Khajune's Kiss
By Skald Finira
Hwaet! Listen, Jiralhanae cub, to the story of young Kardat. For though it is hard to believe, Star Chieftain Kardatus was once a little thing like you.
Kardat was born in the days of the San'Shyuum Covenant's war upon the Citadel Council. In those days the San'Shyuum asked why the enemy had numerous biotics who could kill with their minds, but they themselves did not. They found two scientists, these being Emeritus Par'Matsuri, who was a fool like all Sangheili; and Doctor Valim, who was a liar like all Salarians. They instructed the scientists to raise telekinetic warriors for the San'Shyuum Covenant.
The alien scientists were brought Kardat's mother, Valide Narila, and they told her that if she submitted to their experimentation she would give birth to a great biotic hero. They were right, but they concealed that the eezo radiation would give her cancer as well. And so Valide Narila did give birth to a great biotic hero, and that was Kardat, but she also died of a brain tumor.
And around that time Kardat's father, Chieftain Karagus, also died, lost to Turian artillery bombardment. Kardat was left all alone in the galaxy except for his uncle, who was worried about lines of succession and such adult things, and cared little for Karagus' mutant whelp. And young Kardat had great biotic potential, but no notion of how to use it. Kardat's abilities did not bring him respect. Rather his cousins called him witch, and they tormented him by telling him that he had killed his own mother. In this degraded way Kardat grew up on Doisac, anxious to leave it at the first possible instant.
When he was old enough to pass for an adult Kardat left Doisac and traveled to Haivat. There he enlisted in the San'Shyuum Covenant's war effort, as was proper for Jiralhanae in those days. On account of high birth he should have been commissioned and given a prestigious billet, but the chinless Sangheili had reserved all the most best military offices for themselves. Even Great Chieftain Argurus' gendarmerie could only equip so many Jiralhanae to fight the Martollan Warpath as Argurus already had, and so Kardat found himself posted to Ajokarit, a moon of no importance.
Ajokarit was a place so far from the fault lines of the war that most of the gendarmes there were still Unggoy who had stayed loyal to the San'Shyuum. The people of Ajokarit were quiescent, mostly Asari. There was little for Kardat to do, until one day, with no warning at all, there was a small riot.
A blue crowd of Ajokaritan Asari surrounded a small gendarmerie base staffed entirely by Unggoy. The Unggoy sent a lathi-squadron out to quell the unrest, but the Asari rioters ripped the lathi-squadron's weapons away with telekinesis and struck the Unggoy with their own clubs until the squadron fled back into the base. Kardat was dispatched to take command of the besieged Unggoy gendarmes and learn what had so upset the previously complacent Ajokaritan Asari.
Kardat landed his Banshee on the roof of the gendarmerie base. He entered the base from the rooftop and was met by a commotion of hapless Unggoy panic. Kardat also saw a single Asari bound in restraints. She, unlike her Unggoy wardens, was calm as could be. Kardat roared until the Unggoy gendarmes were more frightened of him than they were of the rioters. He stamped over to the most important-looking Unggoy he could see and demanded to know what was what.
"They want the witch!" the Unggoy wept hysterically.
"Her?" Kardat pointed to the restrained Asari. "They want us to release her?"
"Yes! No! They want us to release her so that they can lynch her! They say she is a witch and I don't understand because they are all witches how do they move things without touching them it isn't natural and they're breaking things and they're tall too and I'm scared and so I want to do what they want but I don't think I can because if we just let mobs do what they want I don't know where that will end but I know it will end with a lot of dead Unggoy and-"
"Enough." Kardat left the Unggoy and walked to the restrained Asari. "You, what did you do?"
"Nothing at all," the Asari smiled. "I'm just a witch."
"Elaborate."
"My name is Envedura. I'm an ardat-yakshi. We are the most gifted biotics alive, above even other Asari. But the narrow-minded and envious insist upon shutting us away in grim monasteries which lie to us, steep us in a false religion, and teach us to always be ashamed of ourselves. It is an injustice. You are a brave warrior who has come to Ajokarit to tell the people here supernal truths, to give them good religion, to teach them how to find dignity and meaning in their proper place. You must protect me."
