythology, commonly seen as second in power only to Tengri, who was often presented as being her husband or relative. By controlling both Ötüken and Burkhan Khaldun, Chinggis Khan had the exceptional ability to say that the two greatest divinities of the world were on his side.

I see qut as sort of a hybrid sacral kingship model, which combines the elements of a few others. It comes from a physical location which must be seized and controlled in order to harness it, yet it takes the form of an empowering supernatural energy that is non-exclusive with, similar to, and distinct from the general favor or protection of the chief deity. I'd dare to say it resembles the power of barakah conferred upon people, objects, and places by God in Islam, though on a comparatively very limited scale, and with very specific stipulations attached.

Today we don't have a lot of world leaders claiming that they are empowered by magical leyline energy, which is probably for the best. But the beauty and history of the Orkhon Valley are preserved by a UNESCO heritage site designation.



¹ Though to be fair, we aren't sure about how the Elder Things governed themselves.

² Franke, Herbert. The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Page 347.

³ Allsen, Thomas T. "Spiritual geography and political legitimacy in the eastern steppe." Ideology and the Formation of Early States. Brill Academic Publishers, 1996. Pages 124-125.

⁴ Drompp, Michael R. "Breaking the Orkhon Tradition: Kirghiz Adherence to the Yenisei Region after A. D. 840." Journal of the American Oriental Society 119, no. 3. American Oriental Society, 1999. Page 391.

Raft People of the River Khesh.

"You think you will move all of these baskets upstream faster by land? Sit down, and my rowers will show you the strength of Sayau!"
- Headsman Olu of Handas Islet, to several southern salt traders.


Identifiers are important in many aspects of our societies. Indicators of who we are, what we are, which group we belong to, and how we would like to be recognized. These identifiers can take many forms. The way we carry ourselves when we walk. The affectation we impart our speech with. I know that styles of dress and decoration are among the most highly visible, as someone who once had to (and on occasion still do) trot around in the beige and grey robes of the Ivory Tower University.

But they can be deeper than that. Skin-deep, in a literal sense. Tattoos, piercings, and other superficial modifications to the body can achieve much the same effect, sometimes in an even more impactful manner.

And then there are those which go deeper.

The results of those sometimes lengthy and involved processes can disturb some of us, or inspire a sort of patronizing fascination in others. I will attempt to avoid both while dealing with this group.

I write of the raft-people of the River Khesh, more appropriately known as the Sayaula or Sayauans, but more commonly known by the ethnic epithet "drop-heads". I will limit my use of the term to the statement of its existence here so that I do not sully the rest of this article with it.

The Sayauans hail from the mid-to-southern Khesh River, being the primary occupants of the river and its tributaries and offshoots in between Riven-Bridge and the Deltas. They have been present in the area since the beginning of recorded history in the late Ersuunian era, but it is not known if they are an aboriginal population. For much of their history, the Sayauans have earned their livelihood by fishing or sailing along the river upon long rafts or more rarely wide, flat-bottomed boats. They typically live one nuclear family to a raft, with the entire extended family cooperating as a loose sort of clan. Clan lineage is traced patrilineally, with most families claiming descent from the folk-hero Sayau, from whom the ethnic group takes its name.

Sayauans also practice artificial skull deformation of a type which is unique to this part of the world and time period.

Ersuunian head-binding was once a common practice among the noble lineages of the old herders, in which the skull was bound at a very young age so that it was very high and "steepled", with a flattened forehead. The practice sharply declined after the ascension of Haraal, and is believed to have ceased completely by the second or third generation of his sons. However, we are left with rich accounts of the practice today, as well as more than a few mausoleums or burial mounds filled with such skulls. Sayauan head-binding, meanwhile, still flourishes among the Sayaula, with upwards of nine out of every ten adults having received some degree of binding in their infancy.

What distinguishes the two styles visually is that where Ersuunian binding raises the top, Sayauan binding pulls the skull back. The top of the head as well as both sides are squeezed into a tapered point at the back of the skull by tightly coiling rope around a cone-shaped structure made of reeds or steamed wooden boards. The desired shape results in a low forehead and a side profile which resembles somewhat the shape of a teardrop. This visual similarity is what has contributed to the obnoxious term referenced above.

