|
>>
|
5bf190.jpg
Sweety Tulip
5bf190
>who would be the most famous historical/mythological character in pre-contact neumono memory?
>has there ever, in recorded or legendary history, been a predator who was able to be "tamed" by neumono other than [Three Stripes]?
Let me introduce myself. I am Aryega, Queen of the Dustwalker hive, and I’m going to give you four answers to the history inquiry, ranging from fanciful mythology towards concrete history. The third one should settle the predator question, as well as involving my ancestor, which is why I’m the one answering. So: the most widespread myth that involves specific identifiable individuals, and therefore probably the oldest, is the one about the creation of the neumono species and why we’re divided into different hives. Settle in, because this might take a while. Ahem.
The Sun and Her Children.
Long ago, so the story goes, the Earth, the Forest and the Sea-sky had created all the beasts that inhabited themselves, each given a spark of heat from the Sun to bring them to life. Then, wanting to have companion creatures who could think and speak and make things themselves, they each designed intelligent creatures. Forest wanted creatures that were clever and dextrous, and created salikai; Earth wanted beings who were strong and steadfast, and made voklit; Sea-sky was mysterious and secretive and we don’t know what was made for those depths; and the Sun, who was secretly lonely because no-one could get close to her, wanted creatures that could endure pain and who would always understand each other, so she made the neumono. After enjoying their work and teaching their new children for a while, the Earth, Forest and Sea-sky became tired and went to sleep, but the Sun, who had limitless energy, decided she wanted to go on and live among her creations. So she turned herself into a neumono, the largest and most powerful and most beautiful there has ever been, with fur of black and ashen grey. She shared her own spirit with them, lending them endless fitness and youth, and eventually, she had five children: the oldest, a white-furred daughter who loved the mountains and snow, then a red daughter who loved the open grasslands, then a green son who loved the forest, then a blue son who loved the lands by the sea, and finally the youngest, a son with violet fur, who loved the dark places under the earth. Each one, being greater than normal neumono, became leaders of those who were most similar to themselves, and had many children among them, but though they lived apart they all were one people, with the Sun as High Queen over all. But the youngest son, though he was cleverest and best in making beautiful and useful things, was also smallest and weakest and became envious of his elder siblings, for the attentions that were put on their achievements, while most neumono outside his own people were too nervous of the dark to come visit him, to see the real beauty of his home and the full splendor of the treasures under the earth. He did love them, however, and so he came up with a plan that, he thought, would not harm anyone; he began to create all manner of splendid gifts for his siblings, presenting them to each with a declaration of what great and worthy deeds had earned it. Each trophy he presented was greater than all that had gone before, so that those who received them began to measure themselves against each other and to compete for the honour of the greatest prizes. Then, when they asked to meet him and deliver their assertions on why they deserved the next gift best, he could say he was too busy to visit them, and ask them to come to his home as guests instead. Surely, then, he would receive an equal measure of the glory his siblings had.
He did not appreciate the full heat of the feelings he had inspired, however. The Sun’s second daughter, she of red, had always felt herself overshadowed by her older sister, and had been overjoyed to receive for her triumphs a splendorous spear, stronger and more deadly than any other weapon that had existed. But the white daughter, planning to hunt an enormous beast, and believing the spear a much better fit for her own hand, went to her sister’s home and took the spear without leave, so great was her certainty in her own right thinking. Enraged by the theft, and by the empathic certainty that her sister thought herself better than her, the red daughter went to the white and grabbed it off her again. Shocked, the white daughter instinctively tried to pull it back, and the red sister answered by swinging the spear down and cutting her sister’s hand from her arm. Though both sisters were immediately horrified by this turn of events, and sickened by their own part in it, they were both overpowered by their outrage. The white daughter departed, but swore she would take redress for the injury and insult her sister had done her. Fearing the anger they had provoked, the two sisters and their people prepared to defend themselves from each other. The Sun was troubled by this, but did not interfere, believing that her children could resolve the issue themselves; her two daughters were each strong, self-disciplined, loving and protective, and would surely forgive each other. Even if not, their brothers, each of them clever and crafty, even-tempered and generous, would certainly step in to help cure the trouble. But the green son and the blue son, knowing their sisters were mightier than they, hid themselves rather than risk getting between their anger. The violet son, realizing his personal responsibility, instructed his people to refuse giving any further weapons or tools of conflict to his sisters’ peoples; but the red daughter, still stung by her sister’s scorn, took this disobedience from her youngest sibling as a dire insult, and sent her followers to take these things by force. Fighting back, the neumono who lived under the earth were killed or captured in great numbers, enslaved and their secret crafts and treasures stolen. The white daughter, woken from her own personal indignation by this crime, went with her own warriors to put an end to it. Seeing the culmination of their fears, confused and driven to desperation, some of the most powerful of the red daughter’s own children used their empathic power to capture other neumono who were not yet involved in the conflict, stealing their souls and sending them into battle as their slaves, believing that their enemies would hesitate to fight them. They were wrong, however, and so all races of neumono became involved in the war.
