23:50, Rotation 263 / 365, 232 AE, -67.828734, -69.173516, Reath
And now she was flying, hovering above the hurtling water.
Leaning forward into the curl, she pushed her back foot toes down hard to carve the foil’s blade into the surging green face. Unconsciously she blurted “woah!” when the foil responded instantaneously, and she steadied herself to recover from overturn, and then she realized that this was exactly that barely in control feeling she so loved. Here, at the peak, the wave face was tall and steep, so that even so high aloft she could reach out and brush the rushing water with her hand. She could feel the wave’s power pulsing against her fingertips as it skipped against the slipstreams.
But now she could see the breaking lip crumble into the foam ball in front of her. Still high on the wave, she fluttered out as many speed generating pumps as she dared- pushing her craft up and down to nurse the grasp that would accelerate her downwards, before diving into a big bottom turn. She refused to be eaten alive by the dreaded closeout section!
She shot down, and along, and then passed the lip of the collapsing wave, skirting dangerously close to the roiling foam edges. As the wave smashed into the trough- the empty space just in front of the wave where the water is sucked into the devouring maw, it emitted a gurgling roar before erupting into prismatic spray. She shot through a wall of coarse droplets and into a fine mist, swinging around the foam ball in a wide arc, before reaching the other side of the peak where the wave now warped, bent and began to reform.
“WOO!!” she was barely aware that she had let loose another whoop as she threw her arms up to throw her momentum further.
She made it to the lip. The next section pitched but still peeled. She turned her waist to look down the line, her arms and upper torso rotated to follow, gyrating through her hips and legs like a corkscrew into her heels, which smashed out an explosive top turn. An arc of spray sliced out under- she shredded it. Now, back aloft the highline, she followed through to dive bomb the next section. Before she dropped too far out back to the flats, she extended her ankles further, before standing up straight and tall to nestle the foil into a cruising trim. Which meant, for the uninitiated- she and the wave were one now, she did not need to climb up or down the face of the wave, but instead she was slotted right in the middle of it. Standing perfectly still, she went wherever the wave guided her, she need not fight it, for she was now in the pocket of the wave, the part of the wave that pulsed the greatest amount of energy.
Right here in the pocket, it looked like the rider was suspended midair, gliding alongside the rushing wall of water. Her figure was graceful and relaxed, leaning only slightly with the momentum that she surged, secure in the inertial bond between body and board. Her arms drifted behind her, betraying no effort. A soul surfer. The rumbling in her wake deafened as much as it soothed her with its crisp tones. As she hurtled high and fast, the air she displaced whipped what felt like gentle wind through her hair and across her face.
Surfing was true magick, and it made her feel profoundly free.
In this balletic dance with the raw force of nature, grace prevailed over brutality. Now she began to outpace the wave, so pirouetting with a quick turn back in, and a quick turn back out, that is, a roundhouse cutback- she neatly folded her foil wings right back into the pocket. It felt effortless and powerful at the same time. She likened it to tai chi [太极], using nothing but gentle force to manipulate raging power.
Then she hurtled past an all too familiar silhouette of an orcan rocking to an arched cobra pose, ready to pounce for the catch that Githarie had already caught.
“OW! Ah-bp,” glub, glub, glub.
The shadow was sucked into the rippling, bubbling, translucent wall of water. Githarie’s conquest had conquered him instead.
In her euphoria she had lost all perception of anything but her line but was now rudely startled out of her flow state.
Zholl, nineteen revolutions old, and Zhon, likewise, were riding much deeper in the inside to make the most of their shortboards, which could only take off on much steeper sections. When did they get here? How did she miss them paddling in? Was she so lost in her own surfing that she completely missed her own kith and kin, her very own blood, her bloody older siblings, paddling in?
Githarie carved up through the lip and over the crest to disengage from the wave. The foil let her pump and trim along by her own power for quite a distance, and she thought briefly of just pumping away. But she felt guilty, so she did a quick carve back to the wave, now in its final dying throes, to face her comeuppance.
“Sis, sha cut me!” Zhon barked, clutching his forearm.
The front wing – which was especially sharp for Githarie still had not divined its original purpose – had grazed it, leaving a long abrasion. She was lucky. If she had hesitated even just a moment to disengage, she could have lacerated him deeply.
“YA KOOK!”, he cursed.
“Foiling? That’s cheating for sure,” Zholl piped in as he paddled back towards them.
Zholl had noticed his sister coming in, stalled for just a bit later, so he could ride just a bit deeper, and had blown past his brother to snake the rest of the wave after he burned Githarie, that is, interrupting her ride. It was all his if his siblings couldn’t make.
He projected to the lip into a floater- skimming across the crumbling foam ball before smacking it with a tail whip, just as the entire wave was closing out. He hung momentarily midair, falling through the disintegrating lip of the wave. Just when he thought he wasn’t going to make it, his fins landed into the trough, and miraculously he did not bog. With the successful acid drop, he was now in the perfect spot for a slabby coverup, letting him pull into a short barrel that otherwise would have been Zhon’s.
Secretly he was thankful that Githarie had forced Zhon to tumble and bail, otherwise his twin brother would have burned him instead of his sister. But-
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“Foiling? That’s cheating for sure.”
“Sorry!”, she used her most chipper, singsong voice, but because she could not help but feel the least bit guilty – the ride was most definitely worth it, probably just a scratch – it didn’t convey any remorse whatsoever.
Zhon grabbed Githarie by the back of her blonde hairs and yanked her down into the water.
“Ahk! - gluhg-”
At this point we must address violence and its relation to the orcan race. For violence, at least on some level, is always permitted by the ethos of the Horde.