The logic behind this practice is informed by the mythology of the Sayaula, who believe that Sayau was born with a head shaped perfectly like such a water droplet. Its contours, alongside his supernatural strength and agility, allowed him to swim up and down the river with no water resistance to speak of. It is not obvious whether the practice has a measurable effect on one's ability to swim or not, but the tradition is a central element of their culture regardless.

This ethnic identifier has also made it very easy for outsiders to pick Sayauans out, however, and the unusual appearance of the practice has probably contributed to past persecution of them. More than once, the heirs of Haraal based in the city now known as Riven-Bridge attempted to subjugate the Sayauans in a bid to consolidate control of the River Khesh, but Sayauan knowledge of the waterways generally ensured that they could escape most of their would-be aggressors, and wage a guerrilla war against those who followed anyway. Material support plus the occasional offer of safe harbor from the northernmost Delta dwellers displeased with the idea of Haraalians coming down from the north was also an invaluable, if clandestine asset.

Today, the sporadic warfare of the past has given way to a tense, cooperative peace in which Sayauan barges and merchant groups have flourished, relatively speaking. They primarily deal in the north-south trade which is still supported by the Independent half of Riven-Bridge, while their relationship with the Loyalists is more tepid at best. Contact with the hill-folk further inland is only occasional, but generally peaceable. Interest in the Sayauans from the central cities has increased in recent decades for other reasons, however.

While they are distinct, the two traditions of skull-shaping referenced above, in addition to the extensive history of the Sayauala in the region, has led some researchers from Deneroth and elsewhere to speculate that there is a link between them and the ancient Ersuunians. One theory is that they were once a lower caste of an Ersuunian tribe, or perhaps an entire tribe of non-Ersuunian bond-servants brought with them on their westward migration. What began as a branding or indicator of subservient status then developed into an element of culture owned and used by the Sayaula themselves, after the events which led to their independence. These theories are of course still in their extreme infancy, and it is unlikely that they will see much development until such a time comes that the rare few researchers who do brave the long journey east manage to conduct their research in a more tactful manner.¹


¹ Somewhat understandably, Sayauans are reluctant to offer comment when overdressed foreigners inquire into whether or not their ancestors once owned them.

Riverine Despotism in the Ersuunian & Early Haraalian Periods.

As we pass farther away from the cesspits downhill from the alehouse, my mind relaxes as chances of some strange tricks on the part of Elrusyo diminish down to the minimum level of risk one always runs when consorting with herb-hermits.

In place of that mental exertion, I'm able to appreciate the river, now broadening and clarifying steadily, for what it is. It, like so many other bodies of running water across the Basin, is a vein of life running through the heartland of so many former states.

And, like real arteries, one need only apply a little pressure to them in order to affect change in the body at large.

The Ersuunians, and the people of Haraal who would eventually subsume or supplant them, are famed in written history as well as modern popular culture for their vast forces of cavalry, able to wash over any opposition like crashing waves. They conquered their enemies and then held onto their winnings through the threat and force of that mounted elite, which would grow increasingly landed and powerful as time went on. They remained the focus of warfare and political might until the appropriation of dry-stone building from Esgodarran architecture eventually met with mortar and resulted in the first fortified and stone-walled cities, which complicated the art of the siege and seriously hampered a cavalry focus.

But an equally important component of control was water access. As mixed and settled Esgodarran-Ersuunian petty-kingdoms formed, pastoralists and montane herders alike became more and more discouraged from true nomadism, and the ability for them together with their entirely agricultural neighbors to move to a new area in the event of drought became practically nonexistent. Recognizing this, chieftain-kings along the Basin's periphery exercised control over the wealthier heartlands by building the most elaborate series of earth dams the world has ever known- excepting the irrigation systems of inland Nambar of course. By limiting or allowing the flow of water into a particular region, the rulers of the northeastern reaches (where the highest percentage of rivers have their source) were able to exert formal or de facto control over groups who were downstream of them and had no way to rectify the issue or displace some other tribe in a better position.

