Granted, the world seed was optimized to result in the most viable sapient species, which wasn’t how natural evolution worked. But some parts of these primates had to have come from natural evolution that happened somewhere else, which was brilliant.
He would’ve had more context and information if he had his stellar core, but since that was on the dark side of the moon, this high resolution first hands experience of the primates was about as entertaining and fresh as it could get for the youngest constellation serpent in the Dominion.
Erul’s people had a unified racial identity called ‘Aslaman,’ which encompassed their limited gene pool. Dark hair, brown skin, dark green eyes. Aslamans named themselves by their societal roles. Erul was a hunter. His full identifier was Erul the hunter. Tarsel, his oldest brother, was a soldier; he was known as Tarsel the brave.
Aslamans lived in relative isolation at the outskirts of the three valley kingdoms of the first civilization. They were affiliated with neither but had trade relations with two of them, with more favorable attitudes about one of them that occasionally shared resources with them in rough times.
These relationships were at least a hundred years old and were maintained primarily by a coupling ritual where Aslamans paired their young adults with the visiting trader families to align their incentives.
The two kingdoms, Karatoca and Vaaltorenia, operated on rival systems, with the latter opting for a more aggressive conquest of surrounding settlements than the former. Both kingdoms enslaved their subjects in some way, but Karatoca was the one that tried softer methods first.
Aslamans were more partial to be ruled by Karatoca as a result.
The key part of that was a shared belief system in the deities that they worshipped. It was far from an epoch of organized, monotheistic religions, but the Aslamans had been geographically close to the settlements that eventually became the kingdom of Karatoca. They worshipped the same things, Aslamans choosing a more purist, simple version of it.
Balor knew this belief system had something to do with their apparent docility when it came to the topic of killing the dark lord. In the days that he spent so far, he had talked and explored every corner of the village to find everything he could about it.
It didn’t help that Erul was insulated from most of it.
The belief system itself had no identifier. It was a concept inherently known to all. For Balor, the idea was buried beneath two layers of translation. The only thing he could relate to was a pseudo-identifier: ‘The Call.’
The Call was based on several pantheons of gods, a set of lore that had been passing from storyteller to storyteller with a few accompanying artefacts—paintings drawn on cave walls and scrolls of animal hides.
Aslamans limited the access to The Call based on the named roles of an individual. Erul was only concerned with the pantheon of hunting. He’d been socially conditioned to never really show any interest in other aspects. It was considered embarrassing, and the belief itself prevented generalization by rewarding specialists.
The Gods could only bless someone based on their role. If one’s attention was divided among other irrelevant gods, their prayers got scattered in the wind, making them weaker.
Balor had to find someone who was knowledgeable and allowed to be a generalist.
It was the young ones.
Children who had no named roles assigned had the full freedom to pray and worship all the gods. The role giving usually happened around the age of eleven Veilthornian years for males, and twelve for females.
Erul had been one of those once, but his memories were a blur, and he had no high-resolution information about The Call anymore. It was rather odd to forget things in such a short period of time, given that he was only about twice as old. Balor attributed it to the nature of The Call itself. Erul must have willfully forgotten all the unrelated things that he knew growing up.
An eleven-year-old male was hard to engage in conversation with. They were elusive creatures in themselves, never found in one calm gathering. He met one at a cliff by a lake where a band of children was entertaining themselves by jumping off into the water from it.
Needless to say, the conversation hadn’t gone anywhere worthwhile, even with a willing participant.
He thought a female would be harder. Aslamans guarded their females with all sorts of protective measures, and immature young ones especially so. They were never to be found by themselves unattended.
Luckily, Erul had a relative with a young daughter, and he managed to talk with her about The Call. The child was more than eager to talk with him, and she told him everything that she knew.
She told him The Call came from the underground. This wasn’t something strictly secret. The entire belief system relied on ancient cave paintings and a set of stories associated with them.
There was something in the way she was talking that made it very obvious she was unwilling to tell him certain things. The Call was divided into gender roles in addition to the given roles. Getting information outside of a gender role was even more difficult than breaching the given roles as an adult.
Balor had to compel her to speak with a slight molecular change to her inhibitors. He used his dispersed soul matter to perform the surgery, and he managed to trip her brain just enough for her mouth to keep going. It was a negligible use of his powers, virtually undetectable for the ghost serpent.
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According to what she told him, there was an underground entrance near the village below the sacred site of The Call. Balor had already seen the place; it was a sporadic array of square-profile wooden pillars bearing the name and symbol of each pantheon God carved in vertical letters.
Males, whether children or not, were only permitted to perform tasks at the surface. The cave entrance remained closed with polished wooden logs, never to be touched by male hands. All maintenance tasks inside were meant to be performed by the oldest female children under the guidance of some elders, where needed.
Balor made the girl fall asleep after extracting all the information from her. She wouldn’t be sure whether she divulged it all in a dream or not when she woke up much later.
He was pleased with his first little investigation. He had perhaps found the first clue towards Veilthorn’s failure. It could be nothing, but he had to investigate it in person.
There’s no reason why the ghost serpent would plant this proto-religion.
It went against their whole Dark Lord enterprise if the population was being held back from proper participation by a simple belief system.
At the very least, this was something else. A second axis of influence.