Driven by guilt and the need to redeem himself, the violet son told his remaining people to escape and scatter; once they had gone, he turned and began to fight his way to the center of the battle. Though the weakest of his siblings, he easily pushed his way through the struggles of lesser neumono, until he reached the bloody field where his two sisters now fought each other one on one, all others too afraid to approach them. Overcome by the desire to put an end to what he had begun, the youngest son of the Sun pushed himself between his two sisters and they, blinded by their rage towards each other, each drove their weapons through his body at once, and killed him. They had only begun to understand the horror of what they had done when the Sun herself finally appeared, blazing with her grief and rage and the agony of best hopes betrayed. Her children had been foolish, they had been cowardly, they had been cruel, they had allowed their feelings to master them, and they had spilled their own blood and that of those who had followed them. By poisoning themselves with anger and fear they had divided their spirits from each other forever more, and she could no longer bear to be near them. Those who had enslaved their own kind, she cast out into solitude, where they would be transformed into beasts without thought or craft, consoled only by the empty husks of their victims. All others, she banished to the corners of the world, to never live in one place and as one people again. The blood of her fallen son, split by petty and treacherous passions, dripped down into the earth and gave rise to twisted monsters, so that no neumono could ever dwell under stone in peace again. Finally, the Sun silenced her own connection to her creations, leaving them to become tired and sick and to eventually die of age. She left the world, and though she would keep watch on her children and her children’s children, she would never walk among them again so long as they remained enslaved to themselves.
That’s the first story. Just a story, obviously, but it is very popular. There are lots of different versions, tweaking it to suit the morals that particular hives want to teach their kids. It has a lot of cultural influence and forms the source for a lot of symbolism in other legends and in modern works of fiction. But, although there are various theories on where the myth might come from, like maybe there was once one really huge hive that just happened to split into several pieces at once, there’s no evidence for any reality behind this story other than that there were an unusually large number of hives that were passing it on. It was probably just made up to answer questions like “where did we come from” and “why are other neumono different from us”, while passing various lessons and also a bunch of gender and race stereotypes. The next story I’ll tell also has a lot of mythic elements in most tellings, but there is a little evidence for some aspects of it. So:
The Teacher who Listened to the World.
That title as actually a rather poor translation; the original words used in place of “Listener” mean receptivity in an empathic sense, not an auditory one. A more accurate but fanciful title might be “the teacher whose soul was open to everything”, though that’s still kind of inaccurate. In any case, he’s a figure that aliens have been interested in, as he’s the closest thing to a religious philosopher in our history. Some aliens call him “neumono buddha”, even though there isn’t that much in common between the two besides a general message of peace and enlightenment.