We know this because the descendants of Haraal utilized the exact same methods of control centuries later, as evidenced by one passage offered by our ever-present friend Yashka the Sage, in which "the sons of the conqueror restored to use the old choke points of the rivers."¹ Opposition to this view traditionally argues that the dams must have been an invention of Haraal himself, and the restoration was by many later generations of his descendants whose forebears had let them fall into disrepair. I would argue against that by pointing toward the trend in existing literature of painstakingly and in excruciating detail exulting all of the achievements and creations of Haraal or his known lieutenants. Nowhere within that swollen body of chronicles can be found mention of the river controls. I know- every sophomore-level student at the ITU is expected to have them memorized.²

Today, the majority of the dams and other earthworks are lost along with much of the rest of the architecture present during the height of the Haraalians. Those that remain have been converted from weapons of war to tools of commerce, being used to aid river navigation or at times irrigation. If we are fortunate enough to develop a funded archaeological community in the near future however, I do not doubt that many spectacular artifacts of that bygone age could be found.

It could even shine light on--or put to rest for good--the notion that once upon a time, up until the migrations of the Ersuunians through the eastern highlands, the River Khesh flowed not south into what would become the Deltas region, but east into what we now know to be foreboding wastelands.

What cataclysmic event could have caused that? Had there once been a green east?



¹ Verse 28,441, line 8 of the Histories of All, Yashka the Sage, 1284 BR.

² And while it is officially attributed to Haraal's spontaneous knowledge and intuitive battle-prowess, I would argue that a broad, inherited cultural knowledge of the Ersuunian Basin's waterways from preceding generations played a large role in his conquest of the western reaches. This was one of his last campaigns, which culminated in the battle at the Masib River, south of the Oron'er Mountains. The river's original name is unknown, but today it bears the name of the Masibi people, apparently a distant offshoot of one of the mountain tribes, who believed that the river was the gateway into the afterlife, and as such traditionally set their dead adrift on rafts down its current. Haraal demonstrated that he was no stranger to dramatic irony when he first ordered the flow of the river to be cut to a trickle,  then released it in a flood that swept away the surviving Masibs who hadn't been pinned and cut down upon its banks by his army.

The Goats Who Stare for Men.

"I send Hhicza with you for fourteen stalks, a good deal for a friend. What? You sail against the wind, through the Pinholes? Twenty-eight stalks, and not a grain less!"
- Tal ad-an-Perap, a savvy priest-herder known for his somewhat questionable credentials.

"You'd think with such a pampered lifestyle, they'd at least taste a little better cooked. Worst thing I ever got tried as a heretic for."
- A tattooed and prodigiously paunched man standing about ten feet behind me as I write this. Name unknown, and not about to be asked for.



For some reason which eludes my understanding, I have the thought of the maritime traditions of Nambar stuck in my head- right in between the splitting headache and the worry that this breakfast might have been spat in. At least the hunk of cheese I was given seems to be from a goat, rather than the pig dairy "delicacies" which we are treated to back up in the higher tiers of Deneroth.

Goats, as the case happens to be, also occupy a long and storied place in the history of Nambarish seamanship.

While not often considered the proudest of animals in our reckoning, goats are highly prized and symbolic in Nambar. Owing I think to the pastoral traditions of the inland folk who would eventually join with their coastal kin to form something of a (relatively) unified people, goats have ritual importance imbued with the memory of practical considerations. While they themselves might not be considered very clean, they are the cleaners of society by having such a hardy constitution and adventurous appetite. Of course the stories of goats eating one's entire pouch of tin coins for dinner are fancy, but they do help to keep the streets of towns and cities clear of refuse. They also serve as apotropaic protectors, either as a whole or in pieces, and it is frequent that those with a stronger belief in magic will keep around a lucky goat, or an amulet made from the bones of one. The unusual pupil of a goat eye is likewise imbued with power, being just unnerving enough to cause the Evil Eye to blink and avert from its target out of discomfort. Because of this, goats are associated with more than a few protective deities, and may be sacrificed or sacrificed to. More mundanely, they also serve as very effective producers of milk, fur, and meat.

