The Life and Soul of Rikh Ghanyr
#58 of Child of the Sands
I'm declaring this journal non-canon. Everything that happens in it is still true-ish, but Ghanyr would have written an autobiography, a book of his life kept as the utmost secret, passed down by the king of thieves to his successor as the keeper of his true history.
At this exhibit, we have one of the infamous "lost" journals of Johana Wayfinder, with its translation. During her travels, she transitioned from writing in English to writing in the native Serpent tongue, and after her untimely death in 1861, many journals were left untranslated. However, with the arrival of Mr. Scorpent, we finally had someone fluent in both languages who can translate the rest of her writing. The Naga have a rich culture of oral storytelling similar to the Greeks of old, and he insists that this second translation (The first being from spoken word to written language) has completely removed what soul of the piece remained.
This journal in specific is an oddity; the ink is different, a blackened shade of blue, and the handwriting more pristine, more precise than the other entries. More dubious is that the journal claims to contain insights into the mind of Rikh Ghanyr, infamous for instigating the bloody civil that bears his name, the Ghanyr rebellion. Even among the Naga, Ghanyr's legend is broken; it is undisputed that he instigated the rebellions, and that, after the war, he committed a series of progressively more brutal murders until his ritualistic suicide. Everything else is under question, fragments passed around campfires until the truth was, as the Naga say, lost to the sands.
This entry seems to be a legend from olden times, a story of gods and magic fit for Homer to recite in a grand pavilion. When questioned on his opinion about the journal's authenticity and veracity, Mr. Scorpent said only that Ghanyr had been right all along; "Heroes ever are remembered, but you know legends never die." Perhaps, undeveloped as they are, the Naga still believe in magic... or perhaps something more primal lurks beyond the golden sands. History is what we choose to believe, and we leave belief and interpretation up to the reader.
The nerve of him! The moon is full, and we are far from civilization; the conditions are perfect for me to finally convince Cappo to relay to me the Ghanyr legend. He set up his candle and began with his verse; "Moon, descend now and bear witness to me, as I recount the legend of Rikh Gha-" He got no further before the candle was snuffed out, as if an invisible hand had pinched the candle wick. Cappo grew pale, and refused to tell the story, citing "Perhaps it is not meant for an outsider's ears, or perhaps I am the wrong teller of the tale. I must apologize dear Johanna, but your curiosity is not worth his wrath."
He retreated to our tent posthaste, leaving me alone to write my journal. All this time, I fear I may never know the truth! I've tried plying drunkards in alehouses, I've tried bribing librarians, and I've entreated Cappo on numerous occasions, but it is as if the entire country fears the name Rikh Ghanyr! And a bad gust of wind has prevented me from knowing the truth. To think that I was...
What grace do mine eyes see? The moon itself has descended before me, a dragon white as bone with the night sky as its cloak. He waved a hand, and the candle was extinguished, but I need only his light to write. He gestured towards my quill, and now he begins to speak.
"Listen child, and take hold of each word as it falls. Let them flow through your fingers, words into ink, as a stream flows into a river. Let your quill capture them in ink, exactly as they have captured you in their meaning. Secrets sleep best in their graves, yet you ask after a story best forgotten, a legend that helped shape a nation. Know that a secret is not a gift, but a burden, a weight that will chain your soul for the rest of your life, freed not even in death. You may take the words down, be the first to record the truth into writing, but you can never tell another soul. Not a whisper, nor a hint, for this secret does not belong to you. Would you shoulder such a burden?"
The moon paused here, and I looked up, gazing at the cratered surface of its scales in awe. I came here to document the Naga's culture, it would be criminal to not put ink to their infamous boogeyman. I could bear keeping it a secret if only to know the truth of it. I nodded.
"Then open you mind and hold fast your lips. Bear witness, for you and your papers shall serve as a tabernacle, holding tight to this secret until such a time comes that she who owns it releases it to the wind." He fell silent for a moment before speaking again. "Listen now, to the truth, to the life and soul of Rikh Ghanyr, boundless soul, bravest of the Serpents Born."
Ghanyr was born unremarkable. Another cottonmouth, another worker for the fields, but he dreamed of the city. Weaned on stories of daring escapes, brazen burglaries, and tales of risk and romance, he dreamed of Ocala, and of the thieves' guild hidden within it. His soul was weak in magnitude, hardly capable of lifting a sack of grain, but what he lacked in power, he made surplus in ingenuity. By adolescence, he could use magic to pick a lock, and by young adulthood, he could bend light and sound to his will. He stole enough money and goods to travel and made his way to the grand Thieves' Guild in Ocala, where he fell in, thick as thieves, as they say.
His knack for subterfuge gained the refinement of proper training, and with it he developed a silver tongue that could almost charm the clouds from the sky. Before long he set his eyes on the greatest prize of all; the chance to be Kalokin's vessel, his hand upon the earth.
Kalokin. Infamous trickster, renowned astronomer, keeper of secrets and knowledge. Kalokin was the god of lucky thieves, and it would seem Ghanyr's life was graced by such luck; Kalokin's vessel at the time was old, ready to pass the torch on, while Ghanyr himself was quite young, just coming into the prime of his life. With candidates selected and Ghanyr among them, the tournament was arranged. At every task, at every turn, at every challenge, Ghanyr lied, stole, cheated, and used his seemingly boundless ingenuity to rig every roll of the dice in his favor; that's no figure of speech either, his gift with control was such that he could guide the dice to land exactly as he wished. He was the one.
