The Book of Todram
Author: Lynn Yi
Original post: https://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=7608.0
Entry for YC121 New Eden Capsuleer’s Writing Contest in the Prose category.
Book of Todram Volume II by Sebiestor [賽畢斯托部族 米玛塔尔] Lynn Yi [易林]
YC 120.03.01
Try not to believe what you want to. Rather, try to believe what you can. The greatest lesson a child can learn, is responsibility. Men fear what they do not understand. And the memories of what they understand is short, for these simple wisdoms appear lost to Man. The Balance has been forgotten. And now nothing separates Man from the ravenous yeast consuming every last molecule of oxygen and dying in their own excrement. Please seppuku responsibly.
YC 120.03.18
Having discovered my father was a Shaman of the clan of Yi I am writing a second volume of my traditional book of Todram. His title as acting Shaman will be passed down to me so I must try to write this book in its traditional allegorical form to some degree. I was sent to the arctic regions of Mikramurka, not very far from a certain traditional style Vherokior home. There I was led to a cave where a patch of ghahari plant grows protected out of the bone freezing wind. This plant is needed for communing with the variety of spirits I will encounter who will guide me through this journey. I brought only the basic necessities to keep me alive along with certain tools I won't part with even if I won't use them.
I lived two moons there dwelling in introspection of my incarnation among the spirits of my ancestors and others steeped in wisdom. They provided me with knowledge including how to hunt my own food with an oiled hide wrapped length of bamboo with my kri’tak tied to one end. I wouldn't use my kri’tak if I could help it and so I was left using artistically engraved traditional stone and obsidian tools such as the ci’nal ice pick from where the kri’tak had originally evolved. While using the ci’nal, I gathered ice water from the glaciers to place into vials to carry with me everywhere I go as a momento to remind myself of this precious journey. A lesson in making various knots I learned with Ling while in captivity by the Nefantar came in conveniently when making a necklace to carry those pair of the vials I had strung together. I felt quite a bit of symbolism in having those two vials fashioned together.
I was given a lot of advice as to how to hunt and survive in these harsh climates where death came all too easily for the unprepared. In one of my visions I was visited by a beautiful lynx snow cat, my spirit animal I had known from my childhood dreams and learned many ways of living in these harsh lands from him long before I ever set foot upon Matar. I never could have known exactly what to do without him there to guide me. The few times he spoke he had introduced himself as Ba’krii. I trusted this snow lynx from my dreams with my life, yet I had never once spoken of him to anyone ever.
Aside from water and the few herbs I found in the cave I could eat without decimating their microcosm, I spent days laying perfectly still beside the fresh tracks of a hare which went back and forth each night to graze on a source of grassland beneath the light snow. With what must have been an ancient family heirloom ci’nal with its perfect balance and scenic bone handle carvings, I gently severed the head off the hare with deep respect. And then as restitution for the female with young I carried a sack full of greens I had found buried under a light patch of snow back to the entrance to her lair so her young would grow strong off their mother’s milk. I did this often so that it was less of a peace offering and more of a means of ensuring the survival of her young.
The most memorable event in hunting was out in the snow for camel with my makeshift kri’tak spear. I feared my motor skills and age of the ci’nal would damage it beyond repair. Where I lay in ambush even the slightest air current change and snow would give way my vantage point from above a shallow crevice running below and ruining that ambush. Said ambush did not go exactly as planned and I woke in that shallow crevice with warm blood running across my face. I washed the wound with clean snow before wrapping my head and pulling my hood back up. The round two-toed tracks of the camel had only my blood visible in them for a few steps. What should have been an easy kill and provided me with all the meat I would need turned into a hunt of epic proportions. A camel chase was almost always a fortnight’s act of futility, but I was not starving and with the aid of the spirits guiding me provided that my odds were not so bad. However, I was severely lacking in the ingrained motor function which was responsible for the failure of my last ambush.
I was about to search for traces of other easier prey when suddenly before me sat Ba’krii. He was silent but close enough I only looked up when I thought I felt a breath upon my skin. Staring into those endless glacier blue eyes which mirrored my own I took a short quiet gasp as I reminded myself to not be afraid. Raspy words echoed in my mind, “Foresee the Balance.” Then Ba’krii turned and leapt up over the edge of the crevice and was gone.
