So, it was a difficult balance — a veritable artform he relished in the mastery of: encouraging the development of strong minded individuals, while keeping the herd manageable. In all the decades of his work, he had only had a few close-calls he had not anticipated, but nothing that he could not overcome, or gave him pause to fear. Superior beings such as his society did not hold room for fear, except for one shared fear that they all worked in communion to avoid: oblivion.
The first of his kind had been granted a vision: a society without the shackles of gods to corral them, or the crutches of the arcane to weaken and addict them. A civilization whose collective hubris was forged, not into the blunt cuddle of lesser species, but a finely honed edge, able to cut and carve away the diseased and decrepit aspects of a people, leaving only the best to carry on.
To that end, he established the means of change, and in the process unlocked the potential of the mind. Lower life forms could only hope to channel the power of the energies and threads of existence, whether as an arcanist or a higher-being’s conduit. Gods, would-be-gods, devils, and archfey played a cruel game with those who pledged themselves, granting power they could yank back on a whim to lower creatures too blind and stupid to realize the danger and vulnerability of such dependence. Arcanists needed precious materials mined or grown, and could be shut-off from their source by a clever strategist. A Galathyrie, as his kind called themselves, had no such weakness.
For this reason above all were they feared by those who truly understood them. Others feared them for baser, inaccurate reasons, or were too stupid to fear them at all. Galathytie didn’t care: they were mortal beings, yes, but were themselves gods by comparison to the other creatures which walked the planes. One was formidable, but as a united community they had been known to crush continents, even worlds. This one was no different: a conquered globe, reshaped to house the Galathyrie’s livestock, complete with their petty social orders and means of sustenance. Even vermin was carefully and deliberately included in the new environment to provide meats to these crawling simpletons, as well as the grains and fruits they managed to farm for themselves.
Ah, that one there, Gannix thought to himself as he watched in the shade of a tree. A large, heavily muscled specimen was being cowed by the scolding bellows of a slighter individual. Behaviorally immature, it seemed to have interrupted its cleverer counterpart in something seemingly important, and now was being berated in their bestial tongue. The herdsman continued to watch, observing and listening as the outrage of onlookers built, and the burly creature hung his head.
Strange that these cattle-beasts would consider the largest of their prey-animals the prize to be hunted and killed, when even among their own kind brawn clearly had only limited uses. A wonder they don’t prey on their own kind, Gannix thought to himself. He knew among his fellow herdsman there were stories of such canabalism, but he’d never witnessed it himself. He wasn’t sure he could stomach seeing such completely animalistic behavior exhibited by his food. Participating creatures would likely have to be put down, so as to prevent the rest from learning such bad habits.
With the spat now complete, the chastised creature turned — rather quickly and eager to please — to carry out it’s better’s orders as the rest of the community slowly scattered back to their previous occupations, and the intelligent one resumed his work, albeit setback. With that one’s image now set in his mind, Gannix moved on to the next den. His feet levitated off the ground, and he leaned slightly in the direction he wished to go, silently drifting forward. He left in complete confidence that he knew which member of the clan he claim, and that his presence had remained undetected by any of these primatives.
Ice-blue eyes watched with keen, intense, even tear-inducing awareness of his periphery. The floating culler held in the center of his field of view, he kept his attention elsewhere: a trick he’d been taught to avoid the detection of the Galathyrie. To keep one’s mental energies spent on your surroundings, Blane, his mentor had said, is to shield from the Galathyrie your awareness that they exist, or that they are present. If they realize your knowledge and potential in such things, you will become a prized target for them.
Zed had always been a nay-sayer of the Galathyrie threat, despite being the village’s leading engineer. He preferred things he could see, taste, smell, hear, and measure. He would have denied the mind if his weren’t so gifted with figures and angles. But a race of boogie-men who could defy gravity, make themselves invisible, or crush the mind? Such were the ghost stories of children, along with hags who ate disobedient whiners, or angels who wielded blades of flame.