The story goes that, at a time somewhere more than three thousand years ago, on the western side of a continent in the northern hemisphere where the forests of a particular mountain range meets the red grasslands, a neumono boy was born the son of a rogue. Various legends exist regarding his childhood, but what all versions agree upon is that, even as he grew to adulthood, the young man’s empathy was so pure, wholesome, forthright and sincerely unselfish, that he found himself able to travel amongst the hives of other neumono without disturbing them, and was even welcomed by many. Instead of choosing one hive to become his, he continued to wander between them, at times disappearing into the wilderness for some time before returning, always miraculously unharmed. With his visits he brought knowledge, teaching the hives he visited how to find new kinds of food, how to make new kinds of tools, and how to tend to their environment so as to ward off dangers and prevent starvation. He tried to persuade the hives to leave rogues alone, to live in peace with each other, and eventually would even make the attempt to form them into what we would now call an ultrahive. This is where religion comes in. The Teacher taught his various friends that empathy was universal: we were, all of us, members of one hive, and simply unaware of it. Though the neumono were the main focus of his teachings - he taught that hostility and fear between hives was only a reflection of the hostility and fear we felt towards ourselves, which we would overcome if we achieved inner peace - he also extended it to all other living things and even to the world around us. Just as neumono stopped sensing each other when we fell asleep, but the empathy still existed, he believed that the world and all other creatures had a kind of empathy that was just too distant for most neumono to make out. So, just as neumono were gifted with the awareness that they and theirs were all of one single hive, a person who had achieved enlightenment would realize their connection with the universe and become aware that they were part of it, while it was part of them. The legends attribute amazing feats of empathic sensitivity to him, the capacity to sense other neumono from many more miles away than anyone else; in more extreme versions, he’s even attributed with the power to communicate with the world around him through empathy, to make flowers bloom and to have ravenous beasts lay down peacefully at his feet. His ideas on life and death may have appealed to some neumono as a comfort, as he taught that reincarnation - of the piecemeal sort that a lot of neumono hives believed in - would continue even when an entire hive was put to an end.
The story doesn’t have a happy ending, however. An insane Queen, of a hive of fierce and terrifying warrior, falls in love with him. Internally tormented, ashamed of her affection for such a peaceful person, unable to express her feelings in any healthy manner, and maddened by jealousy of his many companions, she endangers all the other neumono of the area and everything he has worked for in an attempt to take and keep him for herself. In the end, he uses himself as bait and drags her and himself over a cliff, ending her threat to his friends and giving her peace at the cost of his own life. The nascent ultrahive he attempted to create falls apart, and his message of peace eventually fails to find any significant purchase; it survives amongst rogues and among smaller, weaker hives enchanted by the idea that their more powerful competitors might be persuaded to spare them their depredations, or else is remembered purely for the diverting romantic tragedy of how the story ends. Post-contact, more neumono have started taking an interest in the philosophy behind it all, since it’s so supportive of the ultrahive values we developed after aliens took an interest in us, but the number of people who subscribe to the religious aspects remains quite small.
A lot of the story’s elements are pretty fanciful, of course, but there is a little evidence that it might be based in reality. The landmarks mentioned in the fuller versions of the story are clearly identifiable and match up with a real place, where a lot of the hives who had the story lived, and some of whom even remember themselves as descendants of descendants of et cetera of a hive described in the legend. These hives also display a commonality in some of their traditional practices, mostly agriculture, that could be the result of them all being taught from the same source. Most likely, leaving aside the miracles, was that there was at some point some person or group of people who moved through the area and passed on knowledge and technology to all the hives they met. If that person was really a neumono, then the idea that they could move so freely between hives and not get killed is quite miraculous enough. Let us move on to something more certain in its details.
The Predator Empire.
Long ago, a hive was almost entirely wiped out by a predator, save only one person, who discovered he was immune to the creature’s control. Why this was so, we don’t know - modern scholars speculate that perhaps he was able to silence his empathy, or that he suffered from some mental illness - but he dedicated his life to using that immunity to hunt down and kill every predator he could find in revenge for the loss of his family. As he did so, he would often ally himself with hives that had suffered from predation by his quarry, until one day the Queen of such a hive discovered, after their successful hunt, that her empathy could command the dead predator’s mindless slaves. Taking them as a labour force for her own hive, they were better able to build shelter and grow food, and the Queen decided to continue helping the Hunter on his quest in order to take more slaves. Becoming prosperous and populous, she and her hive built a city in the mountains, fed by terraced farms, where they could be safe, well-fed and at peace. Knowing she couldn’t stay away from her hive for too long at a time, however, she decided to have many children, most of them with the Hunter himself, in hopes that they would demonstrate the same powers as her, or him, or even both. Eventually, she succeeded, producing a daughter who had the same slave-commanding empathy as herself, who she could send with her father to fight predators and secure more of the broken servants for their own use. Here is where the question about tamed predators can be cleared, for as the story goes, the daughter of the Queen and the Hunter found two baby predators, whom she secretly rescued and raised as her own pets.