This was not the first he had spoken these words. To hunt easier prey meant less for other predators, and to exclusively hunt a rapidly reproducing prey could have long term effects on the predators who relied on them for food when their longer lasting hunt failed. Besides, I owed this camel its death as males were highly competitive for harems and would not be offered the clean death I brought with me. As a predator of intellect our only advantage is foresight and preparation. Those without foresight must scrutinize their own intellect. Failure to predict and maintain the balance deprives them of everything their ancestors harnessed to provide them with their existence.
After careful preparation for what had become a lengthy chase across frozen steppes I took off after the camel at an even and careful pace. Often when I wanted to stop, I would catch a glimpse of what seemed like Ba’krii just ahead of me. The Ohnesh frequently called out to me from the ground to be balanced. The pulse of Matar flowed hot through my veins. The tracks doubled back on me, my quarry aware death followed behind him in the white. The snow from the humidity whiting out the blanket of frozen grass on the ground and the sky easily hid the camel’s white fur. Only the crushed earth from his wide feet gave me any indication that my path was true. I knew this was not a sprint to the finish. All of my physical training had provided me with the stamina to run for days with only short breaks to search for the tracks of my quarry to endure this marathon my ancestors had so refined with great resilience to hunt such prey. The flagon of water I had brought with me had been laced with herbs and grain to help keep up my strength and heighten my senses.
The predator’s eyes sat in front of the skull, triangulating the distance to the prey who’s eyes sat on either side of their skulls to sense danger. The camel was extremely adapted to this climate with its wide hooves keeping his feet from sinking into the snow. The round wicker soles I had made from bamboo and laced to my boots gave me a similar advantage. The soft rabbit skin I had molded to cover both my face and feet from the biting cold. Polarized lenses from my ocular implant kept me from going blind in this environment thick with reflective UV from Pator instead of the traditional bone ovals cut with horizontal slits. The thick eyelashes of the camel provided a similar although less technologically refined information and effect. It was not just the polarization that my implants had access to. There were numerous spectrums and filters I had used while observing the spirits and I was baffled for an explanation as to what the implants could not provide. The tools I needed to form a hypothesis required larger tools and cooperative subjects. What I did have was access to electromagnetic energy which measured over the 700 nanometers our cones used for seeing red was measured by. This provided me with the edge of more swiftly detecting fresh tracks and stool and mass spectrometry of the chemicals I encountered.
I could not let the camel have rest to eat and I could eat and drink on the run. Slowly but surely the camel’s tracks became more clear and I had only been taking chase for just around for 60 straight hours. Without food or water and moving at such a pace he would eventually collapse from sheer exhaustion. I would catch up to him first. He sought out a hiding place to rest but in having closed the gap so significantly, his heated body made finding his hidden spot simple enough. My combination of foresight and spiritual guidance left me little to focus on but my breathing and steady pace.
I was closing the distance and the pace of the camel had begun to falter. While my natural eye was constantly trying to find patterns in the snow and interpreting them as my quarry, my implant had more information and detected the camel as it lumbered into sight. He sped up a bit at that point sensing the danger not far behind. I had to force myself not to do the same with my prey so close at hand. The next time he entered the view of my augmented eye I burst into action to close the gap as swiftly as possible. With so little rest this was my last chance. Sprinting alongside the camel out of harm's way of those deadly rear hooves I timed my jump well to twist my body mid air as I threw the spear aiming behind the camel’s shoulder. I dropped immediately into a rolling dive but the camel seemed nearly unphased except for a sort of ripple that spread throughout his entire body and the gout of blood that shot out across the snow. It was already dead but didn't fall for a good thirty meters. After disassembling the spear I cut open his belly from anus to sternum, pulling out the steaming giblets only to crawl inside the carcass for warmth while I slept. I had dragged the bowels a good distance from my kill, devoured the heart raw while it was still warm, and then ensured a well deserved rest within the cavity I had cut out.
By the time I woke the giblets I had lay aside had already been scavenged while no such beast had dared enter my makeshift bedding. A single eye had been pecked out but otherwise the corpse was intact. My kri’tak made short work of cutting the rest of the camel into manageable pieces which I could drag through the snow over the next few days to my cave. Using the bamboo as a spit I had roasted camel meat the entire way home. I mused to myself while smoking a cigarette after a meal that a glass of wine would have washed it down nicely if I had brought some with me. My flagon of tea was all that I was going to get. And so concluded my first camel hunt on the ancestors lands of Matar.
