Genesis Black

The First Song of the Vitagashi Megas, as spoken through the people of the Yeren Khanate, from the Myths and Legends of Sovagulo

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Another world lived before this one. At the end of that world, there were two forces as warriors: Getavara and Tien-Rus.

The Wrath of the Monkey Warrior Getavara had, over eons, calmed to temperance as He rose to godhood. 

Getavara slayed and Getavara fought until time ravaged the populations of the old world. Every act of creation had begun to calm Getavara until, towards the end of it all, He felt little desire for battle. 

And yet, before He could wither into nothingness, the Black Buddha emerged to challenge Him and change the shape of Creation to whims Getavara found unacceptable. 

He was the Dark One known as Tien-Rus, who championed all that Getavara found profane, for Tien-Rus exalted the glories of cowardly creation and despondency before ruination.

Tien-Rus had, with black intentions, sought to forge a new world according to his vile whims and thus drew Getavara’s blood in His sleep to bring to harems of waiting creation maidens,and each maiden was seen, in their realm, to be a delicate cosmic beauty, all pale with divine golden hair. Each would be subsumed by emerging virile gods of desire, known for their onyx shine, and which had all been granted a sacred endowment that would give them the vigor to charge New Creations life energy. All they needed for this was the blood of Getavara. 

Getavara Himself had little essence for creation as He had chosen the divine path of the Warrior of Chaos and had let such wither to the point He no longer cared for anyone’s wiles. 

One day, Tien-Rus had been careless, so confident was he in his victory, and Getavara riled in rage.

This cowardly attempt reignited in Getavara a wild warlust untempered by passive emotions. He seized Tien-Rus’s neck and attempted to kill him then.

However, Tien-Rus sacrificed the maidens and onyx gods to grant himself the power to challenge Getavara. Even in this, Getavara saw only cowardice, for Tien-Rus refused to cultivate the power himself and proved his ambitions shallow that he chose to destroy them at the first sign of danger. 

And so they fought.

The two waged a bestial war whose carnage brought all corners to ruin and ash. And yet they continued to fight long after the light of Creation had been snuffed. In nowhere and no-when, their duel raged. 

Galleries of the dead hanged lowly over their eternal battle. The black pointed hoods of souls walked in procession unto the judgment of Enma-daio. The old world faded away as the last two remnants carried on their battle. 

Tien-Rus had no skill in proper combat and no appetite for it. He fled when he could and he bargained when he could not flee and he bit when he was cornered, and his bites were venomous though his blows were weak. Getavara pursued him through the corpse of Creation as a hunter pursues a creeping thing, through the cracks between collapsed heavens and the silences between the bones of gods. For trillions of eons did He hunt him, and the hunt was long not because Tien-Rus was His equal but because Tien-Rus would not stand and fight, and a quarry that will not fight is the hardest quarry of all.

But what truly ignited the infinite Wrath of Getavara was the cowardice of Tien-Rus! At every small epoch, Tien-Rus would speak soft cowardly whispers of peace. And he would coo silly words suggesting friendship and diversity of being, and would then, in those early chances, immediately lunge upon Getavara the moment He considered an honorable truce.
And soon, Tien-Rus’s weakly utterances of soft pathetic words begot wild bloodlust beyond that which even Getavara could control.

And then at last after trillions of eons of brutal suffering and beatings exchanged, which had by the end of no-when become entirely one-sided brutalizings, Getavara struck a killing blow and annihilated his eternal foe. Tien-Rus vanished in an infernal flash. It was not the flash of honest dying but the flash of a thing that should never have been.

Upon the death of his nemesis, Getavara roared a bellow that broke beyond nothingness and bled what little was left of Creation.

And it was from this blood of the old world that the new one had been born in rage and violence. 

One by one and then in cascading multitudes they tore themselves into being out of the divine gore, and each was a sphere of plasma and of fire, and each was a Satvya (God).

The satvyas obeyed the echo of Getavara’s Wrath.

Thus sighed Getavara.

They collided and devoured each other from the hour of their first burning, and the tentacles of their fire and energy, formless and emergent, each of them greater than the worlds that would one day cower beneath them, lashed at the  ether itself. Their light was such that no lesser creature could stand before it without being broken. Their visage was such that no lesser creature could look upon them without the ruin of its eyes. And yet without them no lesser creature could be at all, for all lesser things are begotten of the fire of satvyas, and there is no other fire.