All of those are reasons to bring a goat along on an uncertain voyage where supplies may run low or the waves of an angered deity might rise up high. But far more fascinating is the goat to which no harm is ever, under any circumstances, permitted. These are the Mir u'Yam, or Goats of the Sea in our language.

No voyage into uncertain waters out of red-shored Nambar is considered complete without a dedicated, multi-functional sea-goat. They tend to be specially bred and trained from a young age to be obedient, patient, observant, and above all, stately in demeanor. The responsibility of breeding them tends to fall to the devotees of one of the associated deities, such as the blue-bearded and resplendently robed figure of Hhuuzt, who also brand their goats or dye patches of hair--such as the chin--a deep blue.

Once introduced to the appropriate vessel, a sea goat's first duty is to calmly and smoothly guide the rest of the voyage's goats up the ramp and into the holding pen where they are to remain until the ship's return to port. For reasons not entirely known to outsiders, the Mir u'Yam have a particularly pacifying effect on other, less well-bred livestock. After this, and once the ship has properly departed, a crewman hefts the Mir up on his back in a specially-designed harness, which allows him to ascend the rigging of the ship's (usually solitary) mast up to its highest point.

There, the goat is placed in a small, cage-like nest which gives it a full, uninterrupted view of the sea in every direction. Provisioned with fodder and water, the goat stands placid yet alert as a lookout. Thanks to the wide vision of goats, they may see a very broad swath of the horizon at once, and have to only turn their heads a bit. Thanks to the training of their breeders, they are not utterly and totally bored to death by the job of being lookout. It is given periodic exercise breaks down on deck, both otherwise its voyage is solitary and high-altitude.

In the event that something interrupts the wine-dark waves around the ship, the Mir u'Yam produces a trained series of bleats with particular intonation conveying different messages of direction and distance. Typically, one bleat refers to sighted land, two bleats refers to another ship, and three indicates that something other has been sighted. The ocean accessible from Nambar, truthfully or not, is believed to be filled with all manner of terrifying monsters, and those daring yet superstitious types who make up the ranks of their seafarers like to have some advance warning on when they should arm themselves with lacquered bows and toggle-spears. It is said that particularly brave and battle-hearted sea-goats even adorned the masts of the long warships which sailed into battle against the Gertish proxies of the Third Trade War.¹

When at last a ship returns safely to portage, the Mir is brought down from the mast for the last time, and kissed between the lozenge-shaped eyes by every member of the crew out of gratitude, captain included. Then it leads what remains of the supply flock ashore, depending on how many needed to be eaten or sacrificed to appropriate spirits. Finally, it is either returned to its previous handlers, or given over to a comparable group for safekeeping in the new location. Rented sea goats can come at considerable expense, however, so most find their way back to their priest-herders.

In the event of the premature death of a sea goat, whether by incident or natural causes, many sailors might fall victim to utter despair at this absolute omen of impending doom. But others, at least frequently enough that anecdotal evidence of it exists in amusing tales all across Nambar and beyond, might take a more self-determined approach. More than once, the careful eye of a priest has found that a very different goat from the one they sent off has returned to them, done up in a rough approximation of the proper branding and regalia of a Mir u'Yam. As for how the ships continue to navigate without a sea goat, I presume that no decent crew would ever let their own skills as lookouts atrophy completely.

Perhaps we should consider painting one of our own mules in lucky colors before resuming our travels today.



¹ While I don't currently have access to a verifiable source on this subject, I am quite confident that the above is correct, given that I have previously studied the events and effects of the Third Trade War, specifically in the context of how it led to the creation of Hylek's Hundreds. In lieu of a better citation, I can at least provide evidence that the occurrence is well-known enough to have become a popular subject of literature, resulting in it having been featured in the second half of Tirti Naorut's Twenty Children's Bedtime Stories from the Occident, 231 A.R. ²

² What? There's nothing wrong with carrying around a token from one's childhood. And it's as lavishly illustrated as any old codex in the library, I can say that with confidence!

On the Arrival of the Ancient Ersuunians.

