LIGHTNOVELONLINE 240 The Problem of the Velar
"It should come as no surprise to you now that when I say the Velar are not human, I am not exaggerating. Beyond even a lack of connection with what one might generally consider human characteristics, I would go so far as to say that they, in their most basic and wild form, are no better than a mindless monster from a children's fairy tale. It was truth I had known for a long time before that particular assault, but I had rejected it because I knew I was included in that number. Try as I might to distance myself from my race, I know that if I ever lose control, it could be the end of humanity as a species. At this point I am far too strong for the Great Csillacra to stop without some serious preparation, preparation we aren't even sure will work.
And yet, back then, I did nothing.
After the raid, I went back to my regular duties. I received uglier looks than I was used to, but there was work that needed to be done. I had done my part in the defense, what little I could, and there was nothing left for me after that. Emotions, particularly those related to association with other people, are hard for a Velar to grasp. I could not empathize with my neighbors, and I could not sympathize. Death, to me at least, was still just something that happened to living things.
While I was enraged that my happiness had been stolen from me, there was nothing that an unfeeling monster like myself could do about it. Those responsible had been captured or killed, leaving nothing for me to take out my anger on. Or, at the very least, there would have been nothing."
One of the Arboreal Maiden's eyes twitched as she recalled something.
"Before continuing, I would like you to take a guess as to what lies at the core of my staff. The exterior is obviously crafted from the Great Csillacra's branches, but the core is something completely different, something I found to be excellent at channeling split." The staff lifted itself off the ground and lazily floated over to Donovan. Diana stirred a little bit when he rested her head on his lap, but she remained asleep. "I don't expect you to get it right. Hell, I won't mind if you don't give an answer at all. If anything, I'm doing this for shock value and dramatic effect, cheesy as that may sound."
Donovan wordlessly took the staff an made a genuine attempt at inspecting it. He knew less than nothing about the art of woodworking and . . . staffery . . ? but it was obvious in an instant that it was incredibly high quality. Guessing that her request to inspect it implied that Donovan should be using split, he mustered what he could. Technically this wasn't his first step into the realm of mapping objects with split, he had been required to do so with his own body, but in an environment where his split was constantly 'evaporating' out of his control this process was much more difficult to do properly. This difficulty made him appreciate the qualities of the staff. The wood, while hard to push split through, was a pretty damn good insulator in comparison to the open atmosphere. The interior was interesting though, incredibly smooth to move split around in, but choppy in a way.
"It's like it's segmented or something."
"Well, that's one way to put it." The Arboreal Maiden summoned the staff back to her side. "The staff's core is made from a Velar's spinal column. More specifically, it belongs to the one Velar I hate more than any other.
See, despite the immense tragedy the Sage experienced at the hands of my ilk, he had received news we considered to be good at the time. One of our captives was incredibly responsive to the Great Csillacra's probing, far more so than I had been at first. He was even capable of maintaining some level of conversation with it. The Sage did not immediately authorize his release, he would have been a moron for doing so, but he made the same promise to him as he did to me.
In the mean time, the Sage did what he could to rebuild his life. He found a new wife, though I cannot recall if the relationship was the same as the one he held with his previous lover. He even had a child with her, a boy if my memory is correct. The cities here were devastated, but they were rebuilding. Everyone was rebuilding. Everyone was slowly getting their happiness back, though they would never admit it. All of which made the betrayal of that Velar all the more infuriating.
See, he wasn't anything like me, mentally at least. I could say for sure that he wasn't older, but he was definitely more clever. He waited out his sentence, morphed his personality into something personable to those around him. He even assumed a human form to increase the trust of others in himself, something he enlisted my assistance in. All of that, just so he could get back at the 'leader' for the humiliation of a defeat. If I had to guess, he had experience dealing with pack animals in his youth, and had grown accustomed to the act of taking over a group of social creatures by deposing their leader. In all likelihood, that experience was also the source of his heightened personability.
He let the Sage's wife bleed out whilst he tortured his son to death, all the while forcing him to watch. He reveled in the anguish, the despair, the grotesqueness of it all. Had I not stopped by to retrieve him for some duty of his, I am certain that the Sage would have died there. What followed my discovery of that plot is not something I have a decent grasp on. I am certain that I made life painful for that Velar for quite some time. Perhaps not as painful as the Watcher behind me, but certainly not a live he wants to be living."
Donovan raised an eyebrow. Something about what she said felt off.