Todoro-Kabathi, the firstborn and strongest satvya of New Creation, was the first to be challenged and the first to fall in this age of formless carnage. 

Upon his death, Kabathi wailed a cry that broke the ether of New Creation and fell upon himself a form more terrible and destructive than any other, now so mighty and so arcane that he crushed light into absolute darkness.

Kabathi died! Thus was born the first amotsatvya (Dead God). All amotsatvyas to come would bear the same horrible form, that of darkness beyond understanding and tears in the ether that opened holes to other realms unknown.

From the womb of this Dead God birthed the star Nuly and the planet Kollidor.

Thus sighed Getavara. 

Upon Kollidor, Getavara forged His first creatures: the industrious Jinkai and the savage Yabans. 

The Yabans became His pride. From beyond the void of fire and chaos, they rose to seek that which Getavara saw as good: the pursuit of strength and combat against all who crossed them and all who challenged them. 

Against them were the Jinkai, who would be their challenge.

The Yabans and Jinkai were parallels. 

Among Yabans there were two kinds: nagois (warrrior-people) and yenois (breeder-people). 

Among Jinkai, there were men and women. 

The males of both were built to be strong and capable, and the females of both were built to be nurturing and fierce.

Getavara did not create His form in either, and instead forged both as humans. However, the Yabans had longer hair that refused to grow beyond a natural point and possessed lightning within their bodies, while the Jinkai possessed fire. The yenois also possessed, in their feral maternalism, a vigor and intensity that women would lack. Both were intended as domestic warriors upon whose labor and rearing the fighting warriors would depend, but the Yabans demanded of yenois a greater level of martiality and a love of violence. 

But Getavara was not content merely to observe, for He was Himself a warrior-god, and it is in the nature of the warrior-god to provoke that which He has made, that He may see the metal of it and the grain of it and the limit of it.

And He said within Himself: I have made two peoples upon Kollidor, and I would know which of them is the more fit for My purposes, which is to say, for combat without end. Therefore did He loose upon the world a wicked thing.

The wicked thing was a serpent, and the name of the serpent was Kisha, and she was subtle beyond the subtlety of any creature that had come before her. She was a tempter and a whisperer and a cunning one, and she bore within her coils a fruit. The fruit was not of the kind that grow upon the trees of the deathlands, but a fruit begotten of knowledge itself, and whosoever ate of the fruit would be changed, and the change would be according to the nature of the one who ate. Then she cultivated a sweet wine, and this was a wine of temperance, which would calm the fires of Getavara’s Wrath screaming through the blood of all who consumed it.

Kisha the Wicked went first unto the Jinkai in their tents and in their halls.

She came first unto the male of the Jinkai, whose name is not remembered, and she whispered unto him and offered him of her fruit and wine. Yet he heard her not, for the male of the Jinkai was set firmly in the way of his making, and he knew combat and he knew craft, and he knew Getavara would test him and feared the results of displeasing Him. Thus he had no hunger for the fruit and wine of Kisha. He walked past her and thought no more of her.

Then went the serpent unto the female of the Jinkai, and she whispered unto her,

“Eat of this and drink my wine! You shall be a greater being than before!”

But the woman refused:

This is wrong and not what we must do. We will trust Getavara.

Kisha continued and spawned multitudes of children that amplified her voice. 

“You were lied to by Getavara! There is a greater power within you! But you must eat of my fruit and drink of my wine!”

And the increasing voices convinced the woman to trust Kisha, and she bit first of the fruit and felt an awakening within that compelled her to drink the wine, which washed through her mind and extinguished Getavara’s Wrath!

At once, she realized she had been tricked. 

A man then came and demanded to know why she wept. She begged him to eat of the fruit and drink of the wine to satiate her tears, and he did. He too wept. 

Getavara looked upon and knew now the Jinkai would not be His. 

Then did Kisha come unto the Yabans.

She came first unto the nagoi, and she whispered unto him and offered him of her fruit. He heard her not, for the nagoi’s hunger is for combat and not for knowledge, and the whispering of a serpent is as the buzzing of an insect in the ears of one who seeks only battle. He passed her by as though she were not there.

