The Khans Defeat The Sky Eater

The Gemaian Hordes tell a story to their children, a story that is the basis for their entire way of life, from how they conduct war to their religious beliefs. This legend is taken so seriously that Khans have been deposed for expressing doubt in it. The story is about Encroh, a wolf that was one of the primordial gods that created Fujiyama, the origins of humanity, and the creation of the hordes.

The Dawn of Time

The universe, in the beginning, was a great owl. No one knows how it came to be, or why it changed, or what came before or even what will come after. Regardless of how it happened, it did, and the universe hated to be empty and alone. And so it decided to lay three great eggs, and it spread its enormous black wings around them to keep them warm. The first egg that hatched became the world we live on, and it was cold and without life. Distraught, the great owl wrapped its wings tighter around the other two, but it squeezed the largest egg too close to its heart, and the egg became too hot, and it hatched into a great ball of fire that became the sun, releasing dragons from within itself upon the infant world below it. The great owl learned from its two mistakes, and kept the final egg in just the right way. It hatched into the sky, and it lit the world below when the sun went away each night to find somewhere warmer, only to come back to its mother each morning. But when the sun is close, the sky burns, and that is why it becomes black by the time the sun feels warm enough to go looking again. As the sky heals, it sheds bits of itself that become the spirits. Those spirits are our ancestors, and we will fly to them one day.

The Birth of the Hungry One

As time passed, the universe grew more and more attached to the world we live in and the sky above, for it is afraid that like the sun, the world and sky would start to leave it to seek out something better. As it squeezed ever-tighter to show its love and to stop the world and sky from running away, pieces began to break off of tall mountains. In the embrace of the love of the great owl, these would become the first creatures that were neither dragon nor spirit. Many of these still roam the world, such as the great sharks of the sea and the horses we so cherish. But the greatest of these beasts was Encroh, the Hungry One, the First Wolf who stood taller than the sky and whose bones we stand on even now. Encroh was always hungry, for nothing in the world could fill its belly properly, and even so the other beasts were usually more clever or faster than it was. Starving, it began to take bites out of the sky. For untold years it ate little bits of the sky, consuming with each bite thousands of the spirits. Some lucky ones escaped its mouth, and those are the kami we know, the lucky ones, which is why we treat them with respect. Anything that lucky is not to be treated with contempt. Now, the Sky Eater Wolf could not digest the bones of the spirits, only the divinity, and so it would periodically spit up great mouthfuls of spirit bones. Since spirits can not be killed, the bones would heal, but without divinity, they became us. They became all people.

Shadow of the Beast

Each pile of spirit bones that fell from the mouth of the Hungry One went on to become a new group of people, populating the world as the great wolf traveled in search of food to fill its endless belly. The first of these, of course, were our people, the first Gemaites. We understood then as we settled endless expanses of earth that we were all wrong. We are spirits without divinity, looking longingly towards the blue sky of our ancestors. We were made to swim among the stars, but because of the greed of the Hungry One, we wander the world of mortal flesh instead. For many generations, we lived on this world and wandered and hid from the great wolf, but at first it showed no interest in us. It had learned long ago that creatures of the earth were not fitting prey. Rabbits were too small for it, deer too swift, and monkeys too clever. But we, we are just right for the jaws of Encroh. These years of being prey molded us into what we are. We could not outrun the wolf, so we tamed horses. We could not see where it would move next, so we began to run over this world. It chased away the animals we eat, so we invented our bows. In its relentless pursuit, we could not afford to grow food in the soil, so the wolf gave us our greatest gift: our ferocity. For more time than anyone could remember without going man, we trampled the world escaping the Hungry One. We ran over mountains and made them flat. We crushed valleys into the earth and carved the paths of mighty rivers. We became strong, and still no one of our hordes were a match for the beast. So we had to do the one thing no horde has done since, we became one people for the first time.

Battle To End The World

Khan Chongaw was the first and last Khan of Khans, he who defeated each of his opponents to unite the hordes into the first and last Great Horde of Gemai. It was then that we, the Gemaites, claimed our land and together rode as one for the fate of the world. The great wolf Encroh was so large that even with all of us together we were as ants to the beast, but as anyone knows a colony of ants together can still be dangerous. We pierced the creature with a hundred thousand arrows, we slashed at it with a million swords, and we died by the hundreds and thousands. But still we perservered. Through a hundred nights we fought, and through a hundred days we died. Then, finally and blessedly, the great wolf shuddered and fell, the weight so great that it fully split the pieces of the world apart. From the wolf's corpse all the people it had eaten emerged, but they had been changed by the demon's belly. These moved south from us, and became the empires of elves. Ourselves, we stayed as far north as north goes, for we knew that one day the great wolf would heal its wounds, and it would come back. And deep inside that wolf lays the rest of our divinity. The khans debate about how to steal it back, but the ending is all the same. We will kill Encroh when the world ends, we will take back our spirits and return to the blue skies of our ancestors, and the mother owl will take us back in her loving arms, and all will be well.

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