Fragment of parchment found in Kunlun Shan
Our time is coming to an end. All things end, and this should not grieve us, but it does. We grieve not for ourselves but for Asiana. Once the last Sahiru is gone from this world, the last living link with the Araini will break. The world will forget us. But it should not forget the Araini. It should not stop hoping for their return.
We remember the Araini, even though they left before we were born. For we have the memories of the first Sahiru, just as we have the memories of the last one.
The first Sahiru was Vamika the Wise. She was part of the trade delegation sent to negotiate with the Araini when they landed in their vast, elegant ships on the Uzbek Plains. Like small planets they were, those leviathans. And now only one is left. It sits like an iceberg on top of a mountain, revealing a fraction of what it hides. There we will go when our work is done, as our elders have gone before us.
Vamika the Wise stayed with the Araini in one of their ships to learn their language. It is said that her goal was not wisdom, but the securing of a better deal for her own people. But the longer she stayed, and the more she learned, the less inclined she was to leave. The day came at last when she mastered the language and became other-human, for she saw then our thousand-year history unfurl before her like a scroll. She saw humanity teeter on the brink of greatness and misery, death and resurrection. She went into silence, knowing the terrible power of words. But the Araini sent her from their ship, bidding her work to the best of her abilities. Knowing the arc of history does not release us from the pain of living it.
The Araini made three kinds of other-humans: Those who could bond with kalishium, so they could communicate their thoughts, even if they could not grasp the language of the Ones. Those who could, like the Araini themselves, change shape and heal wounds. The latter abilities were greatly coveted, and if not for the fact that most humans could not bear the pain of transformation, there would have been a stampede to their ships. Still, several hundred were successfully transformed by the Araini over the years, and they formed an important link between the Ones and the natural world of Asiana.
But of us, the Sahirus, there will only ever be twenty-six. Very few can learn the language of the Araini. Fewer still can learn it and stay sane. And of our precious number, twelve died during the Great War alone, in an unprovoked and cowardly strike on our people.
Few though we are in number, we have played our part. Did we not build the world where all other-humans may meet as equals? The world that will come to be called many names in many tongues, but which we will always call Anant-kal, the world beyond time. At the height of our powers, we used to meet our compatriots every new moon, gathering in a large hall in a beautiful city of gleaming towers and white domes—a mirror of the city that flourished on an island state in the Dead Sea.
The real city was ravaged by war, the island sunk under the ocean. But the one in Anant-kal will outlast us all.
Our end draws close.
The last Sahiru is yet to be born. But we have seen him cross the desert and climb the mountain in search of our monastery. He will ride through a firestorm and crawl over icy stones to reach us. Bleeding from wounds unseen, stumbling in the dark of his mind—that is how we will find him.
We must go forward to await him. We must teach him what we can, even though he will have little time with us. It will have to be enough. He is the key that will release us from our earthbound prison.
This is the Araini’s gift to us—to know and to remember past and future, within the living memory of our sect. A thousand years of history, and it will die with us. None will find these scrolls. They will crumble to dust, and our monastery will fall to ruin. It will be the end of an age, and we cannot see what comes after.
Yet we leave these seeds of knowledge in the hope that we are wrong. In the hope that some day, they will fall into the right hands and spread the light of truth.