It occurred to me as I wrote the last complete parchment of my current travelogue that I have never given a great deal of attention to those commonly alluded-to progenitors of ours, the Ersuunians. I often write as if my audience has received the same general schooling in history as I have, or at least a fraction of it, but as I try to write for a readership not confined to the upper levels of Deneroth, I realize now that I leave far too many gaps and vistas of untouched possibility in my works. This will never be completely remedied, but I will attempt to remain conscious of the issue while moving forward.

Or in this case, even farther backward.

Disregarding for a moment the Esgodarrans, the Pach-Pah lineages, the tribes of the Oron'er Mountains, half of the ethnic admixture of the Nambarish, the Gertish, the aboriginals of the Khokhantipa Mudflats, and the Delta-dwellers¹, the Ersuunians were the catalyst for the development of complex and wide-reaching civilizations in all of the known world.

According to classical depictions, they were a tall and broad-shouldered folk with dark hair and dark or sometimes blue eyes, possessed of a bronze complexion and, in the case of the men, truly impressive mustaches. With that said, I point to the much wider diversity exhibited by the groups descended from them as an indicator that this was simply one of many phenotypes found among them and their constituent peoples at the time of their arrival on the landmass.

More verifiably, the Ersuunians were well-established pastoralists who carried or carted what little material wealth of theirs which couldn't be herded. According to tradition these other articles of wealth included finely crafted iron tools and weaponry, and the materials used to create them, but it is unclear how they managed to maintain both a pioneering lifestyle and a long tradition of blacksmithing. Perhaps their carts were larger and more numerous than commonly reported, or perhaps the speed of their expansion across the continent should be measured more in centuries than in decades.

The Ersuunians were accomplished riders, and the horse is strongly associated with their culture to this day, though it is unclear whether they had such a surplus of horses that all had a mount, or only the nobility and warriors--those most likely groups to have records or accounts about them extant--had access to such resources. By "nobles", I mean the tribal chieftains who led a group in practical as well as ritual affairs, and who commonly passed their title down through a patrilineal like of succession. These chieftains would host a court and establish fortified camps for at least as long as winter lasted, often building them so that they resembled an ovoid or more rarely crescent (perhaps even horseshoe?) shape.

They originated from somewhere far to the east, beyond the lands which have since become dried and parched. Either they dwelt in those regions soon to become desert until they became less favorable, or they passed them up directly in their efforts to find or claim a new homeland for themselves. Wherever they or their own ancestors originated from beyond what is now wasteland is lost to unwritten history, for the extent of those trackless and dangerous lands is unknown either by land route or sea. Whether the Fokari lived in the area at that time is also unclear, but I speculate that if they did, the Ersuunians had one more reason to push further west, rather than contend with established tribes and their herds.

Settling first in the highlands to the east of the rivers and the corridors of steppe country north of there, the Ersuunians spread out over the region over a period of time which might be better guessed at if the University begins to develop an archaeological studies group in the next few years. I imagine that they moved with less than burning purpose, with those who arrived first establishing themselves and their families in decent grazing lands while those behind either passed beyond into the newest frontiers, or forced their erstwhile neighbors ahead of them in return.

Eventually, or "forty-by-forty generations before the cracking of the alabaster bristlecone pine's trunk and the birthing of Haraal" to be exact ³, the Ersuunians would come to the basin which now bears their name.

When they did happen upon this vast and comparatively quite verdant depression, they also encountered the Esgodarrans living there. Exactly how these two peoples related to one another at first is unclear, but at some point their relations turned hostile. It may have been a matter of land dispute, because the mounted Ersuunians were victorious over the Esgodarrans and "drove them into the hills" of the basin according to the Histories of All written by the sage Yashka, circa 1284 BR.⁴ The implication is that the Esgodarrans were present outside of the hills prior to that conflict, and the resulting clashes allowed the Ersuunians to move in and occupy the territory by themselves. This too needs better research than I am able to attempt at the time being, but were I to make the attempt, I would seek to cross-reference these histories with those surviving in Esgodarran accounts, oral or otherwise.