Then Kisha went unto the yenoi, and she whispered unto her, and she said the words that had served her so well among the Jinkai, and she offered her fruit and wine.

She spoke in increasing number to the yenoi 

Eat of my fruit and drink of my wine!

But the yenoi reached for the serpent!

She took Kisha in her hands, and she tore her from her coils, and she bit down upon the serpent’s neck, and she devoured her. The blood of Kisha ran upon the yenoi’s chin, and the fruit of knowledge fell unheeded upon the floor of the tent, and no one remembered it after.

But Kisha, though devoured, was not wholly undone. The seed of her was scattered in her dying, and her daughters have never forgiven, and they have waged their spiritual war upon the daughters of the Yabans through all the ages that have followed, with whisper and with shame and with the soft insistences of the tongue their mother inherited from the Black Buddha.

Getavara laughed. 

For their loyalty, He bestowed upon the Yabans a greater amount of His power and form. 

He said unto them: You are my truest children! You have been blessed with tails much like that of my own, and this will be the source of a greater power. 

He said: Upon any suitable night with a full moon, or a similar source of guiding light, look to the Kollidorian moon Nuly, and you will be transformed into a Great Monkey (Oozaru) similar to my form, one of great power, ferocity, and wrath! 

He said: I will continue to guide you and cultivate your willpower and desire for battle. 

Unto the Jinkai he said: You have proven yourselves the children of Tien-Rus. For your follies, I choose you to be the antagonists of my children. You will suffer endless unwinnable wars, but you will survive to satiate the need to test the Yabans. Look upon the sun above, and wait for Nuly to cross it and shine black like Kabathi. This will be your power: children of the Black Sun.  May you redeem yourselves in the Next Creation.

The Jinkai rested and toiled in the land of Sansho, where they labored and toiled to craft homes and tame the jungles, led by the first great warlord of their people, Akir Ta, who had forged a secret covenant with the satvya Serpha, bestowing him the ability to craft mechanical tools.

The Yabans retreated to the wastelands and badlands of Yera and Sovagulo, where they lived brutal and primeval lives of violent struggle and battle. The first Yaban khan was Jiran the Great, who had been a child of the Alma Badlands pitted in battle against his siblings to determine the most worthy of life. Of them, he proved the most clever and ferocious in battle, his strength unyielding and magnificent, and grew into a man of force and insurmountable will, around whom hundreds of Yabans gathered to listen to hear his wisdom.

He united the disparate and untamed Yaban people into the first warrior troops, and he gave them a tradition: “Never settle and never rest proud, for there will always be someone stronger. Woe be unto the strongest under heaven. If you ever find yourself the strongest, never settle there, or you will rot and grow tired, as Getavara suffered. Cultivate the strongest root beneath you and train your own executioner. Only through this will life continue.”

Jiran, upon uniting the Yabans around his fist, chose war with the Jinkai, but chose it as honorable duel between two powers.

The first great war between the two young races was the War upon the Alaamaresian Sea, the outcome of which would decide who would, for the next thousand years, control the land of Subotai. 

Early on in this war, the Yabans suffered great losses, for the Jinkai refused to succumb to weakness and had, in truth, trained vigorously for centuries to forge martial paths that would keep them par with Getavara’s children. They developed an assortment of great weaponry that was enough to keep the Yabans at bay. Furthermore, the Yabans were at a disadvantage upon the sea, as Jiran himself discovered, for their incredibly dense bodies, which bestowed them their preposterous strength, had also left them unable to manage the sea and, thus, unfit for nautical and underwater combat. 

The Yabans’ strength was so great that few materials they crafted could withstand their force or density of muscle, and many Jinkai weapons proved futile against their bodies. But they were too few in number to ever decisively defeat the Jinkai.

Getavara considered this and had decided, to prevent the extinction of His children, to consider the nature of His children again.

When He had created the nagois and yenois, He had chosen to not excite them for one another, so that they chose to procreate only in absolute necessity, and only on rare occasion when the yenoi fell into estrus, so that the nagois would focus on the matters of war and weaponry, while the yenoi would focus on crafting weaponry and homesteading. Nagois were fierce and forever ready for challenge, physical and mental. Yenois were in their own way fierce and strong-willed, expected to be capable of hunting and managing affairs. However, they were not expected to be warriors, and the few who attempted were often outmatched and taken to be claimed by Jinkais who were, in their own right, growing ever stronger and more capable despite their natural weakness and passivity. 

