| |
Ylandre, in the 825th year of the Common Age
The scribe droned on, enumerating the results of the latest census. It made for tedious listening and never more so when one wished to engage in an activity that required some physical mobility. Particularly on a fine day when the outdoors were more enticing than the confines of the royal study. Indeed, it was at the tip of the Ardan of Ylandre’s tongue to tell the scribe to stop and hand the report over to the chief advisor.
But one piece of information revived his flagging attention and he sharply looked up from the phantom tracings he had been making with his finger on the tabletop. Joram Essendri stared at the oblivious scribe who continued reading in his high-pitched monotone.
“Are you certain you read those last figures correctly?” he asked.
The Deir looked up to find his sovereign regarding him with unnerving intensity. He adjusted his nose spectacles and perused the numbers on the long piece of parchment.
“Yes, Your Majesty. It’s clearly stated here. Females comprise one in a hundred of the total urban populace. The percentages are even lower in the rural areas. Furthermore, the majority are past the middle years of their kind. Also, the number of females born per year in the last decade hasn’t changed. One in every thousand births in the cities; almost nonexistent outside the urban centers.”
Joram glanced across the table at his chief advisor who nodded almost imperceptibly. With a peremptory gesture, he dismissed the scribe. Leaning back in his chair, he tapped the table with his fingers.
“One in a hundred,” he murmured. “How long do you think before they vanish, Senen?”
“Considering that there has been no increase in the births of female gelra, I’d venture to guess that day isn’t far off,” the advisor said. “It may come to pass during your grandson’s reign.”
Joram whistled under his breath. “I hadn’t thought it would happen so soon. The Inception wasn’t all that long ago.”
“Yes, my liege, but as our foresires didn’t care to breed them or with them, it isn’t surprising that they’re dying out.”
“Dying out,” the Ardan repeated under his breath.
Hearing laughter from outside, he rose from his seat and strode to the window overlooking the gardens. He gazed down at the wide expanse of lawn where several youngsters were chasing each other about, the great length of a Deiran childhood ensuring many more years of carefree innocence for them. His eyes were drawn to the elderly female who watched over them. The sole remaining female in royal service. When she went the way of her predecessors there would be none of her kind left in the Citadel.
The gelra did not possess either the longevity or slow aging of the Deira. They seldom attained even half the average Deiran lifespan of a hundred and fifty, an age surpassed by about a score of years by those whose blood was least diluted by breeding with Aisen’s indigenous folk.
“An entire race soon to disappear forever,” Joram muttered. He glanced at Senen as the latter came to his side.
“It’s not only the gelra who have all but departed from this world, Joram-dyhar,” the advisor gently reminded him. “We ourselves are no longer the same as our ancestors. In that sense, they are already a vanished race.”
Joram looked down once more at the children. They were distinctly male in appearance. Even to his untrained eyes, he could tell none would grow up looking anything like their forebears. Certainly nothing like the Deir who approached them with a tray of sweets. That one was obviously a throwback to a time when the evolving Deira still inherited the full androgyny of their ancestral race.
It was there in the softer cast of his features, the slenderness of his shoulders, the faint swell of his hips and the slight but unmistakable effeminacy of his gait. But he could not be mistaken for a female. And as time ground on, the number of Deira who still bore some passing resemblance to their primogenitors would diminish further.
Joram sighed. “I wonder, did our forebears foresee the sweeping changes in our kind? Would they have proceeded had they known?”
“I imagine they were more engrossed in ensuring the survival of our race,” Senen said.
“And survive we have. And flourished.” Joram shook his head. “Ah, I don’t know what’s come over me. I’m not given to foolish sentimentality.”
“It’s neither foolish nor sentimental to ponder the fate of one’s people.”
“Then what is it?”
“Solicitude. A trait well worth emulating.”
A child broke away from the group and now ordered them around with the authority of one born to it. Joram regarded his eldest son and heir with equal parts pride and melancholy.
“Will those who follow remember how we came to be?” he mused. “Or will they relegate our earliest histories to rumor and legend?”
“If they remain devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, I see no reason why they would forget our origins. What’s of more concern to me is that we’re becoming a people divided.”
Joram frowned. “I hear some university students coined terms to point up this division.”
The counsellor nodded. “And all of them scions of High Houses. They’ve taken to calling themselves enyra while naming the less racially pure students sedyra.”