"This spinal column is his, or rather, him. Even after all these years he still lives, reduced to less than a vegetative state. He has no brain and no heart, only his spine. For countless years, I have used this staff as a means of torturing him. Every time I send split up or down it, a horrendous pain strikes what remains of him. That was the punishment the Great Csillacra and I decided on for stealing what little the Sage had left.
He had become a broken person afterwards, capable of doing his job but little else. Two families he had built, two families he had lost. On multiple occasions he asked me to kill him, to end the suffering. I refused him every time. Day after day, he spiraled deeper into a depression he showed no signs of escaping, so I offered him a solution.
By this time, I had fully realized the monstrosity of my kind. I hated them. I was still capable of somewhat rational thoughts with regards to their existence though. The Velar were a problem, not their behavior but their existence. A galaxy in which Velar occupied the top slot on the food chain was a galaxy I could not justify the existence of, a sentiment that was growing among the humans I interacted with. So I offered them a solution.
Genocide.
I could make no promise as to when I would complete this task, nor if I would even be able to, but it was the only real fix to the problem of the Velar. They could all see my logic, but none of them believed that a single Velar could accomplish that task. I was not deterred. I started with the Velar that the Great Csillacra had imprisoned. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years worth of invasions had left it with quite the stockpile of subjects with which I could experiment on, find the weaknesses of, and for the first few years I dedicated myself to that task.
Most of what I know about Velar biology was discovered during that time. For example, the most efficient method of killing a Velar is to ambush them from behind, stabbing them in a small gap between their leg and hip with a sword coated in another Velar's blood. After that, all I needed to do was wait. They would end up dead in short order. If the blood method proved to be insufficient, that meaning the disparity in blood quality was too high, I would have to do things the hard way, removing their blood by force and replacing it with my own.
Along the way, I found a few interesting applications for various assets on my body. The first of which was the Heartbreaker toxins, one of which Titanyana was a victim of. I was vaguely aware of the possibility that blood could be sprayed into the air, but analysis of the organs of my kin revealed how they worked. Those same investigations showed me that I was in the minority when it came to not having the natural instinct to use them.
The second was the stomach. Did you know that the stomach of a Velar is a few orders of magnitude more efficient at extracting split from ingested items than the average human's? In practice this only accounts for seven or eight percent of the total amount of split present in a given specimen, but when the food is incredibly dense in Split, this really makes a difference. Did you know that a Velar can eat another Velar's corpse and not suffer consequences so long as the blood doesn't enter their system? That little discovery turned out to be the key."
"Cannibalism?"
"Insofar as the definition? Yes. However I must remind you that I see them as nothing more than mere beasts, pests in need of extermination. If I needed to eat a few of the disgusting creatures to get rid of the rest, I was more than happy to do so. As a matter of fact, I began to feast on Velar flesh quite regularly. The taste was horrendous, don't get me wrong, but it certainly wasn't enough to stop me from my goal. I had a vast reserve of readily available Split available to me, and in a form that would allow the venting of my frustrations with my own kind. I would have been a fool to forgo it."
"I can understand genocide to a degree, we forced the extinction of many parasites and diseases because they threatened the lives of the people, but cannibalism is a bit . . . much. Don't you think?" Donovan was biting his lip. He was no paragon, nor did he consider his moral compass to be particularly well developed, but the act of eating one's own was on a level of barbarism he couldn't see the benefit in. Even if it gave you immense strength, he saw way too many negative implications for him to ever be convinced of the practicality.
"Perhaps. Act disgusted if you wish, but it will do nothing to change my past, and nothing to dissuade me from believing it was the correct decision. Faced with the prospect of fighting Velar millions of years older than myself, stealing the power of others was the only option available to me. You must remember, at this time my allegiances did not belong to the Velar, my species, but to the Humans and the Great Csillacra."
The Arboreal Maiden did not even bat an eye at his push back. He felt her justifications to be a little iffy in the best of cases, but he had to admit his knowledge of this universe's scale of power was less than sufficient. Perhaps he would be better off thinking her actions were made out of desperation? A desire to survive? She wasn't under any direct threat, but if the universe was full of hostile actors . . . maybe cannibalism was better than death?
"Is cannibalism a common Velar trait?" Maybe he could content himself with that knowledge if it was somewhere in her nature. Certain species of fish ate their own kind, didn't they? Or maybe it was a reptile. At the very least, he knew that bacteria did not make much of a fuss over the corpses of their genus.
"No. To my knowledge, I am the only one to have taken such extreme measures. Most Velar avoided interaction with other Velar corpses beyond what was strictly necessary out of fear of their blood. I learned how to 'clean' a corpse from some of the human hunters, and applied that knowledge to my brethren."
