Profiles in History: From Other Shores

Wherever you go on Auberean, you encounter a variety of wildlife ... some of it very wild indeed, and much of it intelligent or semi-intelligent. Their number and variety of these beings is explained in part by the mutagenic effects of the Black Breath during the Fifth Sending of Darkness, and in part by the fact that their progenitors came from several different planets in the first place. This was made possible by the rediscovery and development by Asheron of the ancient Falatacot skills of planar magic, which allow the creation of portals into other parts of this world, or other worlds altogether.

The original intelligent inhabitants of Auberean appear to have been the Slithis, once the size of mountains, called "the Old Ones" and venerated by the Falatacot. We see them now in a shrunken state, scarcely the size of lily-ponds and thrusting a few tentacles into the air, and we see their Spawn drifting through the air. No Spawn were observed before the Cataclysm, which gives rise to many questions without answers about the Slithis' breeding cycle.

The gromnatross and its juvenile stages the gromnie and gromnaroc may also have been native to Auberean, but I am inclined to doubt it. The Yalain considered them emissaries of the Light, and when they departed from this world it was a judgment upon mortal wickedness. Maila, mother of Asheron, was told by her mother that "during the Black Rains, the gromnatross had flown away into the stars, for there was no place on the face of the world which knew happiness." The Tale of Years of Aerlinthe said "they ascend[ed], disappearing into the heavens." Now consider that just before the gromnie-kin returned to Auberean, the strange lights upon the dark limb of the moon Alb'arel reappeared, that were last seen during the Fourth Sending. Perhaps the gromnatross did indeed come from the stars, or from Alb'arel, not through portalspace but flying on their broad wings through air and airless space. Perhaps it is from there that they have returned.

The Virindi, on the other hand, are native to portalspace, and it was not until some time after the Sundering that they touched down on Auberean and decided (for reasons best known to themselves) to establish a foothold here. Old records hint that at some point they fought Asheron over something, and lost, but give no date. The color purple is associated with them, which is why so many portals are that color, and in PY 12, as the Virindi prepared to attack the Isparians, the first sign of trouble was a drift of purple mist across the sky. Of old they were a single mind, into which juveniles are recruited on maturity. Contact with mortals has loosened their strict uniformity somewhat, which may not be a good thing, since a Virindi so tainted with mortal individuality as to develop a personality and a name is an insane Virindi.

The Empyreans, according to old records found by the Aluvian explorer Alatar Locke, "arrived here many thousands of years ago, with a singular purpose. What that purpose is, even I can only hazard an unfounded guess. What is clear, however, is that they forgot this purpose over the long ages." What we do not know is whether the various Empyrean nations--the Falatacot, the Haebrous, the Dericost, and the Yalain--all arrived together, or in separate waves, or descended one from the other. Nor do we know by what means they arrived, whether by portal or by some kind of space-traversing vessel. Recent discoveries have indicated that the Falatacot did not have the power of planar magic until they were taught it by the last Slithis Watcher, some using it to escape Auberean altogether (the True Falatacot are their descendants), and some to visit other worlds such as Bur.

We know that the Reapers and Crones (and their hardier varieties, the Thralls and Felsisters) are the male and female forms of the same species. (Slay Mad Moiren on Arramora, and her brother Helthwick the Hysteric will come and have words with you.) The ancient Felsister Old Herrigar, on the north shore of the Foundry, claims descent from the crew of the ship that carried the three Falatacot witches to their meeting with Geraine. It would seem, therefore, that these beings have served the Falatacot for a very long time. No records tell their origin, but considering how the Falatacot were willing to twist and change the flesh and the genes even of their own people to suit their purposes (as with the Sclavi), perhaps these lanky, bony creatures are descended from an existing underclass of Falatacot Empyreans. Or perhaps they were warped by the forces unleashed by the First Sending of Darkness, and made use of by the practical Falatacot. Thornlings, who so commonly live in company with the Reapers and Crones, are not related to them: they are the descendants of forest-dwelling Drudges who were grafted with tree tissue by the Black Breath during the Fifth Sending.

The Falatacot found several intelligent or semi-intelligent races on Bur: the Burun themselves, the Moar (whom they altered in various ways, making them Moarsmen), and the Sclavi, whom they fused with the genetic material of their own people to create the Sclavi known before the Cataclysm, with human shapes but reptilian heads and hoods. The Falatacot brought the Moarsmen to Auberean to guard their temples, and the Sclavi to serve them, but the Burun did not arrive until PY 15, when Nuhmudira's use of a Falatacot ritus to defeat the One Olthoi Queen re-opened the portals to Bur. The Burun caused swamps to spring up in the trackless sands of the A'mun desert, and from there they were recruited by Geraine to serve the Gurog, to rule the Drudges, and to be the Nemeses of the Tumerok. The Moarsmen, little changed, remain to this day in the Vesayen Islands. The fate of the Sclavi is the strangest of all: blended as they were from the genes of two different species, they diverged under the influence of the Black Breath into two different species again. The Sclavi we know today are less humanoid, more serpentine, retaining only two small arms with which they construct weapons and armor. Their cousins, the Mimbu, have retained the humanoid form but taken on an appearance more amphibian than reptilian, and they love to live near water.

We do not have a name for the world from which the Olthoi came, along with their natural enemies the Grievvers and the many forms of fungi which appear to make up the rest of their ecosystem. Asheron discovered the portal into that world; Gaerlan insisted upon reopening it; and the Olthoi poured into Auberean and overwhelmed the Empyreans until Asheron cast the Sundering that sent them all away to sleep in portalspace.

