Journal Entry 161
8th of Blossom, 1798 S.C.
Tlulanxu
It has taken me some time to adapt to the strangest sensations I have experienced in many, many weeks:
Solitude and calm.
I didn’t have a single second alone while in the Under of Gur Grehar. And while silence was not hard to come by in those tunnels, it was in no way calming. It varied between the stillness of the tomb and the protective stifling of all noise, during which imagination filled the surrounding dark with soundless pursuers.
Here, writing in the service hostel maintained for Legiors and Outriders between postings, there is peace in the silence of night. And if I listen very closely, I can hear the tread of the watch, the laughter of distant revelers, the sleepy bellow of a titandray in its paddock. Sounds of a city with no worries beyond those of the next day’s round of labor and living. Dunarra may be located upon the same globe as the Under, but they are truly different worlds. And although I welcome and revel in the comforts of Tlulanxu, I no longer feel fully at home in it. If I ever did.
My recent fellow travelers are, to the best of my knowledge, in Menara again. Our journey back was longer than the one north to Gur Grehar. First, we returned Zhuklu’a to her tribe (which would have naught to do with any of the rest of us). A week later, we bivouacked a few days while Umkhira rode to her own kin (who were no more forthcoming with an invitation). After that, we crossed the open lands that separate those wilder western reaches from the border of Connæar, which we paralleled. Our prudent intent—to lessen our chance of encountering troublesome creatures while also remaining as distant as possible from Khassant—was rewarded when we finally drew within sight of the Sea of Kudak and so, parted company.
I did not expect to be missing them, and yet, I do. And not merely in the way of those who have served together under largely benign conditions. It is because we shared living in constant peril, in the midst of enemies, with no hope of help except that which resided in each other.
Before parting, they promised to seek me here, particularly since I had the authority (barely) to give them a writ requesting passage aboard one of the Consentium’s routine advice packets that cycles between Tlulanxu and Menara. However, they have much to distract them in the free city, most especially the search for Elweyr’s parents. That search is apparently what brought S’ythreni into contact with him and Ahearn, but they did not share any further details with me. Frankly, I suspect that even Ahearn is not in full possession of them. But as he philosophically put it, “One never deals with aeostu without also dealing with their mysteries.”
I have my doubts they will avail themselves of the two-day sail from Menara to Tlulanxu, particularly since I felt obligated to emphasize how unlikely it was that we would share further travels. I am still an Outrider, and I am due for new orders, although those are late in arriving, actually. It is a welcome irregularity, but also perplexing.
However, it has afforded me the opportunity to spend time at the Archive and with Shaananca once again as I finish writing my observations of the Under in general and the urzhen in particular. Naturally, for those notes to be useful to subsequent researchers, I took pains to ensure that they built upon the older sources that I had studied (well, skimmed) before my travels.
Alas, that noble intent was stymied. But not by prior differences of opinion or theory or observation: I expected those discrepancies. Rather, the source of my frustration was—and remains—the disregard that researchers and archivists and scholars in general evince for each other’s work.
Specifically, I spent my first days back in the Archive Recondite attempting to puzzle out the proper naming scheme for the many beings that earlier texts refer to under the broad label “the Bent.” At the end, I realized I could not discover the authoritative and orderly taxonomy of them…because it doesn’t exist. They did not merely ignore each other’s researches but seemed to subtly relish invalidating it, however they could.
In the end, never have I been so grateful, and secretly proud, to have had the instinct (if not the foresight) to deflect all suggestions to consider a career as an archivist or docent. It seems entirely possible that even I could have become pedantic and hopelessly abstruse…
However, although my notes do expand what has been recorded regarding the Under, I am no closer to answering how, or from whence, the deepest dwelling Bent get the food with which to support their immense communities. Nor how it could be that Bent who are said to emerge from the Root of the World happen to speak the same language, worship the same gods, and share the same culture as those who were raised in a tribe. A logical surmise is that they are outcasts from still deeper communities, but if so, I am wholly ignorant of how far down the Underblack goes or how many layers it has. In short, are there always still deeper communities ready to arise just as the hordeing approaches? And wouldn’t each layer find it just that much harder to acquire minimal sustenance?
I cannot rule out the commonplace explanation for all of these quandaries: that it is all at the will of the gods. But would the gods regularly rebuild an entire species by the flagrant use of miracles? That seems to press far beyond the implicit limits they themselves have set upon the projection of their will into the world. Sacrists and nativists agree on few matters, but one such is that both peace among the gods and balance in the world depend upon their universal accord to limit the physical exercise of their power. Orthologues report how the deities promised each other to restrict mundane manifestations to finite and particular acts. Otherwise, even the passing of seasons and the spinning of the globe would be their playthings. Whether altered with serious intent or on a whim, the outcome is identical: natural law would not merely be provisional, it would be moot.
Turning away from my failure to make any definitive determinations regarding the Bent and the urzhen, I have shifted my attention to a new mystery that has increasingly pressed at me since Elweyr asserted that blugners, also known as ur gurur, cannot be one and the same as the race commonly called “giants.”
It began as a fairly casual curiosity, but my very first researches indicate that Elweyr is almost certainly right. Blugner are not merely considerably smaller, but are always noted as being misshapen, often with pronounced asymmetries of both head and body. They are comparatively slow, lacking agility, and have markedly less manual dexterity than any other biped. Their reproduction is extremely different from urzhen and the preeminence of Sister Sows in their groups suggests that females are at least as socially powerful as males, probably more so.
Giants are entirely different. They always dwell above ground, usually in large caves in the sides of hills or cliffs, and if not, then in deep forests. They purportedly prefer hostile climates and regions and are said to surround themselves with Bent and other servitors who routinely patrol their domains in exchange for the decisive power they bring to battlefields. Both reclusive and capricious, they remain quiescent for years and then suddenly fall upon communities, either in groups or alone, but always insatiably hungry. They stand twice as high as the tallest human, and whereas blugner are slow and cumbersome, giants recall humans in their speed and manual dexterity. However, they cannot simply be large humans, because if I were expanded to twice my height and five or six times my weight, I could not even stand, let alone function: it would be a physical impossibility.
During my years at the Archive, I spent considerable time assisting both physicians and scholars of fauna and flora with their researches. As a result, I learned a reasonable amount regarding certain basic principles of physiology. For instance, even with a heart the size of a bucket, a proportionally larger human would likely collapse due to inadequate circulation of blood. While there are many immense mammals, all evince multiple adaptations to meet the circulatory requirements imposed by both their size and weight.
Conversely, according to the archivists who specialize in great fauna, simply expanding a human form to fifteen feet in height does not provide the room nor proper shape to incorporate such adaptations. Likewise, they see no way that the blood may perfuse and then return quickly enough from the small capillaries that service the digits of distant extremities, particularly toes. Consequently, most scholars advanced one of only two answers: that giants are simply creatures of myth or that they enjoy the intervention of deity.
A further perplexity is that in the older texts, they are referred to as belonging to that group of creatures known by the label direkynde. It is a mysterious nomenclature that I might never have encountered were it not for the august and elderly Saqqaruan scholar who took an interest in me when I was an assistant at the Archive, now six years past. I have since learned that he is none other than Aji Kayo, the First Scholar of the Orchid Throne. Also, by a stroke of singular luck, he returned to Tlulanxu just a few weeks ago so that he might expand the research for his magnus opus, about which he is infamously close-lipped.
In hearing his name again, I recalled his exhortations to explore a tome that touched upon the direkynde, the accounts of which are said to be even more disparate and problematic than those of urzhen and giants. Perhaps I shall dip into them tomorrow.