YC 120.04.04
Water forever became my spiritual element with my blue facial tattoo during my Voluval or Test of Destiny, even in death I always found my corpse frozen floating in the ocean of space in the last images of my remaining camera drones. This element, water, 水 in its Matari form became a symbol tattooed on my body although most capsuleers of the Tribes seemed inclined to use 火 for fire, especially if the pod pilots whose tattoo was red would find themselves enveloped in a fiery death when they lose both a ship and its crew members as another symbol of purification in death.
They say youth is wasted on the young. My father aims to avoid that scenario with me. It is often his duty as clan shaman, especially as my father, to offer spiritual advice. With me this went far beyond the Andesh and Ohnesh and directly into the path fate would choose for me and to provide direction the ancestors knew would provide the greatest benefit I would surely need. It was up to me to earn the trust of the Seibestor. Bringing me straight to a star system, Eram, populated with Sebiestor space stations and was to immediately begin to gain a reputation as a pod pilot when only 14 years old. However, with the guidance of the ancestors and my animal spirit I could not and would not fail them nor my father.
After some hectic fighting on the war front from where we both lost and won back virtually every system that was contested I split my corporation to join a wormhole star system to gather funds for the war effort. I lost and gained a great deal of Isk in this endeavor, but I gained significantly more in highly valuable experience in operating in star systems connected only by unstable wormholes. Between ops I spent time increasing my reputation with the corporations that would assist me in my ultimate goal to replace the Midular clan with my own as the Sebiestor Chieftain. Running security in the wormhole provided me with an enormous wealth of experience in a very short amount of time taking just a few days out of each week from working for the Tribal Liberation Force. Especially when I started enforcing security to the point of actually closing wormholes to our hidden Class One star system which always had at least one wormhole leading to high security empire space. Nothing larger than a battlecruiser could ever travel through these medium sized tunnels through spacetime. I even set up our own control tower at a strategic moon. It was only after getting trapped on the wrong side of the tunnel that I had a quick learning curve on navigating back to the mapped star cluster we called EVE. Our star had been designated with a six digit number preceded by a letter J, as with all such stars only accessible by wormholes were so named. Type A were class one and type E were class five. Protecting the Matari miners in this system became a great source of pride in my career and shone on my resume as a pivotal point in how I did more than mobilize military fleets and worked with my fellow Tribesmen who supported our efforts against the Ammarian Empire.
But it was not only members of the Minmatar Republic which composed my faction warfare corporation. I was not so much a fascist or even a nationalist but a patriot. That distinction was important to me so long as our goal of rescuing those Minmatar who wished to throw off their yolk were free to do so. A full third of the Minmatar race was still beneath the feet of their Amarrian holders and I was willing to do anything within the law of the sword to remedy the situation. I did not care about red tape, only what needed to be done and by any means of bringing this great wish to fruition. My goals align well with those of the Elder Fleet.
YC 120.10.10
The Balance is typically the responsibility of every individual within their personal grove. This is not always the case when an entire planet hangs on the precipice. In such times a traditional school without borders needs be formed for both education in what the Balance demands of us all and for the training required to force others to keep our worlds habitable. These worlds our honored ancestors have toiled for so many generations does not deserve the selfishness of a privileged generation and corporate greed. Once we can no longer call these worlds home we are forced to abandon them as any other rock tumbling through space. The more drastic the conditions the more dramatic the measures which must be taken against the corporations, land owners, and their so called guardians. A Druid should only be an individual of peace and wisdom. Woe unto the worlds who have declined to heed the wisdom of their Shaman and now face the alumni of these schools who have been left with little choice in becoming an organization of Druids of War. What words they did choose to ignore from our Shamans needs now must be paid for in their blood. After all, blood makes the grass grow green.
YC120.12.22
At this time the Agency had initiated Operation Permafrost. I felt the need to participate in exploiting these Ice Dwarf phenomenon as I remapped my attributes to train up my large projectile weapons, swap to my Standard class implants, and build cerebral accelerators to greatly reduce the time I would spend training up to class V in order to operate tech two weaponry on a Minmatar battleship. This would come to be extremely useful in protecting the inhabitants of the star system within the class A wormhole system. As ice was my element of choice this Operation Permafrost felt as if it were a part of my destiny in working towards the position of Chieftain of the Sebiestor Tribe.
End of the annual Book of Todram YC 120 by Lynn Yi