Blane could all too easily guess that Zed’s display as a leader of their society had marked him as likely prey, next time a sudden “wasting” illness struck the village. First, victims would become lethargic, as if their energy had been sapped by a fever, but without any such symptom. Within minutes, they would be laying on the ground or leaning against a wall, drooling on themselves and completely unresponsive. It was said in olden times villagers would be carried outside the village to prevent an infection from spreading, and the bodies would waste away to dust by morning. Nowadays the victims were quarantined within the village hospice, with a similar result but lacking the supposed dust. They were simply gone.
Methuselah, Blane’s mentor & Zed’s predecessor as village leader, had awakened him as a boy one night from an especially deep sleep with urgent word to follow him silently to the hospice. He witnessed with a child’s horror as grey-skinned beings with beards that matched their flesh, flowing cloaks, and impossibly long fingers stepped out of what looked like a tear in the air, picked up the wasting victims, and carried them back through the hole. As they were about to complete their eerie abduction, one turned to look in their direction as though seeing them. He had fallen unconscious a moment later, by his elder’s doing he learned, but what he saw in that terrifying instant remained frozen in his mind for years afterward.
What he had initially perceived as a beard that strangely matched the tones of their skin uncoiled in pseudopods with strange circles underneath. These extended toward him and Methuselah, revealing the hitherto hidden mouth and chin. The latter seemed to almost not exist, replaced by an opening from what would have been the upper lip to what should have been the voice box. Instead, the mouth seemed to be lined with pointed teeth, and the tongue resembled more of a fleshy mandible with razor-sharp teeth at the tip for either eviscerating flesh or sawing through bone.
The next morning, Blane started to train in the skills Methuselah had been secretly developing. He learned that his mentor had stumbled upon his own abilities and learned to master them before the Galathyrie had discovered him. As he honed his mind, he realized he could also sense whether others in the village had sensitivity such powers, though often too late to prevent selection and culling by their unseen keepers. When Blane began to exhibit signs, he took him in to start learning mental exercises and tricks that would hide his truest mind from their predators. Finally, the aging man had succeeded in saving someone.
Methuselah died some years later, struck by lightening while helping fellow villagers gather in their flocks and herds before the storm’s full rage could be unleashed upon them. His neighbors said it was depression and grief from the loss of his adopted father, but in reality, Blane had taken to hiding out in and around the village in an attempt to avoid and observe the Galathyrie whenever they came. He was becoming fairly certain he knew their routine and schedules for checking on his people, and for triggering the “wasting disease,” which he had since learned was them merely incapacitating victims before sprinting them away for purposes unknown. With faces like theirs, his worst nightmares were as good as anyone else’s guess.
Now that the most recent “guest” had departed, he came out of his hiding spot, slipped a loaf of bread from the baker’s sill, and stalked his way to his hovel — the delapidated, empty shack of Methuselah, said to be haunted according to children and housewives, but scheduled by Zed to be torn down as soon as harvest was over, so it could be either rebuilt for any new families that the winter may produce, or tilled into a plot. Blane had managed to postpone the repurposing or destruction of the place this long, but he knew his time was running out.
With his precious abilities Methuselah had refined and the exercises he’d instilled, Blane felt the usual consciousnesses around him. The huntsman’s wife next door was frustrated, again. Her envious thoughts of the farmer across the village were loud, yet again, and he had to steel himself from blushing at her raunchy imaginings spawned by anger toward her husband. The woman was a nightmare. Then again, her man’s brooding wasn’t much happier.
As he entered the door, however, he felt an unfamiliar mind. Curious, impressed, sad, regretful, hopeful; such strange emotions coming from a mind that felt— no, it couldn’t be! A Galathyrie, here? In dead Methuselah’s sacred house?
”Calm yourself,” he heard a voice say in his mind. It seemed apologetic, even afraid for having intruded. The consciousness, still on the other side of a wall, seemed to turn to address him as if the barrier didn’t even exist. “I am not here to kill or kidnap. I am not even here to do anything on behalf of my kind of any sort.” The voice spoke telepathically with a sort of reticence. It wasn’t condescension that it expected its words to go unheeded. It seemed a genuine regret, as though it craved but did not expect forgiveness for a great, unspoken atrocity.
