A Chronicle of the Blue Sky

Description: Who are the Daevites, really?

How did they spread their crimson banner, trampling entire empires in their path, not one, not two, but three times?

Well depending on who you ask, it’s four times, maybe even five.

And perhaps even zero.

I: nascence - dyuləs - 421 BCE
Back then, my people were not yet called the Daeva.

Back then, there was no reason to. Daywa in our tongue meant 'holy,' 'divine,' and 'god' - a word fit for spirits and deities, not a lowly tribe of the steppe. It was a name we would not - could not - give ourselves. Instead, we named ourselves like any other tribe - after our most holy symbols and totems.

So, back then, we still called ourselves the Ataraŋ - 'the people of the horse'.

There were other names too, of course. The Chinese called us the Beidi, meaning 'Northern Barbarians', as for them, that was what we were. Perhaps that was not entirely inaccurate. Unlike our western relatives and the Chinese, we were averse to cities and agriculture, and instead lived a simple life in our tents and upon our steeds. Most importantly though, the art of writing was still privy to us. After all, without a way to pass down its tales unaltered, what is a culture worth?

Nothing, is the answer.

We could have become nothing. If it weren't for our luck, we would have been washed away by the waters of time, eroded by the winds of eternity. A cruel fate, but not an uncommon one.

Claiming to want company, Jiaruan, a Chinese girl taken and raised by our people, led me along to the edge of camp every afternoon, teaching me her language. When I found the foreign syllables, squirming on my tongue, too hard to pronounce, Jiaruan sighed and resolved to teach me the characters they used in their homeland. Transcribing sound with symbol was a concept foreign to me, but it certainly came easier to me than speaking Chinese, so we continued our daily lessons.

Soon, we ran into roadblocks. When I tried to string words together to form phrases and sentences, I found that I could not. The numerous particles of my tongue, half-words as I like to think of them, were impossible to represent. At this Jiaruan scratched her head and offered no solution. They didn't have that problem in Yang, she explained. Their language was much simpler in grammar than ours.

I, however, was adamant to write. I wanted to scrawl out lines of poetry and tabulate numbers in my language, like Jiaruan could do in hers. Eventually, I found a solution, one that I am still proud of. Instead of assigning meaning to symbols, I assigned sounds to them. One sound for each syllable in my language.

And so, I began to write.

Though writing began first as a hobby of mine, it soon became a way to render meat and milk for the table. I offered myself up as a messenger, but instead of memorizing messages to later recount, I simply wrote them down with red mudstone on whatever I had.

One night, one of my clients offered me bread and board for the evening, which I graciously accepted. He was a powerful chief, with connections to the matriarch of our people herself. That night, their daughter came to me as I wrote - not recording messages, but rather composing poetry.

"What are you doing?" she asked, as I shifted one hand over my inkwell, making sure the long hair now draping onto my work surface did not fall into it.

Not that it would have mattered, of course. Red on red would be unnoticeable, but the image of streaks of ink sprayed across my birch-bark sent a shiver up my spine.

"Making a record," I answered with as much curtness I could muster without appearing rude, hoping that the girl would take the hint and leave me alone.

She did not.

"So what does this say?" she then asked, pointing to the rightmost column of text.

"Ceaselessly raining, the grassy wilds-"

"And this?" the girl asked, circling a grapheme to its left. "It's got the same-"

"This is the time when sheep grow fat in plenty."

"So you can rearrange symbols to write anything?" Whether she was confused or impressed, I was not sure. I nodded.

"My name's Paynät! Can you write that?" she pleaded. A simple name. With my finger I drew the strokes of my script in neat lines. Giddy with delight, she ran off, presumably to tell her siblings of the strange man out back who wrote her name.

The next week, I was told to meet the Matriarch by the banks of the Lugəstula river.

Word of my invention had spread.

When I introduced writing to the Matriarch and the herd of priestesses and clan chiefs behind her, she leaned over my shoulder in much the same way the girl had. As I had with the girl, I wrote her name - Dartah - down. For the sake of fairness, I asked the names of everyone intrigued, and wrote them down as well. The Matriarch, of course, asked for more than the girl. She asked me to write down a few sentences which she dictated, before asking me to lead her finger over each of the characters, sounding them out.

When I was finished, she took a step back, and her possé shuffled accordingly.

"I only wish you had told me of your presence of mind earlier, in keeping for yourself away so great a tool" she muses finally.

"What, what do you mean?" I responded. I felt myself shrinking over my sheet of bark.

"Oh, nothing," she answered, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips, before turning to the crowd.

"This man has bestowed upon us a weapon more potent than our bows and spears," the Matriarch announced. "Though I have united our people and conquered myriads more with the blessing of the Azure Sky and our Old Mother Earth, this man...shall make us immortal. From now on, we shall be one with the never-dying gods of Heaven, Earth, and Sea. Let our names ring forever resonant across the steppe!"

For a brief second, all was silent, as if even nature had bore witness to the Matriarch's proclamation.

And then, applause.

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