Balor snuck out of his thatched roof mud hut later that night. Erul and his brother were living in the same house, but Tarsel had the night watch at the village wall facing the forest. He had to shapeshift again to gain access to this underground lair. He was fully capable of swapping bodies at a whim; he could just snatch one of the children in their sleep if he wanted.
He decided on a much less invasive method. What he was going to do didn’t require a full identity. Nobody was going to be at the sacred site at the dead of the night—nobody that should be there, at least.
He could shapeshift roughly into the girl that he talked with. He had been close enough to absorb her physical appearance.
Finding a dark crevice in the mountain path along the way, he changed his form. He dispersed one-third of the soul matter that he needed to maintain Erul’s form as he warped into the smaller, leaner frame of the girl.
His outfit was inappropriate for the task, because Erul’s rags simply slid off her shoulders. He had to maintain appearances. Taking some soul matter back, he crafted a thin fabric outfit over his new form, similar to the single-layer flowy fabric the girl wore during their talk.
Preparations completed, he hiked up the mountain on his new form, which was the size of the girl with the muscles of a man. He had to calibrate his steps because each one pushed this new body to jump off the ground.
He didn’t plan on meeting anyone at the sacred site, and he didn’t plan on interacting with another person in any capacity. This shapeshifting was too low resolution in terms of behaviors and mannerisms. That wasn’t going to be enough in a village with a few hundred individuals who knew each other.
If anyone else were at the sacred site, it would be some hidden personal ritual. Erul knew about what the villagers called ‘bad blood rituals.’ These things involved animal sacrifices to air out grievances or to quench other primate desires and vices. Anyone doing rituals in the shadows would certainly never want to be found. This made his task easier.
Ha arrived at the sacred site in the dim moonlight. The girl wouldn’t have been brave enough to hike the road up here in the dead of the night on her own without a source of light. Balor didn’t mind being seen by others. Even if the rumor spread, it could get dismissed as a child being afflicted with something.
At worst, the girl would have to swallow some bitter concoction for a few days, a small sacrifice in the grand scheme of things.
The towering wooden pillars loomed over him, silhouetted against the moonlight filtering through the trees. Some fires still burned beneath offering stones, beneath them with wicks and residue resin left in pottery lamps.
Mountain fog settled around the pillars on the relatively flat ground, cascading from higher surrounding peaks. He weaved through them on his short legs, making sure to stick to shadows. There was some activity in the distance. He heard hushed voices, no doubt a bad blood ritual in progress.
He arrived at the closed entrance to the underground lair. The girl would’ve been exhausted by the time she lifted one of the logs, but Balor had his dispersed soul matter to help.
He couldn’t blow them away with apparent telekinesis of course. He assumed someone was observing him, and if a child performed a miracle, that would set off a rumor worse than a night-walking affliction.
He used the full strength of Erul’s muscles while his soul matter did things in unnoticeable ways. He pulled each polished log out of the way, arranging them in a neat pile next to the entrance. It took a while in this disadvantaged form, but he removed enough to hop over and squeeze through.
The cave was engulfed in pitch darkness. Knowing no one was down here in a sealed cave, he used his soul matter more freely, floating across instead of climbing wet rock surfaces on his limbs. The girl’s shape dissipated as Balor became himself, passing through the gaps like a soul matter meteor again.
He reached an underground cavern.
Once there, he looked at everything all at once.
He dispersed his soul matter in higher concentration, filling every crack and crevice of the cave—spreading himself wide. He found what he was looking for right away. It was stretched across a flat wall.
There was a huge artwork carved into a big patchwork of animal hide. Each patch had a story to tell in its intricate drawings.
Balor knew what they depicted right away.
The coming of other serpents.
Somehow, on those animal hides, these primates had drawn a perfect story of celestial beings coming from the stars, crashing into an empty world, seeding it with a tree of life, and presiding over them in the form of many gods.
How did they figure that out?
This could’ve happened a million different ways. These cave paintings could have come from the time when the first hominid got magics from the ghost serpent. That definitely belonged in the age of caves.
The story was too high resolution to have survived the languages. This was a nondescript village that he picked at random. The line from that first hominid to this was blurry at best. If this story were here, then it definitely meant all or most of the other belief systems would be built on the same foundations.
Somehow, that wasn’t the most interesting thing on that wall.
There were many animal hides on the wall. At a glance, it looked like their attempt to redraw the same story. He saw patterns that couldn’t be mere attempts at replications. The story varied in some animal hides, no two having the same elements despite starting and ending in similar ways.
Balor felt a spark at the core of his being when he realized what they were.
Each one of the animal hides depicted a dead serpent.
The surprises didn’t end there either. There was one long strip underneath all the drawings at the very bottom of the wall. It depicted something that he couldn’t parse at all.
It looked like a random mess of symbolic things drawn in a very specific way. There were eyes, toothy mouths, and ocean waves, rocks, stars, and moons all mixed in one artwork. Curved lines flowing around them integrated them all into a single design, not a spot left blank on that long roll of animal hide.
It would’ve taken the combined effort of all other drawings to put it together. Based on some astute observations, this single artwork could’ve been the work of several generations.
Balor couldn’t feel what it was trying to convey as a serpent, but switching over to Erul, he felt fear unlike any other. It was a remarkably different flavor of fear from the one that he felt towards the Zartiga with big teeth. That was a blunt sort of fear for survival.
The artwork before him depicted a primal fear.
They are not docile to the Dark Lord. They’re more afraid of whatever that is.