Kardat was not sure whether to take this prisoner's story at face value. He went outside and roared at the Asari lynch mob until it quieted down and he could ask it a few questions and get a sense of the lynch mob's point of view. After a short while Kardat reentered the gendarmerie station.
"The other Asari say that you ardat-yakshi are in fact voracious sex demons who devour the souls of any that couple with you."
(You are but a cub. Do not worry if you do not entirely understand this part of the story. It is enough for you to know that it explains why other Asari often abuse the ardat-yakshi).
"I am not voracious! I have harmed only one other person in my entire life, and that was a century ago and on accident!" Envedura protested. "That was how I learned. Is it right that for the events of that one day, the most terrible day of all my life, I should spend all my thousand years locked away in a convent?"
It did not seem right to Kardat, who had been called a witch himself, and so Kardat went back outside and roared at the Ajokaritan mob until it dispersed. After the rioters were gone the Unggoy gendarmes cried out in relief: "Alive! We're alive!"
Kardat removed Envedura's restraints. Together they flew to the Monastery of Ajokarit, where the planet's dozen ardat-yakshi were kept.
"What gods do you worship here?" Kardat asked the monastery's frightened Abbotess.
"Athame and her handmaidens. And we venerate Heroine Pereshina, who stood against the deviless Khajune."
"These are false idols. I could turn a blind eye to such things if it were all voluntary, but I am told that this is not the case, and that your membership is cloistered here against its will."
The Abbotess hesitated a moment before deciding to stand her ground. She gestured to Envedura. "Did she tell you that? It is only true in her specific instance. The others are all here by their own volition. I bear Khajune's curse myself."
Kardat questioned the other ardat-yakshi at the monastery and found that the Abbotess' words were true. They were like Sangheili women, who are proud to always be secluded and to not to wander freely as Jiralhanae women do.
"It is a sad thing," said Envedura. "What they have done to the spirits of my sisters is a sad thing. They have nothing to be ashamed of except for their submission." And she was right.
"I advise you to turn Envedura back over to us," the Abbotess told Kardat. "Outside the boundaries of this monastery Envedura's difficult personality in combination with her dangerous disability is liable to get her killed. You have already seen all the evidence of this you should need. That is to say nothing of the menace she poses to others."
"A disability?" Envedura shook her head. "Label Khajune's kiss as demonhood or vampirism if such is the limit of your impoverished imagination. But a disability? It is a blessing. A blessing from the Forerunners, from the great gods of the Covenant! This noble Jiralhanae warrior sees it, even if you do not. All together, all as one on the Great Journey! Let the shrill and fictional harridan Athame lecture me no more!"
Kardat knew that Envedura was pandering to him, but he still did not hand her back over to the monastery. He took her with him back to the capital of Ajokarit and offered her his protection. In exchange she taught him how to make powerful use of his own biotic abilities, for it is true that the ardat-yakshi are the greatest biotics of the galaxy. Some say that there used to be biotic Lekgolo colonies which were greater, but that all ended in disaster, and indeed that fiasco is what killed Emeritus Par'Matsuri and Doctor Valim. So, for practical purposes, the ardat-yakshi are the greatest biotics of the galaxy, no matter what really happened on Danum Zojat. Only those biotics who have had the benefit of ardat-yakshi tutelage, such as Star Chieftain Kardatus, may approach the level of the ardat-yakshi.
As she taught Kardat what she knew and grew closer to him, Envedura studied the Forerunner scriptures, and she became as learned in them as she had been in the false scriptures of Athame and her handmaidens. But there was something about Forerunner scriptures that she could not understand.
"Where are the San'Shyuum in all of these books?" she asked Kardat.
"Nowhere," Kardat answered. "The San'Shyuum are the heirs of the Forerunners, not the Forerunners themselves."
"But who says that they are the heirs of the Forerunners?"
"The San'Shyuum themselves say it."
"The reasoning seems circular and self-serving."
"That is what the Martollan Unggoy say, along with any number of previous heretical movements. Always High Charity wins, always the heresiarchs lose."