One of the tricks Methuselah had taught him was how to wall-off his mind, dividing it even against itself. It had been difficult to learn, and he typically only did two divisions, but in this moment he split off as many as he could manage. Each portion took a single emotion and ran with it. Part of himself went into an unbridled rage; his fists shook, barely controlled. Part of himself flew fully into panic, wanting to run as far and fast as possible; his feet and knees tensed like springs to bound away in a moment. A third part let these two bellow and scream, hiding and studying in eerie calm the “other.”
”Where did you learn such a trick?” the voice asked, genuinely impressed and honestly intimidated. “My kind learn that the same way yours learns to crawl,” it observed, almost cooing like to a frightened beast to calm it as it did so. It seemed to realize its town as soon as he had, and retracted back through the wall, once again as if apologizing. “It... It is good to see my kind is not alone in these abilities, that their superiority over yours is feigned, artificial. It would humble them to learn this,” it explained. Then, in deep sorrow, it added, “unfortunate that their pride and hubris would never allow such a heritical reality to exist.”
With that, the figure belonging to the strange consciousness drifted through the leather curtain hung in the doorway into the room beyond the wall. Blane’s eyes widened with both fury and terror to behold a being that had haunted his nightmares, his village, and his steps for years. Every fiber of his being wanted to tackle this Galathyrie to the ground, grab the nearest blunt object and turn the grey skin into a bloody smear on the floor.
”Your hatred is not unfounded,” the creature commented, as though able to read his emotions. Of course he could — Galathyrie are telepathic creatures. The realization he was practically shouting at his unexpected guest caused him to pause and collect himself, realizing in that moment that the creature’s eyes did not seem haughty like the rest of his kind, or even self-assured. Instead, the initial emotions he’d sensed of sadness & regret seemed to weigh just as heavily on the other’s face as his own did on his.
The figure met his gaze for a brief moment, then blinked and looked away. Was that self-loathing he detected in the Galathyrie’s eyes? With a mental sigh, they collected themselves and glanced back. “My kind was not so different, once,” he said as his form seemed to waver and take on an appearance similar to Blane’s people. “The changes to our flesh was supposedly because we were superior. We’re nothing but slavers. Our minds aren’t so different, either; just our goals and perspectives. Even then, your kind does not deserve to be kept as cattle.”
As the illusion shifted through the different forms Galathyrie had taken in the past, ending with the being as he stood, an uneasy silence fell between them as Blane took it all in. “Aren’t you going to ask any questions?” the figure finally asked, still speaking only telepathically.
Blane shook his head and looked around, realizing he had barely moved or breathed since realizing he was not alone in his mentor’s “abandoned” shack; since realizing a Galathyrie was in the room within the hut he used to plan and practice. This seemingly contrite intruder knew everything.
”Why?” he asked aloud in a whisper, then telepathically in a bolder demand.
”Here? Now? Because I am an Alhoon, a Galathyrie who practices magic. When I am discovered, I will be outcast. However, unlike what they will assume, it was not my curiosity about magic that led me to accept it. It was... This is difficult to explain, even if you were my kind and knew what our people are like,” the stranger said apologetically.
Blane’s rage presses to the forefront, suppressing his patience for lengthy conversations: “try me.” The frustrated determination on his face carried over to his telepathic demand, and seemed to hit the Galathyrie in the chest with weight.
”We eschew gods and such as pompous snobs, simply put. We have something of an equivalent, called by outsiders as The Elder Brain. At it’s most basic it’s a repository of all our past members and their life-experiences. But it’s also alive, powerful, and for intents and purposes a ‘god.’ Except that an older, more powerful, actual god spoke to me. He said my people are not a lost cause. We are everything wrong with the world he fashioned, and stand against everything he is, but even his wrath for our crimes against him, his world — even you and your people — is not so great that he won’t accept us. We just have to reject our self-made god, the Elder Brain.” The figure paused to let Blane absorb this, as well.