Joram stared at him. True Bloods and Half Bloods? “They think highly of themselves.”
“They take pride in their families having retained the gift of our forebears in large measure. Which admittedly is no longer true of a goodly number of Deira. It’s become a mark of honor to bear the blood as they put it.”
The Ardan scoffed. “They speak of honor yet they have no qualms about using the gift to their advantage.”
Senen shrugged. “They who hold the power rule the world. Had your family not been inordinately gifted, think you the Essendris could have tamed Ylandre and owned it all these centuries? Yet few would claim that your House has used its power to its sole advantage. This realm has greatly benefited from the stability your line’s continuity provides. Not all who wield the gift do so with base intentions, Dyhar.”
Joram fell into thoughtful silence. After a while, he faintly smiled. “My thanks, old friend,” he murmured. “I hope your faith in us will continue to prove sound.”
The counsellor departed to preside over another meeting. Joram continued to watch the children play, his eyes straying ever so often to their aged caregiver. An era was coming to a close, he thought, but few seemed to note it.
Joram turned on his heel, strode to his writing desk, and took out his journal. He sat down and opened the thick tome to a blank page. He selected a sharpened quill, dipped it in the inkwell, and began to write.
As he finished writing each page, he lifted the small bowl of fine sand in the corner of the desk and poured its contents onto the parchment. Once the excess ink was absorbed, he tipped the sand back into the bowl.
The Ardan reread the entry. What he set down barely filled three pages but he felt satisfied. When he passed on, his journal would become grist for study of the minutiae of his reign. If what he had written helped spur later generations to keep the memories of their people’s past alive, he would have achieved something whose import would last through the ages.
––––––––
They came in that time before written history in this world. A wondrous race of great daring and spirit. It seemed their fate to suffer extinction. They defied fate instead and won their battle to prevail against impossible odds.
The ancient scribes wrote that their world began to die. The climate slowly changed. An unending winter set in, killing plants and beasts alike. They realized that sickness and starvation would destroy them if the cold did not. And so the sharpest, most farseeing minds amongst them gathered together and strove to discover a way for their people to escape oblivion.
They were masters of the mind arts. They harnessed mental energy to heal or wound, to save or slay. They could communicate without speaking though they never forsook speech. Language was important to them for they were a highly cultured people who revered their teachers as much as their soldiers.
Yet they were first and foremost a warrior race. Their history was marked by conflict, the extension of borders routinely realized through the use of force and the attainment of power and property more oft than not achieved by conquest. Fortunately, by the time of the Great Frost, they had learned to eschew war for the most part and live in harmonious coexistence.
It was this general peace, this conscious will to cooperate, that won them salvation. They were learned enough to surmise that they were not alone in existence. At the behest of their scholars and leaders, they joined their consciousness in a shared endeavor to discover if there was another place to which they could relocate their race.
They saw it in that collective mind’s eye. A world similar to theirs that appeared untouched by sentient life. It held the hope of survival and promised a future for their kind. And so they came together on the last continent that could still sustain them. And for the second time, and likely the last, they joined minds, each and every survivor of that deadly winter. They harnessed the energy generated by that joining and channeled it into the creation of a corridor by which they could pass through the void to their new home. That was how they came to the world they named Aisen.
It was only upon their advent that they discovered the presence of a nascent homegrown race alike to theirs in appearance and intelligence. They called themselves the gelra.
The colonists had to make a choice. They were numerous, long-lived and strong. And they were possessed of a power with which they could easily overcome and supplant the gelra. But these ancient ones were wise. They comprehended that the indigenous population possessed what was needed to thrive in this strange new world. They chose assimilation over extermination, breeding with the native inhabitants over many generations until the distinctions between them blurred and finally disappeared.
We are the progeny of that wondrous era. The children of the Inception. A people hewn from the threat of extinction, the harshness of survival, the hardships of wholesale migration, the relentless toil of civilization started anew and the inevitable adversities of evolution. A mercurial race, as capable of bringing down empires as raising them, undertaking both with equal fervor. We are the result of the journey upon which those long ago gallant hearts embarked in a desperate bid to preserve their kind.
They were the Naere and we, the Deira of Aisen, are forever indebted to they who were our forebears, sprung from a world that no longer exists except in blessed memory.
Joram Essendri
Rikara, Ylandre
Year 825 C.A.