"So you actually treated them like game then . . ." Yeah, there was no way Donovan was going to be able to feel positive about that in any way. He could force a level of neutrality on account of how she told the story, but he definitely couldn't say that cannibalism was a positive. That was just too far.
"That is fairly apt description of how I performed the genocide, yes. It was a hunt. A several hundred year long hunt. If I were to continue this analogy, I suppose that would make the Skwiven my hunting dogs. By their request I won't tell you their secrets, but I think this little hint is justified. If a Skwiven knows a piece of information, either all Skwiven know, or only that Skwiven knows." The Arboreal Maiden paused. "Yes, yes that is correct. All or one . . . or none I suppose, but if none of them know a thing then it doesn't really matter, does it?"
Don't ramble.
"My apologies. But yes, the Skwiven served as my eyes and ears across the galaxy. They would report the location and relative strength of any Velar they were aware of, and I would enlist the help of that era's god of Navigation to determine the most time efficient path to take them all out. By that time I had effectively become the leader of what few humans remained with the Sage's blessing, and I made good use of that authority.
Every planet I 'reclaimed' was given to a group of young and enthusiastic humans. I would select a king or queen from their number, the individual I believed to have served most admirably during the expedition, and granted them and their progeny the right to rule that planet. In return, I expected them to contribute to the welfare and embetterment of Humanity's core, the Sanctum. That promise has transformed into the tribute and request system you see today, the legacy of the promise having translated into a form of informing the legitimacy of the ruler. If one truly possesses the authority to rule over a planet, to rule over many planets, then they must also possess the ability to repay the Sanctum for all it has done in service of humanity, something like that.
I'm sure that if you asked people you would get different answers, but the core concept remains the same. To those with a more storied history and lineage, they might claim the Great Csillacra or Arboreal Maiden did something for them and their ancestors so massive and important that the debt can never be repaid in full. Those hailing from younger races would claim that their people and planet owe their existence to the Great Csillacra and the Arboreal Maiden, a favor they will never be able to repay completely, and so they must be willing to pay tribute whenever asked. That's besides the point though.
What really matters in this story is what I learned of the Velar's behavior in the wild. If Velar are such isolated creatures, how do they mate? Rape. Violent rape.
Why did I first gain consciousness in the void? Because giving birth to a ball of spikes is a painful process, and the mother wouldn't be able to kill the child for quite some time after birth. The best way of making sure they don't bother you is to leave them in the middle of nowhere and hope some other Velar comes along and kills them for the fun of it.
Why do Velar like to kill things so much? Because they do. It is their most primal instinct to kill and destroy. They get bored if they don't, and they would much rather run out of things to kill than get bored. As a matter of fact, they would much rather kill themselves than be bored.
As you might imagine, when the Skwiven reported that the Watcher claimed he was having fun while testing you infuriated me quite a bit. That sort of talk in relation to combat with another is all the evidence I need that he was returning to his base instincts."
Donovan felt a chill run down his back. How much danger was he really in at that time?
Are you going to say anything about that Velar?
"Not yet." The Arboreal Maiden stood up. "Forgive me, Donovan, but there are a few events surrounding that period of time that I remember perfectly but cannot tell you. More accurately, the reasons I remember them are related to the reasons I cannot tell you them."
"Is this related to this whole mission thing you keep mentioning?"
"Yes, however most of them are less 'events' and more 'discoveries'. I believe you will discover my findings on your own, and when you have accumulated a sufficient understanding of the topic the mission entails I will feel comfortable in revealing the rest of the plan to you. For now though, live as you please. Don't neglect your training or nation building efforts, but don't drive yourself over the edge with stress either. The time remaining may seem short to someone like myself, but for you it might as well be an eternity."
Don't worry about it too much. As I am sure you are aware, there are more important things for you to focus on. For example, starting a family.
Donovan felt himself blush a little bit. He didn't quite know how to explain it, but the Great Csillacra was turning out to be something like a sly grandmother, or maybe an aunt who liked teasing people. It could be incredibly sincere at times (he felt that its last remark might have been a reminder of the promise he made to it) but was also more than willing to poke fun at the otherwise dignified 'Chestnut'.
"Before you leave, I have something I would like you to do." The Arboreal Maiden stared at the pool before her. He couldn't see her face, but he was certain she wore an expression of consternation from the tone of voice she assumed. "It will probably be incredibly uncomfortable for you and my guess as to the effects might not even be accurate so you have every right to refuse . . . but I think it might help you."