”You need to understand; Galathyrie don’t have gods and religions. When we die, our minds are melded with the millions more already part of the Elder Brain. Without that, we cease to exist: oblivion. No memory of us? We never were even born. But this one, the Timeless Emperor he’s called, has said that despite everything I and my people have done against him, he will accept me, as long as I reject the Elder Brain. As long as I reject everything I have ever strived for in this life, every hopes to achieve with or for the collective consciousness of my kind, he will accept me. And he will accept any others of my kind who do the same. To never hear the beautiful song of community amongst my kind, to throw away eternity and embrace oblivion,” the figure explained quickly before pausing as though to take a breath.
”The insane thing is? I believe him. I did it. I shut myself off and left everything behind. All on a promise from a being who, by all rights, should hate my very existence,” the figure continued, then moved forward with an urgent sureness. Blane was about to strike on instinct at the approaching Galathyrie, but stayed his hand on an insane hunch.
The Galathyrie places a hand on his shoulder as if to add weight to the gravity of his words. ”I can’t leave, not yet. Not until I have helped your people escape. I know some will be complacent to the danger and stay, it can’t be helped, but I can’t leave without at least attempting. And you know already the world is not what it seems. I am asking you to take a lot on blind faith and my word, the word of a being whose kind you have every reason to loathe and mistrust. But will you do it? Will you help me rally these villagers, and those of as many other villages as we can and flee this realm before the Elder Brain decides it’s best to cull the entire herd for one Alhoon’s interference? We are talking complete genocide, an atrocity the Galathyrie as a whole have done many times throughout history, with no less regret than your kind slaughtering an entire herd of goats.”
Blane stood in shock for a moment. This Galathyrie — this Alhoon was physically touching him, but not as an act of aggression, control, or intimidation. Moreover, the haughty condescension radiating off others was completely absent; in fact, he was being treated as an equal, or even a superior. If that weren’t enough, this creature of nightmare was asking him for his help. Finally, he replied: “two questions.”
”Name your terms,” the alhoon replied, almost desperate.
”What is your name?” he asked. The figure blinked, only now realizing there had been no introduction.
“My apologies: I am still adjusting to being outside the commune. There, your name is among the first things picked up through peripheral thought when conversing with your fellows. My name is Phex,” the figure replied, then took his hand off Blane’s shoulder and extended his other for a handshake.
He took it, though it was an eerie and awkward feel. Phex’s finger bones were as wide as his own, if not even more slender, but each was as long as two of his. “Blane. This is certainly the strangest meeting I’ve ever had,” he replied, still wary.
”An understandable sentiment,” Phex answered. “Your second question?”
”What makes you think any of your ‘livestock’ would trust you over you kin, and go anywhere purported to be ‘safe’?” Blane asked. Phex just looked back at him for a long moment, unblinking. It was clear from his surface thoughts as well as his eyes that even though he had anticipated such a question, he had no answer prepared.
”I must try. Anything beyond that is out of my hands. But I must try,” Phex finally said.
Blane stares back for a long, thoughtful moment as he studied and weighed. “Well,” he commented aloud at length. “One thing is for sure: either you are completely insane, or I am.”
~~Z~~
Once the headache subsided, Gannix made his way to the human pens. According to what he had been shown by the Elder Brain from the Galathyrie watching the pens from above, an individual thought brain dead had demonstrated psionic abilities in the center of his pen for all his ken to see, and introduced those who fled the pen with him to someone the Elder Brain suspected was an alhoon of the lowest form: a deity worshiper. After being thoroughly chastised for misjudging a specimen’s potential, he was stripped of his herdsman duties in exchange for one single directive: destroy the defective livestock, and destroy the traterous alhoon. If he failed, there would be no commune for him to return to.
Spurred on by his wounded pride as well as the threat of damnation, he hurried to his home to collect the things he’d need. He would kill them all with his bare hands, if he had to.
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