Raman was the last baitar of the ancient world—and undoubtedly the mightiest ruler in history; he had managed to crush all the opposition and unify Antyra under his iron fist. As a baitar, he was the harbinger of the Ussybayales Mysteries, the head of Antyra’s old religion. The baitar title was inherited by the first newborn, forced by tradition to adopt a male sex.
[←4]
The council that had ruled Antyra ever since defeating the temples in the “Kids’ War,” some 652 years earlier.
[←5]
Antyra’s capital.
[←6]
The Antyran temples were built in the shape of a chopped pyramid. The pilgrims reached their tops by climbing the broad staircases adorned with artistic stone rails. The rituals took place on the top platforms, under the “Dome of Mysteries.” However, in the last several hundred years, the Karajoo tradition had changed slightly, and the Bailas held their speeches atop one of the murra trees.
[←7]
The god of senseless deaths.
[←8]
The litany was the story of the god who liberated the Antyrans from Arghail’s darkness. According to the Book of Creation, Zhan himself broke Beramis’s vow of slavery and took him to the sky as a reward for his sacrifice.
[←9]
Small, fusiform, flying creatures hunted to extinction by the tarjis, who suspected that they became the eyes of Arghail by flying over the vitrified cities. Their sticky feet and nasty habit of rubbing them on the gills of the Antyrans didn’t help them become more popular, either.
[←10]
The baskis were blind reptilian creatures that dug deep tunnels underground. The Antyrans used to search for their nests before building the domes because the animals knew how to avoid the groundwater.
[←11]
Mythical creatures of the old legends, the guvals were described as massive, grayish beasts; their brown, daggerlike teeth and their immensely strong bite meant they could crush any armor or helmet as if crushing an egg.
[←12]
It’s true that the Antyrans also called the administrative buildings belonging to Zhan’s temples “domes.” All of that happened because the Bailas had a fixation on spheres and semispheres, imposing their use in architecture at the dawn of Zhan’s age.
[←13]
Ropolis was the capital city of the mining world, Antyra III.
[←14]
The Antyran kids didn’t have a well-defined sex; their hormonal fluctuations amplified one trait or another. In the long-forgotten past, even some adults played the male/female trick by changing their sex at will. To this end, they employed the smell of some legendary aromas, like Echita, Vask, or Terapi, concocted by the greatest aromaries of antiquity. Needless to say, the sinful recipes were all lost in the mists of time—mostly because the new gods didn’t appreciate the old customs at their just value. Right after Zhan’s coming, the maturity ritual was born. The youngsters had to pick from two seeds and inhale a constraining hormone, irreversibly morphing their sex during a “slightly unpleasant” transformation. Some unlucky ones required surgery and sometimes ended up with nasty scars—mostly losing their tails due to the constriction of the blood vessels, dooming them to remain single for the rest of their lives.
[←15]
Antyra’s unification became complete after Raman defeated the grahs in the largest battle of history—the Battle of the Black Hill—and the utter destruction of their beautiful ice capital, Zagrada.
[←16]
Feathers.
[←17]
Gravitational winds falling from the Roch-Alixxor’s plateaus.
[←18]
Spiny shrubs of spherical shape, sometimes rolling huge distances under the vardannes.
[←19]
Baila IX issued a decree to confiscate the kids, in order for them to be raised by the temples. In a few days, rebellions started on the whole planet. After two years of brutal civil war, the Treaty of Alixxor robbed the prophet of his worldly powers, and the winners formed a council named Shindam.
[←20]
Beasts of burden with six legs, and a tail that ended in lethal bony spikes.
[←21]
Dome communities ruled by the initiates, where the Shindam’s laws were thoroughly disdained. They didn’t have an occupation other than mumbling incantations and hatching offspring, dutifully delivered to the temples when they reached the age of two, as Baila ordered.
[←22]
One of the Guk founders.
[←23]
Most of Antyra’s plants were green, but the more archaic forms like siclides and some species of jagged herbs had a purple hue. Recent research had discovered that they evolved from the ancestors of the purple bacteria lurking in the atmosphere.
[←24]
Despite their heavy armor, the chameleons were able to jump over short distances by passing air from their flight tanks into their fusion cores and ejecting the resulting plasma through downward-pointing nozzles.
[←25]
The gods of the old religion. After Zhan’s coming, no one dared to annoy the gods anymore, if only for the lack of restraint shown by the tarjis—particularly those living in corias. They enthusiastically dismembered anyone foolish enough to offend the gods by not observing the proper reverence when talking about them. It was a wonder the aromary art didn’t disappear altogether, along with the taste for blasphemy of its legendary storytellers.
[←26]
Antimatter energy packs.
[←27]
In order to travel faster than light speed, each ship would unwind and compress the space at the front, then dump the tangled strings behind for recombination. Flying in a formation called a “distortion front,” the ships were able to use the space deformed by their neighbors, adding their own distortion for a cascading effect. The larger the group, the higher the speed—all up to a limit, of course, given by the propagation distance.
[←28]
The planet became the Antyran granary after a giant irrigation project tamed the unforgiving desert around the Orizabia’s ocean crater.
[←29]
The acronte was the Shindam’s dictator. The position was held for life, which was generally true for all the council’s seats. Traditionally, the Shindam's electors invested the most boring and lacking initiative of them all as acronte—a difficult thing to determine, considering how boring and lacking initiative they all strove to be.
[←30]
Spears carved from the wood of murra, the trees of Zhan.
[←31]
Empathic stalkers, spies, and elite fighters, they did under the cover of darkness all the nasty things the temples didn’t dare to do in broad daylight Their unparalleled talent to murder at the prophet’s orders and usually escape unpunished gave them a disproportionate influence in society. They had a penchant for killing the Shindam’s reformers, depriving the council of any chance to change things for the better.
[←32]
As a twist of irony, despite the epithet, the prophet was in fact remarkably small. Even more remarkable was that, apparently, all his predecessors had the same diminutive stature, which made the Antyrans wonder how the prophet chose his successor. Of course, the smartest ones kept the thought to themselves; such curiosities smelled of heresy.
[←33]
The logic of semantics, triggered by the nine primordial Guk aromas.
[←34]
A neural weapon designed to propagate acoustic signals in the inner ear and ganglions to commandeer the vestibular apparatus; the victim becomes captive in a flash and can only move in the direction desired by the attacker. The inductor creates a funnel-shaped cone of paralysis in front of it, to protect the others from an unwanted paralysis.