History has forgotten whether the daughter became Queen of her own offshoot hive after this, or if she remained merely a powerful champion of her mother’s hive, but what is clear is that she took a group of loyal companions for herself, and began to conquer other hives. If they capitulated to her, they were made into slaves of the normal kind that neumono often took from each other; if they fought back, she used her predators’ powers to break their minds and enslave them in that manner. Much of the stories of what magical feats her predators could perform seemed exaggerated for a long time - turning neumono into unwitting traitors against their own hives, or endowing her own warriors with unnatural courage and tirelessness - but since Three Stripes turned up, they’ve become a lot more plausible. Regardless of how many such stories were true, we know the Queen’s daughter built herself one of the closest things to an empire our planet has seen. There is archeological evidence of stone towns, paved roads, extensive farming plantations… all products of slavery, of course. In time, other hives who remained free, but under threat, decided to team up with each other to finally do her in. It is said that her father joined them, and even her mother, either from horror at her cruelty to other neumono or simply from the rational realization that the expansion could not sustain itself. After a long and terrible war, the Empress and her predator pets were killed, and her loyal warriors slain alongside her or driven back to the arms of their more peaceful elders. Without the brute labour of her slaves, the lands that they had taken were abandoned to nature; and, though the original hive had helped fight her, the others feared them and forced them out of the security of their mountain home. The allied hives had discovered they enjoyed some pleasant benefits from working together, but couldn’t put up with each other; so, in return for graciously not being slaughtered, the exiled hive were marked with the three points of a predator’s eye on their foreheads, to remind them of their crimes and to signify they were not to be killed on sight, and conscripted to walk between the territories of the once-allied hives, carrying goods and materials in distant exchanges from each to the others.
That hive, one of the few examples of a trading hive in pre-contact history, is my hive, the Dustwalkers. The original Queen, the Hunter, and perhaps even the would-be Empress are all my ancestors. It is speculated that we managed to survive in our way of life because our empathy is unusually mellow and inoffensive - perhaps a distant, inherited side-effect of having once lived alongside masses of empty predator slaves. Since Polokoa returned our old homeland to us, and we wait only for the archeologists to satisfy their desire to examine it all before we finally return to living there, we have decided to keep wearing these marks on our heads when we reach adulthood, so we can always remember our history.
So, to cover the breadth of the question we started with, I’ll finally tell you the story with the least myth, and the most reality.
The True Ultrahive.
As my previous story demonstrated, hive slavery was very common among ancient neumono, and directly observable in many places when aliens first arrived on our world. What didn’t exist at that time, and what almost exists only in legend, is a true ultrahive, one of multiple hives who worked together in mutually beneficial alliance. But, we know there was one. Centered on the hostile environment of a particular archipelago, but spreading much further, there exists even today the worn but still enduring fortresses of an ultrahive which, it is theorized, once numbered a population of over a hundred thousand neumono - puny by modern city standards, but by ancient and particularly by ravenous neumono ones, it was terribly impressive. Possibly unsurpassed. Aside from history passed orally by hives that still lived near their old territory, the land itself still bears the weight of their homes and their castles - yes, they had actual castles, a good few of them are even still there - which are, themselves, both filled with normal dirt-digging archeological evidence and decorated with elaborate stone murals depicting their culture and history. They even had a written language, though unfortunately no-one has managed to translate the glyphs that are still legible, even though we’ve pieced together much of the spoken tongue through their linguistic descendants. They were quite advanced technologically; not the most advanced that neumono ever were before contact, but quite high up there. They had paper, glass, steel, currency, compasses, simple mechanisms and even the lower levels of gunpowder weapons, including cannons.
But, before you get the wrong idea, it was not an ultrahive like the ones we have today. Their hives existed in a sort of feudal system - normal slave hives on the bottom, then more privileged hives of sailors, artisans and other skilled workers, then warrior hives with even more power and prestige, and finally one hive atop all the others, with their Queen not only their own ruler but also that of all the lesser hives below her. A Queen of Queens, as it were. She reappears in multiple depictions through the ruins they left behind, always larger and more central than all other figures and often with images of tribute and reverence being offered to her.
It didn’t last. It’s unclear as to whether there was some disaster, or an uprising by the lower classes, or even a disaster which caused an uprising… but that one and only definitely proven ultrahive did fall apart, well before aliens ever came close to us. Still, we have to offer our thanks to them; the discovery of their former lands, so easily visible from the air, did a lot to convince aliens that we were worth bothering with. They’re one of the biggest tourist destinations on the planet, now. And we’ve gotten a number of historical dramas full of sex and intrigue and backstabbing. They would be happy, I’m sure.
I hope that’s… sufficient answer to your questions.
|