Darkness Falls on a Dark Land, Part 4

Perhaps because of the ideas I’ve developed about my lineage, I took an interest in fertility goddesses.  Every culture has them, just as they have their own pantheons, and all of it links together somehow even the ones that flatly contradict each other.  It’s always a case of discovering the sliver of truth in the exaggerations that inevitably develop over time.  Do I believe in the divine?  Before the Omoxians there was a vast Consortium, since lost to history.  The Omoxians themselves never believe it existed, but the Vanadi do.  Their stories of the Hybrids force them to.  Before the Consortium, there were the Primordials, who crafted the Andiron Ewer, the very sacred vessel Trey the Conqueror sought to rediscover, the source of the ancient connection to what we call the Pasear Field, which I suppose is the last bit of magic in the universe, what allows us to traverse vast stretches of space in a small amount of time.  Science has taught countless cultures how to achieve the technology possible to accomplish this, but whenever they get together to discuss this breakthrough, they realize that at some point in their histories it was determined that it would never be done, and then someone did it.  The common explanation of the Pasear Field came about because of it, not because it exists in any tangible sense, but because that’s the variable in every equation, or the name we all use for it.  The Primordials were the first of us to find it, and what we now call the Chest of Trey is what was used as the first engine.

Something like that is what allows me to believe in fertility goddesses, what would make it possible for an Omoxian to mate with a human, regardless of whether it ever really happened.  Interspecies genetic combinations are by definition impossible without a little artificial support, and such work is too rare to consider on a wide scale, and yet by what might be considered a miracle it does happen on occasion, and for me that means divine intervention, as such a fertility goddess operating under the most extreme circumstances possible.  It requires a leap of faith.  Of all the cultures and all the pantheons, the only one I ever studied that could have produced such an act would of course come from the Vitell, the most saintly of all the Alliance.  (It’s said that their fall from grace is only a matter of time, so there are those who actively look forward to it, because the form it takes should be quite interesting indeed.)  The Vitell fertility goddess is known as Modoc, and it is a trickster.  Unlike other cultures, Modoc can be male as well as female.  I tend to believe that all theoretical gods are tricksters, and it’s no wonder that Lord Phan is all but considered a god at this point, because he was himself a trickster.  It’s said he still exists, or at least exists out of time, or perhaps a combination of both, the perfect Tikanni, and perhaps an incarnation of Modoc, but I will discuss that later.  He wouldn’t be the only member of the Alliance of Five I would consider a possible incarnation.

In my excavations on Omox, I’ve discovered quite a few totems of Modoc.  Omoxians long ago forsook organized religion.  They believe themselves to be divine, and they glow, so perhaps they’re right.  Such a physical characteristic would certainly have helped Trey convince Alfred the Great that he was an angel, at any rate.  The existence of clay statues on Omox would seem to either be a contradiction or a relic of the early days of the Alliance, before the Battle of Shibal.  Though lost to time, Shibal was said to be the traditional capital of the Omoxian Emirate, from the days before the initial visitations of the Tikanni, around the start of the modern human calendar.  Omoxians are loathe to share too much of themselves with outsiders, even fellow members of the Alliance, probably because of the Tikanni, so most of what we know has always been hearsay at best, legend, anything but concrete fact.  It was only because I had the blessing and assistance of an Omoxian from the Alliance Senate that I was able to begin my work on Omox.  Although I do tend to take Bondquan for granted, she has proven useful, but only to an extent.  She must make constant reports back to the Omoxian senator, and to the Omoxian government itself, which necessarily makes her reluctant to provide any additional assistance other than filing the endless series of permits that make this possible.

She says she doesn’t recognize Modoc, either the name or the artifacts I’ve uncovered.  Still, they exist and there’s no getting around that.  It’s the first layer of confirmation, and it counts as progress, and a gratifying one at that.  If Modoc exists on Omox, the goddess could easily have been present in Trey’s visit to Earth, or at the very least confirm that what everyone knows about the Conqueror is not after all the whole story.  Should Shibal prove to be real, it would be another giant leap, but I can’t allow myself to become carried away.