Whatever the catalyst or the series of events, the result was that the Ersuunian tribes now controlled vast swathes of rich new territory, which they quickly adapted to their lifestyle. It was only so long until exploration into the agriculture practiced by several of their new neighbors began, and after that it was a sad inevitability that the first chieftain arose up among them who got the wild horsehair up his backside and decided that he wanted all to refer to him as "king".

Fans of my short piece on the Pach-Pah Empire might be able to spot history repeating itself here.



¹ Why yes, that is quite a substantial list of peoples to ignore when discussing the qualifications for "original" civilizations.² Almost seems like our definition of the term is worth revisiting, doesn't it?

² Let me also preemptively admit to my bold-faced hypocrisy in not including the Longfolk of the Reossos or the Fokari of the eastern wastelands in this list. Much to my chagrin, I cannot treat all of my sources on those peoples as accurate after two to four hundred years have passed since their (arguably) shaky formation. In the latter case, sheer distance has prevented recent exploration by any daring adventurers, and in the case of the former, our modern brand of daring adventurer tends not to be very arrow-proof. Let me also acknowledge the unwritten word which must remain so even now, lest I return home to find my accommodations back at the ITU completely and wholly dismantled despite what any technicalities in the University's code of law and conduct might say otherwise about the matter. Even so far south, I can still feel the shadow of Adelbramp's black marker looming close.

³ Verse eight, line eleven of the Histories of All, Yashka the Sage, 1284 BR.

⁴ Because the passage in question is not drilled into each and every freshman's brain by orientation courses for three semesters straight like the citation just above, and because I am far away from the text at this moment, I cannot state with a great degree of accuracy where in the Histories this information may be found. However, I am reasonably confident that it is located somewhere within the first 48,000 verses of the narrative, narrowing one's search down considerably.

Looking Southward and Backward, Part 12.

Out here, we are utterly exposed. The wind is dying down by itself, but it can be legendarily powerful across these flatlands. Once upon a time, this whole area was the heartland of pastoralists of varying sorts. First the Ersuunians, then the Haraalians and their kin, grazed vast herds of cattle as well as horses in between the patches of intense hill-country which dominate the imagination of many people confined to the walls of their towns and cities. Indeed, the homelands of the hillfolk are grand and extensive, but the plains which surround them are what allowed for the formation of those first nomad confederations which would eventually give rise to the urban existence which so many of us enjoy.

Even after their fences and tents were traded in for walls and buildings with stone foundations, the hooves of beasts trod over these regions in uncountable numbers along the borders of vast farming estates built to feed burgeoning polities. It was only when the Rupture occurred, and vast areas of grassland were subject to killing frosts the likes of which had not been seen before, did their numbers dwindle. And when they did fall, they plummeted, for the herds and their owners had multiplied and gorged for uninterrupted centuries. Even now, a few hundred years after that winter of winters, local belief holds that one cannot drive into the topsoil with a plowshare anywhere in the south-central plains without striking the skull of a bull.

Not that there is much driving of plowshares around here these days. Many areas are still given to dirt so loose that it blows away on windy days such as this, and deeper soil still possesses that imperceptible taint of overuse. The land that may still be good for hardier crop-raising would have to be reclaimed from the wild first, for the old towns--such as the one purportedly erected alongside Janskurf's Place--crumbled away into nothingness long ago. Deneroth, rather than investing in the risky venture, has opted to feed itself primarily through trade- even as it rulers bemoan the loss of territory and loudly champion returning to the territorial integrity of the old days. Still, the dirt road is wide enough for wagons going both ways at once, attesting to the stubborn regularity of trade from the south.

A peculiar aisle of raised ground divides the two horse paths, dotted with the same tall, tough grasses which surround us. I am remound of the details of one of the accounts of the palace of Haraal, as penned by one of the personal scribe-assistants of Laizij himself. Supposedly for a whole mile leading up to the entrance to the ill-fated stronghold, two roads positioned closely together like this were divided by a pair of tapestries of immense length and height. Woven upon each face was all of the accomplishments of the godlike emperor, oriented so that they could be read while approaching from one road and while leaving along the other. Every day they were being dragged forward or back as new chapters of his greatness were added, lengthening the tapestries while ensuring that they remained perfect, if flipped mirrors of one another.¹