"Another way of putting it is that despite untold suppression, the line of thought still persists. There must be a reason for that. I had hoped that Covenant doctrine would prove an escape from the type of thinking that I became accustomed to at the monastery, but in truth the San'Shyuum holo-preachers are always reminding me of that old Abbotess. Don't look at me like that! You have told me before how in the sterile name of experimentation the San'Shyuum gave your mother cancer, how at the request of the arrogant Sangheili the San'Shyuum have excluded you and the other Jiralhanae from the Fronts, and so on. You are rightly aggrieved. You have every right to criticize the judgements of the San'Shyuum! Let us use our heads. Of all known races in the modern galaxy, which would the Forerunners have most likely intended to bear their legacy? Try to reason it out from first principles."
Kardat saw what Envedura was driving at. "That race which lives for one thousand years, that race which is universally biotic, that race which is self-evidently blessed above all others."
Envedura smiled. "That is what seems intuitive to me. But I thought that my intuition might be biased, and so I could not trust in it until I heard it from you."
"Yet your Asari Republics are hopelessly limp, stifling, and democratic. They crush the ardat-yakshi and the otherwise exceptional. You have yourself complained bitterly about the civilization you Asari have made, on any number of occasions. You have complained every bit as bitterly as I have complained about the San'Shyuum and the Sangheili."
"I have. But I am finally certain where all Asari went wrong. Every last problem is built upon Athame's lie."
"What lie is that?"
Envedura looked deep into Kardat's eyes. "The lie of ardat-yakshi monstrosity. The lie that Heroine Pereshina did the right thing when she tore down the Temple of Khajune the Endless and slew the Vampire Queens. So Khajune was fettered, so shall her daughters be fettered forevermore…That is what they taught me at the monastery. That is what they repeated, again and again, for one hundred years… we, it is what we repeated, it is what we ardat-yakshi ourselves repeated. But do you think that it is true? Do you think it is true that I am only something to be feared and locked away?"
Kardat returned Envedura's gaze. And he knew that he could not touch her, for only the foolish or the condemned ever touch an ardat-yakshi, and Kardat was neither. But he looked into her deep dark eyes, and he saw that there was something sacred in them.
"It is true that you are to be feared," Kardat told Envedura. "But it is not true that this is a bad quality in a Prophet."
Hwaet! When she heard these words Envedura knew that her speculations were no idle fancies, but hard realities that might be affirmed by another. She grew in maturity and power, and became the Prophet of Revelation. "The ardat-yakshi are destined to lead this galaxy," Revelation said. "We are the True Prophets. For the goddesses made the Asari perfect, but in perfection there is an awful complacency. Khajune the Endless saw the mistake, and with her kiss the Endless made the ardat-yakshi, and in so doing the Endless improved upon perfection. For no matter how good things may be, the ardat-yakshi are always hungry."
Hwaet! When he heard these words Kardat grew in maturity and wisdom, and became Kardatus. "I will tell the Jiralhanae to follow you," he said. "The Jiralhanae shall protect you from others and the Jiralhanae shall attack others on your behalf. We shall make all peoples of the galaxy see that the ardat-yakshi are the True Prophets. But I demand a boon in return."
"What boon?"
"I do not wish to suffer the indignity of old age," Kardatus said. "If I never fall in battle as my father Karagus did, if you ever see me grow feeble, you must devour my soul." And Revelation agreed.
It still remained for Kardatus to return to Doisac, to unseat his uncle, to subdue his cousins and assume leadership of his skein, to overawe the Great Packs at the kurultai held in the wake of Argurus' death on Panakut, to name the San'Shyuum as deceivers and name Revelation as the Forerunners' True Prophet, and at last to take his rightful place as Revelation's anointed Star Chieftain. And these labors were difficult, and they took some time, but through his own great strength and through Revelation's profound guidance Kardatus was up to them all.
And even now it remains to lay the Sangheili low, but that, Jiralhanae cub, is your task as much as our Star Chieftain's. As you prepare for adulthood and for war with the chinless enemy, remember that while Revelation approaches her two hundredth year she is in some senses still younger than yourself. She shall see all your victories, and she shall see all the victories of your children and grandchildren after you. And by the might of the Jiralhanae she blesses, the Prophet of Revelation shall see the Halos and she shall walk the Great Journey well before her thousand years are up.
Hwaet! Embrace Eternity!