Even before the Sundering, when Asheron's studies had regained some of the techniques of planar magic, Empyreans visited the double planet Ezheret-Hazahtu. This system consisted of the gas giant Hazahtu and the watery world Ezheret, circling a common center of gravity somewhere inside Hazahtu. After the Sundering portals opened at random into Ezheret, letting through no fewer than four intelligent species: the Tonk (or Tumerok as we have also been called), the Drudges, the Banderlings, and the Mosswarts. We do not have a date for this arrival, but during Elysa's reign there were still a few Tonk living on Palenqual who remembered the journey. The Drudges, at first pale, wide-eyed creatures used to living underground and in darkness, quickly adapted to their new surroundings and, modified by Virindi techniques, became fearsome indeed. A tribe of Tonk, the Hea, were similarly modified by the Virindi, who flattened their faces, lopped off their tails, caused them to stand upright like Humans, and colored them a deep Virindi purple. There was intermittent war between the Hea and the unmodified Aun xuta, till during the Golden Age Aun Aulatah, once the pupil of Celdiseth, reunited the two tribes into the Shi tribe to which we all belong today. All modern Tonk follow the original Aun body plan. The Banderlings and Mosswarts continue to live in a primitive style, in caves or simple huts, fighting one another at times over choice territory.

The Lugians came from a world called Tuu, of which sadly we know very little, except that it must have been a cold world, for the Lugians on Dereth quickly settled on the mountainous plateau that later became the central craton of Linvak Massif, a land of sparkling snows, sparse hardy vegetation, and crisp cold airs.

After all these other beings had come and settled on Auberean, another set of portals opened, haphazardly, on a world called Ispar. The Isparians, or Humans as they are now called, came in four waves of settlement as portals appeared and disappeared in their homelands: the pale-skinned Aluvians, the dark Gharu'ndim, the golden Sho, and the blue Viamontians. They brought with them some of their domestic animals--the chicken, the cow, the rabbit--and a few wild ones, such as the Ursuin. Chickens have mutated into Darkenfowl, cows and Ursuin have disappeared, rabbits remain; and ten generations in the Shelters have mingled the Isparian Heritages into one robust hybrid species.

Everyone knows, of course, that reedsharks are not intelligent, but I mention them for a reason. They clearly came from some other world than the ones already mentioned (named or otherwise), for they have a three-limbed body plan unlike that of any other species. But before the Cataclysm there was another tripedal species loose on Dereth, the Mattekar. Massive, long-horned, covered with a rich furry pelt, it roamed the wilds on three powerful hooves and attacked on sight. Any Mattekar pelt could be made into light, tough armor, and the largest of the breed, the legendary Hoary Mattekar, yielded a pelt of surpassing quality that could be made into a robe imbued with protective spells. The Mattekar appears to be extinct: no one has seen one since we left the Shelters. But there survives a curious record made by a Virindi named Aerbax. That he had a name, and a plan and purpose of his own, is enough to demonstrate that he was insane. He experimented with creatures of various kinds, seeking useful variations that would serve his plans. And at one point he took a few Mattekars and exposed them to an energy source, and the Mattekars changed strangely. "The hind leg withered and crumbled to dust. The front legs twisted and obtained a new joining. The torso shifted upward as the spine structure straightened upward. Fur withered and fell off in clumps and patches. The flesh of the face twisted and the horns of the beast grew longer and more twisted. It adopted a new stance and began to communicate through grunts and chortles. Arms sprung from the center of the torso and the implant allowed for the creature to harness mana." The Mattekars, in fact, became creatures very like Gurogs. But Aerbax destroyed the creatures, lest a representative of the Singularity find them and realize what the rogue Virindi had been up to. Those unfortunate Mattekars cannot have been the ancestors of the Gurogs. Still, the Goarata fragments tell us that the Gurog came to Dereth very late in history. Perhaps some force acted upon other Mattekars as Aerbax's energy source had done. But it cannot have been the Black Breath, for Legros' Treatise says that Asheron taught the Gurogs magic as Kresovus taught them smithcraft; this has to have been before the Fifth Sending. Perhaps someday other documents will surface that will tell us the origin of the Gurogs.

We also know nothing about the origin of the Monouga. They have the common four-limbed bipedal body plan, but instead of the usual two eyes, set horizontally, they have three set vertically. They wear clothes, make weapons, and construct crude dwellings, and we must consider them at least marginally intelligent; but we have never been able to communicate with them.

Similarly, the Scraven build weapons, houses, and interesting decorative structures whose purpose we can only guess at (if you hear an archaeologist say "ritual object," you know he means "I have no idea what that is for"). Some of them cast powerful spells. One or two have even spoken to explorers on Knorr, usually to the explorers' chagrin. We know they are intelligent (as in "How dare that sneaky [bleep] be smarter than I am!"), but we still don't know where they came from.

Finally, I must mention the unfortunate Kallikan, who came to Knorr sometime between the Sundering and the establishment by the Brotherhood of Shapers of the Knorr portal. We do not know the name of their world, and now they cannot tell us. They were a burrowing race, but are now found mostly above ground. They chewed their way through the soft stone of their own world, making tunnels and caverns, until they came across a natural cavern with a floor of purple stone. They chewed through this and uncovered a portal, through which they fell, never to return. But the geology of Knorr was not suited to them: either it was too hard to chew, or so soft that it would not hold its shape. Nor would it provide proper exercise to their jaws, and here is the tragedy of the Kallikan: without the exercise provided by constant chewing, the blood flow to their brains was impaired, and they have lost their intelligence. They run mad across Knorr, biting and gnawing everything they meet--including you, if you are not quick enough. If you meet a Kallikan, you will probably have to kill it, lest it kill you; but kill it with respect. Once it was a being like you.