Up ahead, at the highest point on a gentle slope, we can now see the dark timbers of Janskurf's Place. It rises up out of the least inviting-looking patch of heath in the entire land, perhaps a result of one clever bit of business acumen- the worse the environment looks around it, the more inviting and safe the old tavern seems by comparison. The two halves of the road merge together before it and pinch inward as they lead toward it and the structures nearby. The roadside sign we are nearing now is even larger than I had pictured, standing easily twice as high as I do. Elrusyo lightly elbows me and grins as we come close enough for Hraela to recognize that the sensationalist Denerothi Ersuut engravings upon the sign are not even accompanied by anything in a known Gertish dialect.

She is not amused.



¹ I am also remound of one infamous passage described in The Attestations of Itraszes, in which one of the tapestries miraculously transformed to reveal the future of the empire on the night of Haraal's disappearance, describing in grizzly detail all of the plagues, catastrophes, and evils to be visited upon its peoples. The Attestations only surfaced about a century after the ruler departed from his realm, but it was accepted as true enough to be used as an argument for the deification and veneration of Haraal. While I am no expert on topography, I can somewhat confidently state that these plains have not yet been swallowed up by an ever-expanding lake of black fire, causing me to cast some of my own humble skepticism upon the prophesies.

Ko-Fi CuPost #1.

"How about a peek into ITU's hierarchy and faculty?"

-TheLawfulNeutral

Why is it that the farther away from the University I travel, the closer I seem to be linked to it?

Very well. I will do my best to illuminate the nature of my lodgings.

The exact hierarchy and composition of the echelons of the Ivory Tower University are an impenetrably convoluted mystery, even (and sometimes especially) to its own members and higher-ups. At the time of the school's consecration during the life of Grand Scholar Laizij, the bureaucracy was already a broad and robust machine with many lateral offices divided between a considerable number of tiers of authority. In concept it mirrored the specialized and staggered structure of the whole of the city of Deneroth, embodying the perfect form and function of Laizij's greatest creation.

In practice, it introduced bloat and chaos into the mix forevermore.

I use "chaos" in its literal, mythological sense of undifferentiated formlessness, rather than in its sense of randomness, anarchy, and/or man-made lawlessness. The red tape and regulations in place, however arbitrary they may have been in origin under Laizij, are dutifully followed by all members of staff and faculty centuries later, especially in regards to the procedure used to determine where exactly one falls in the hierarchy relative to another individual. You might ask "why would one's position in the hierarchy be in question at any given point?" And that would be a perfectly valid question for which you would be fired, demoted even lower (and then tasked with finding your new ranking), or banished to the libraries in exile on "probation".

You would not be removed before you got the full answer, however. The faculty is quite proud of it.

Here at the University, every position held has a numerical value attached to it. These numbers range from 76 at the lowest, to 0 at the highest. You read that correctly- seniority increases as the number decreases, with various thresholds limiting or enabling an individual's privileges. The first guidelines for the scale were put in place by Laizij himself, and while the number range has remained unchanged in the centuries since, the means of navigating it have ballooned into a textbook's worth of formulae and rules for irregularities and exceptions. Because raw number overrides position within the spine, it is very possible for someone of quite low standing to achieve a very high rank through a combination of judicious school politicking, dumb luck, and bureaucratic blunder.

For example, a freshman student with zero involvement in any clubs or extracurricular activities possesses a 76, which entitles them to room and board, lavatory access, and basic utility and facility usage across campus within the weekly minimum curfew hours. A 5th-year senior who is head of their dormitory's division of the sporting club however, might have a number closer to 52. This would potentially place them above the ranking of their own nontenured professors starting at 55, assuming the student was still enrolled in entry-level classes of course. But if one such professor possessed the title of Committee Head, which is worth a score minimum of 40, then those scores would be averaged together to a respectable 47.5, which would enable them to shut down just about any student attempting to call a referendum on their course materials.