Among the Sovagulan settlement of Yakutsk lived a yenoi named Khorijin. She was a fierce girl who trained regularly with her brothers to prepare them for their deployment to the Alaamaresian Sea War, and had been raised to become a strong mother who would grow proud to bear a son worthy of dying as a warrior.

And yet Getavara’s Wrath burned within her. 

The constant war and struggle that found Yabans meant nagois could never be on the homefront in great numbers, which meant yenois could not breed in high numbers even if they were not in estrus. This was Khorijin’s life. She didn’t want to be on the homefront, cultivating food and family and business affairs. What burned in her was the desire to be in the thick of slaughter, with the same camaraderie that the nagois enjoyed and driven by the same lust for chaos and honor. 

So she dressed as a nagoi and snuck off to war that way, surviving the brutal military training and winding up in the Alaamaresian War where she was horribly disfigured and brutalized.

Getavara discovered this when prayed upon and summoned to heal her and chastised her for going against her societal duties

And He said: “Foolish yenoi, your battlefield is the home, where you forge the weapons wielded by nagois. Much as an archer knows not to engage against blade-runners, and blade-runners know not to engage with mages, you will understand now to take a position different from your station. You will be cursed to rot as you are.”

And so Khorijin was left as little more than a living lump of flesh. Battle had taken her senses. She had no arms, no legs, no tail, no face, no feeling, no eyes, no nose, no ears, a melted-together mouth, and burnt skin. All she had was her mind and the detached realization that she could not truly live or die. 

However, through pure mental focus and the first Yaban cultivation of qi, and through raw strength of the will, she managed to wrap herself in a suit of armor and open her Mind’s Eye. 

Upon this moment she vowed, “I will be slain as a warrior, not as a victim.”

This second time, she fell in battle, and chose to die where she bled. She stuck her sword in the soil to mark where she fell and perished laughed in the ecstasy of rage. 

Getavara watched on and was pleased. So astounded was He by this victorious will, as well as by how many yenois aspired now to die like Khorijin and generally share that heroic virility of death worship, that He said: “Your kind has shown the Enlightenment of the Will! You’ve proven yourself then fully capable of cultivating the fires of my Wrath. Go, then, and take your reward. I christen you now the Laborer-People, and you will now have the strength to carry your weapons and beat your fists as the Warrior-People can. Hala!!” 

And with that, He moved to uplift the yenois’s strength and aggression, and gave them the moniker “bollois.” These stronger bollois were received by the nagois with revelry, for at last their other half finally possessed their same fire and fury and understood their passion for struggle. The pains of childbirth were no more, for now the action brought no risk of death unto the mother. The cost of this was, at once, that the bollois lost the impulse to be protected as precious, and were now called to the same violent love of denial and honor, which they embraced. Though they still possessed wombs and the barest instinct of a mother, this was now to be subsumed by Getavara’s Laughter, shared by Kjorijin.

With the loss of the Breeder-People, the question arose again of how to resolve the need for many. The near doubling of force had  pushed the Jinkai towards defeat, but every loss stung twice as intensely. 

With the male warriors and female labor-warriors now settled, Getavara chose to draw upon the queer form of the Pintara satvya to forge a gamale sex of Yaban, which he then rechristened as “yenoi” to replace the old sorts. 

The bollois would be very roughly as strong as nagois, while the new yenois would be closer to one-tenth that strength. What’s more, while bollois would be warriors alongside nagois, their main duty was to keep Yaban society going and the war machine well-oiled; the new gamale yenois would be the domestics, with their strong-will remaining as is the Yaban way, but their physical abilities dampened. 

What’s more, as the bollois chose to bleed in battle, the yenois would thus bleed at home. They would be capable of breeding at any given time, and could forge new children in their wombs without penetration. The link they would have to the families would be a spiritual one, one which could not be easily severed, and which would be understood implicitly. 

Renewed by the doubling of force and will, and sextupling of numbers, the Yabans proved unstoppable in battle and mowed down the Jinkais on the Alaamaresian Sea. 

The War was soon resolved by sheer force. Akir-Ta retreated with his men and jesters as Jiran asserted his burgeoning khanate.

Thus began the First Age of Kollidor.