The Horde Master did not use the term ‘master’ to imply dominance or ownership, it was used more in line with the mostly forgotten Jhiryese term sifu [师傅] – indeed the mysterious Horde Master did not seem to govern at all and only emerged from hiding when necessary – but rather simply the mastery of knowledge, a tradition which continues. ‘Master’ was an honorific only, a title to pay respect to hard earned accomplishment. Indeed, the connotation of the orcan masters was that their duty was to serve, they were not the ones to be served. There were many Masters – War Masters and Magick Masters – but only one Horde Master.
The Horde Master, originally a mutant himself, was a magickian of the highest order, not a mere mage but a true wizard. The mutants were called such because they had tinkered with their essence to survive, but the accumulated alchemy was so haphazard and scattershot that the mutations began to run amok, and their progeny were cursed with tumors, or unable to reproduce themselves. The Horde Master’s only driving purpose was to cure this malady.
The elvans believe that the Horde Master’s experimentation on himself corrupted him. He changed himself into a monster and then made more monsters. A mutant had to be dipped in a vat of highly volatile protean, bacta, ectoplasm, and enzymes through which the old form would be penetrated, dissolved, and remodeled. Only then could the mutant then become what the Horde Master named ‘orcan’. The mutants who refused this baptism were fed to the dire wargs.
But those who did not refuse the call would emerge from the vat to find a new home, a new nation, a new body, a new freedom, and most importantly a new purpose. Only after the transformation could the saved understand what they had gained. It was up to the Horde to shepherd the mutants through this painful transcendence. The orcan was the rightful inheritor of Reath. Their bodies preserved the multitudes of phenotypes that would have been lost to the Catastrophe. They kept Reath’s ecological legacy alive. What legacy did the elvans ever protect?
But what was for certain, what could be agreed upon by both orcan and elvan, was that for the Horde to liberate themselves from elvan oppression, violence had been fundamentally necessary.
Not only had the orcans needed to resist the elvans in bloody combat, but for the Horde to have been borne, the Master had had to resort to vicious impressment, demanding mutants either be dipped, or die. There was no other way to generate the infantry numbers he needed to overthrow elvan rule in Protorca, march to Upper Reath along the mountain spines of the Red Path, march back with the liberated, and then finally bring them all here, their final and true home. The Exodus.
In the beginning no elvans paid this so-called ‘horde’ of ‘super mutants’ any mind, until it became too late, and the Horde successfully rampaged across Protorca, which for but a brief few revolutions came to be completely under orcan rule. Only after then did the elvans began to curse the orcan as the savage ‘orc’.
It was in the experience of orcans that the old world must be torn down so that it could be born anew. To police violence, to give the right to mete out violence to only some but not others would only mean oppression ossified and unending.
So, as Githarie snapped herself out of the water indignantly, she smashed Zhon across the nose much harder than he had yanked her hair with her left elbow.
A Lower Jhiryan physical art of manipulating the energy and potential within, but while she enjoyed watching them, she would never have the patience to join the elder villagers in the early rote.
He taught her how to pop-up! It was Zhon! Zahul taught Zholl, Zholl taught Zhon, and Zhon taught Githarie.
Their roles were reversed from that day, the hunted became the huntress, the hunter became the prey.
The boards were made of expanded polystyrene foam and coated with epoxy resin, Zholl’s was shaped with a squash tail and a beak nose. Zhon was riding Zholl’s old board, with a pintail and too much rocker to work well outside of the best conditions – it was orcan nature to overestimate oneself, hence why Zholl ditched it – and it was pretty dinged up too.
It was originally the blade of an elvan knight’s zanbato [斬馬刀], meant for cutting down dire warg mounts.
A pejorative used since the Lost Age by surfers to denote an overeager beginner who had not yet learned the rules of surf etiquette and was endangering others, but connotatively reclaimed as meaning a lifelong learner whose stoke will never die, it all depended on the speaker.
His discipline was just a bit better so he remembered to crane his neck back and check for any riders already on the wave, not just for her safety but his own. Basic surf etiquette.
Whu-pah.
He got pitted. So pitted.
He was properly chuffed that he got the barrel and Zhon did not. Waves, after all, were a limited resource.
This was a curious thing for orcans to transmogrify for they often wove nourishing chlorophyll into their locks, and it was unnerving to see hair reminiscent of the albinic hair of the elvans, Githarie had chosen this color out of rebelliousness. But also, partly to better contrast her skin, which was embarrassingly light. She spent too much time underwater, indoors, or wrapped up in a wetsuit.
To the Godlikes, the idea that a brother could so roughly treat his younger sister would have them aghast.
The two main languages of the nation-state of Jhirya were commonly known as “Jhiryese”, spoken by the Lower Jhiryans, versus “Jhiryan”, spoken by the Upper Jhiryans.
The common parlance for bundled deoxyribose nucleic acid chains, known in the Lost Age as chromosomes, responsible for protean regulation and expression in all organisms.
While the orcans preserved the essence legacy of Reath’s lost cryptids, instead the elvans preserved the psionic legacy of the Godlike Beings.
It was impossible with the added ranks for them to all take the Red Path again, and so they traveled by all three, brutalizing any elvan on their way home.
The Horde Master could not permit himself to give his fledgling anti-state what the Godlike Max Weber called ‘the monopoly on violence’ - that is, unless it was necessary during total war with the elvans.
By Horde custom, nearly every orcan was trained in at least one striking art and one grappling art, and the most popular orcan striking art by far was the Art of Eight Limbs – Muay Thai, passed down through the generations – which taught that the elbow could do far more damage than the fist.