There are ten tiers of importance making up the "spine" of the University, if you will. Various departments confined to each hence radiate outward like "ribs". The topmost rank is made up of the deans of each supra-department, the composition of which is a constantly changing thing, as well as the head senior administrator. These individuals, alongside the biggest contributors to the funding of the University (including at least one representative of the family of the Stewards of Deneroth) make up a Board of the Directorate which modifies all member's rankings to a flat 0, or alters their average, depending on whether or not the Board has been in session in the past eleven days. The Directorate is the single highest decision-making body in the University, and each member enjoys approximately the same weight of importance, involvement, and irritability. Each semester, a vote is conducted by the Directorate to determine who besides the investors has earned the floating title of Inheritor of the Grand Scholar, which among other things possesses a rank of -1. Therefore, the highest seniority number achievable is -0.5 for a period of about sixteen weeks.

The next three tiers are the proper bureaucrats and administrators of the University, who oversee the valuing of titles and positions, the tenuring of professors according to those values, the allocation of funds not decided upon by the Directorate, the regulation of all clubs and committees and their rules, and other matters. Tier three is the level to which my infamous colleague Senior Editor Adelbramp belongs, as both the Provost of the Board for Historical Ordination and Associate Vice-Dean of Affairs for ITU Publishing. He currently sits at a lofty 12, but the latest rumor is that the venerable Chairman Lomeus Bielo of the Treasury is contemplating retirement¹, and acquiring the right position or title left behind in that vacuum would allow Adelbramp to ascend to 8, the threshold for becoming an audience member to the Directorate's meetings.

The next four tiers include the actual professors, instructors, teachers, and graduate students in the University's employ. This vast army of educators is at times even more severe and cutthroat than the realm of bureaucrats, which goes a way toward explaining how hidebound some individuals within these tiers may become- their very livelihood often depends on whether or not the theories they built their careers on remain unchallenged or not for the rest of the year. I am often derisive and hard on many of these men and women (and the occasional squirrel in a waistcoat), but I do not envy the razorwire on which they must balance while also battling for the respect of their walleyed students. Diverse fields dealing with every conceivable consideration or recreation of the sciences, as well as the study of humanity and its many arts, can be found espoused within the classrooms of this at times vexing, other times delightful mess of scholars.

The last tier is composed of the thousands-strong student body itself, but as many introspective pieces produced by students and alumni alike will suggest, a whole separate and intricate web of hierarchies and social dealings is imbricated within, hidden just beneath the surface. At the risk of being over-reductive, I will observe that most of these hierarchies derive from some permutation of clique, academic performance, gang club membership, and family status/background. The seemingly placid, anemic masses of nebbish university-goers is far more vigorous than one might expect.

"But Mr. Litte," you might ask once more, wonder and amazement still etched upon your face, "where is the tenth tier? You've only described nine of them."

Well, my observant reader, you are correct.

Officially there are ten tiers, but the proper tenth receives something of a False City treatment in day-to-day life. The lowest tier is occupied by any and all members of staff deemed to be menial in nature. This includes tenders to the campus grounds, physical laborers, janitorial and/or custodial staff (with the exception of the keepers of the Ivory Tower itself, who are in fact Tier Two administrators), and those who are employed from outside of the University proper work to in or manage various supply offices and commissaries, an exception to the general rule that "outsiders" are not permitted within the gates outside of designated hours. The lower level of Gatekeepers who perform the opening and closing rituals each day while being barred from University entry also occupy this tier, as do stationary adjuncts such as myself.²

All of this is a simplification of a system which must be articulated in several volumes rather than on a few sheets of parchment, of course. One or two nuggets of lore on the subject may have escaped my memory, but I hope I have still made an appreciable contribution to a topic which I have less than absolute fascination for.

¹ It was recently discovered that for the last decade, Bielo had been accidentally sending redeemable treasury checks to University business partners in triplicate, rather than sending records of the transaction down to the Office of Finances. Thus his "retirement" may in reality be mandated. Then again, someone probably should have started to ask questions four years before that, when he turned 89 years of age and began to become confused as to whether he worked at the ITU, or its cousin campus twice removed at Porylus Mons.

² Yes, this is why I am able to maintain the same approximate role and status within the campus despite being dematriculated and then unofficially expelled from the Humanoid Ecology program eight years ago. No, I will not go into this in any greater detail than I absolutely must.