The Account of a Bemarun Philosopher
I haven't given up on Xiaolin fics just yet; the thing is it takes up a lot of time and energy... ugh. Oh, and I've been working on Brave Little Toaster-related stuff too.
This is gonna be pretty obscure, but it's supposed to be. Don't be completely alienated if possible; this is like a backstory of the bemarun race, which my OC Uarcay belongs to. It's told in the form of lore, inspired by the Metroid Prime games' methods of telling tales from the past.
And so let the head-scratching commence, with all these weird uses of words and whatnot, expressed in weird bemarun tongue.
I am but one eteiri among many, and am not fit for representing my blood group, in which every member I hold close and dear. But nonetheless, one small event has pushed me to do this, for the Advisory division, and for the Empress long-lasting. May the Minds cooperate together and uphold the future, and may Inti be crushed under the Sun of Absolutes after my passing.
…My encounter with a human is said to be the first, but who can tell the chances of the ages? In all authenticity, I have yet to forget it. He was a lost creature in the forests, unlike any that I was hunting after. He wore what appeared to be beast-skin, but possessed hands just as mine. Though I could not share communication with him, I brought him back to the sunken mountains in Skoqa to give him some food and water. He seemed replenished at first, but soon panicked at, I believed, the thought of being so far away from home. By that time I was desperately seeking a way to let him know that all was going to be well. But he continued to make these diverse movements with his mouth, lips and tongue, uttering sounds through white teeth that I could not catch. I merely agreed to help take him up through the terrain to his homeland; why my relatives were displeased with this choice I could not fathom until there was no turning back.
It mattered not in the least that this being could not speak for my comprehension. Strangely, the expressions of his face turned out to be all I needed once I was able to connect his actions with his emotions and thoughts. However, he did not understand why I was helping him. I could see his discomfort and fear. Toward me? It appeared so. In time my relatives caught up to us, pleading for me to leave this creature alone. I did not comply. This was not some beast that could be tossed into the wilderness and left to die. There were reasons for his actions instead of instinctive impulses. He had decorated himself in berry juice and wrapped crafted skins around his waist. It was curious, and no other living thing would bother itself with such tasks. Yes, there were the primates in the trees that looked much like him, though they were covered head to toe in fur. To this I refused the relatives, who still persevered behind us on our journey.
My relatives! Tinzaj, Rumu, Akhavvi! They would not cease their forewarnings of danger, and utter disrespect for my choice. Despite their pleas, I will not bring this news to the Empress. Harm would come to the creature, I'm sure. After all, we eteiri very much enjoy curiously picking apart new creatures down to their bones – do we not?
But it was my mistake. What a glorious city it was under the mighty sun… the sun being they call "Inti." Yes, the mention of that name makes me shudder… the ignorance of it all makes me shudder. Go ahead and worship tangible, ugly nature, you lovers of war and death! We can surely overcome you; and if not, take us to your dungeons, so we don't have to see the ugliness of Inti's light any further.
…But please, don't hunt down our people, creatures of the Highlands. The powers you possess are unimaginable. You can distort all which nature stands for, and how? I cannot see the process of your craft, and yet… I cannot see the supernatural either, with these eyes. Can you bring the universe of the Minds down to fleshy Earth? Can you even call upon the Absolutes? Let your evils have mercy on my relatives, but destroy my body with this power, so when my mind is free, I may understand everything.
The creature… who is thankful for my deliverance of him, helps put an end to the madness. He allows me to walk on the grounds of his people. I am not dead yet, though at times I wish I was.
And the knowledge accumulates. This is what they call a "kachuran." While us as eteiri, now deemed "bemarun," appear as reptiles, kachuran appear as apes. Odd that there are far more differences between us and our own beast-images than there are between us two as species. Kachuran formally name their colony as Inca, and have inhabited much of this world, divided into rulers and tribes. But they wish to overtake us. To them, we are their subservients. For what reason? It is apparent we are only one of many giant reptiles they use in the building of their domains, temples, and shrines. Although it is true that we are far stronger than the normal kachuran, the beasts kachuran command hold us down without thought. However, some say that we too can control those creatures…
This is dangerous thinking. If fellow living creatures were meant to be machines under our control, they would not need iron clamps. But even so, I suppose it is necessary for battle. I must escape now, while the bemarun and kachuran clash, and while blood both red, and blue, spills. Tinzaj, Rumu, Akhavvi, thank you… I must bring this news to the Empress.
Let me explain a few things here. Eh-he-hem.
The Yocconian Empire meets the Inca Empire, and it doesn't go well. ("Yoccon" is the name for the bemarun's subterranean homeworld.) The human Inca can wield magic, something bemarun have never done, and they use that magic (along with their beasts) to enslave some of the bemarun, at least until they're later killed off by the Spanish. YAY!
I probably haven't done enough research... but anyhoo, the bemarun who is narrating takes the human to Cuzco, the Inca Empire's capital, where they use dinosaurs as workhorses. Well, the bemarun happen to resemble dinosaurs, so...
As far as the words "Minds" and "Absolutes" go, it all has to do with bemarun thinking:
Many bemarun believe in some shape or form that each individual mind, mostly disconnected from the mortal body, makes up an entire world of its own in a "transcendent space" that moves along with other minds. The Minds are pictured to create a ring that orbits the high absolute of powers, much like the planets orbit the sun. They bond to and separate from each other according to the relations of one person's mind to another's. All these "worlds" that are linked to the High Absolutes within the Ring possess the abilities of reason and self-will, while the worlds of lower creatures drift aimlessly outside the Ring in vast space.
It is also generally believed that the Minds must balance each other out within the Ring, or else all the Minds and all of nature will have their march around the universals disrupted. The quality of such balance depends on the shifts between good and evil, talent and disability, and free will and imprisoned will.
Because it is such a phenomenon to many bemarun philosophers that the mind works from within the body, it is concluded that the body actually "anchors" the mind down to the corporeal world and disconnects it from supernatural influences for a time.
The images described by the Minds, Ring, and High Absolutes uncannily resembles the stars and planets of outer space. While the Incas worshipped Inti, their Sun god, the bemarun gradually turned away from that and started to see the sun itself as a sustainer of life but not as a deity, because most philosophers adopted the notion that higher, spiritual powers can only be realized through the mind, not through the five senses or in nature.
Bemarun philosophy primarily consists in corpism, which involves looking to sensible images of the mind, body, spirit, and states of existence within the order of being to provide a more efficient understanding of those ideas. The ideas are thought to be "touchable" or "reachable" when brought down to the senses. The notion of a deity being naturally visible to the eyes was indeed deemed impossible by many bemarun theologians, but later they concluded that the difficulty to fathom through the mind was too great, and offered the alternative proposition that the bemarun mind could make the ideas of being descend to the senses, not naturally, but forcefully.
One conundrum in typical bemarun philosophy is that the mind and body working together is seen as very strange, even to the some of the greatest philosophers. Few, if any, have formed a reasonable explanation; instead they are bewildered, supposing that the mind should be in a higher plane of existence, but as a result should also be separate from the body (which resides in the corporeal world of lower existence). The mind must then somehow be "anchored down" by the body in the lower world. From all this, the act of murder is justified in the culture, even glorified, because it is simply viewed as "the mind finally being freed from the weight of the body." This undermines the meaning of mortal life, as life's purpose has been narrowed down to merely being the outlet for the reproduction of new minds.
Yes, lots of crazy fun stuff! But creating a race whose ideals and views are unique/believable is hard to do. If I can trudge through the fanfictions over the span of a few years, there might be more of this to come.