But his mind was slippery, slick like soaped stone. He held secrets, even from himself, truths locked behind doors made of questions, and so concealed his true nature from them, from all of them. He and I alone knew his purpose, for I had told him the true nature of the Coin's soul.
Nikolak... she is Kalokin's counterpart, and the second best kept secret of the desert. Where he is weak, she is strong. Where he has control, her emotions control her. Where he is a mastermind, the perfect strategist, she is a hungering beast that feasts on the fear of her enemies... and there was no enemy she hated more than herself. For millennia, Nikolak had been immortalized as a demon of fear, the last of the great four that was never truly vanquished, only locked inside his infinite mind. While this is partially true, she had no wish to be a demon. She hated herself, hated that her survival came from the suffering of others, to the point that she had become determined. She would starve before she harmed another soul, and so would be the first god to die.
This, I told to Ghanyr, so that his mission might be twofold. At the time, the Cobra dynasty had reached a pinnacle of corruption and hedonistic greed. Their lust for excess came at the expense of their nation, and Ghanyr's earliest memories were of incalcitrant tax collectors and indolent guardsmen. He hated the cobra dynasty, hated them for their corruption, their greed, their arrogance, and their apathy to the plight of their empire. He hated them not with the violence of rage, but with the cold disdain of one who has suffered for too long. His was a soul rarely found in any serpent, one who could hold a grudge for as long as it took to get even. And, so just as he had with the tournament, he was willing to lie, cheat, and steal however much power he needed to see them undone. I could give him knowledge, and knowledge I gave to him as much as he could handle, but he needed power to enact his plans.
And so, during the ritual to make him the next Vash'Kalokin, he instead made the trickster undone, summoning Nikolak in his stead. He bound himself to her, chaining her soul to his body in a permutation of the ritual that most would call impossible. And so, he gained access to a power vaster than the breadth of the desert sands and deeper than the unfathomable ocean. He became a conflux of both knowledge and power, and his will reshaped the world.
He gathered supporters and sowed unrest. He called attention to the Cobras' villainies and spoke at length about their unjust actions. He was staunchly against slavery, and soon had an army of freed slaves willing to fight and die for him. He spoke of the waste, the extravagance of the court, and so had the poor and downtrodden ready to die at his side. He spoke and people listened, and it was when the Cobras tried to silence him that his voice rang the loudest. And so, Rikh Ghanyr started a war.
The war itself is well documented. The troops, the strategies, the victories and defeats, and the historians will be glad to tell you more, but what they cannot tell you is what transpired within Ghanyr's mind. At first Nikolak resisted him, at every turn, every opportunity, but at length, he convinced her. Convinced her that the war was necessary, that the Cobras must be removed from power, that shedding blood was the only solution. When she found that she could not stop him, she contented herself with watching, silently disapproving, up until the first battle.
Again, using magic that did not exist before and has not existed since, he forced Nikolak to resonate with his soul. For the length of the battle, they fused into a beast of great vengeance and hunger, and it carved a bloody path through the frontline. A nightmare made flesh, gaining both power and form from the fear and anguish of its enemies. It radiated hallucinations, seeming less a Serpent and more some prime, unspeakable evil. With every battle, the survivors told his legends, and so he feasted.
After the first battle, Nikolak hated him. Hated that he'd force fed her the only thing that could keep her alive. Ghanyr was not an unkind general though; a Monster on the frontlines, yes, but any serpent who lay down their arms received his mercy, and his army captured many of the enemy. He treated his enemies with respect, and at every ceasing of bloodshed, he did what he could to convince his opponents to desert to his cause or surrender to be taken prisoner. If he was polite to his enemies, then he was a proper gentleman to his guest; he spoke with Nikolak at length, between battles, on the long road beneath the stars. Pleas for release softened to quiet discontent, which eventually ceased altogether. Nikolak was gorged with power, glutted with fear in a way she hadn't been since before the great awakening, and she was of sound mind and whole spirit. She kept the distaste for the source of her food, but she no longer despised it... and if she must feed, then, at least she could salve her conscious with the argument that, in this war, she and Ghanyr held the undisputed moral high ground.
But she and Ghanyr could not be at every conflict, and the war was going poorly, until she willingly aided him in his struggle. Ghanyr had access to her power, but at the cost of his concentration, always needing half his thoughts just to keep her in resonance with him. It happens sometimes that a deity and a vessel are so perfectly in tune that they can fade in an out of resonance at will, for indefinite time and without repercussion. Such a joining is named by history as an Avatar, and so they became the Avatar of Madness. They became a whirlwind of panic and dispair, spirited across the empire on the desert winds themselves, singlehandedly carving great, bloody furrows through the Cobra dynasty's armies. So great and terrible was their power that their enemies would fall to their bellies before them, stricken down by the sheer terror of the fate they saw in Ghanyr's blood red gaze. They changed the course of an impossible civil war... but something even more extraordinary happened, something not even I predicted... Nikolak fell in love.
Ghanyr kept her locked inside his body, but he cared for her. He needed her, needed to keep her at his side, but he was a gentleman in every sense of the word. His first responsibility was to the war. His second was to her health. His third was to her happiness, and as she joined him in the first and relented on the second, he could turn far more of his attention to the third.
Strange it may sound, to those inundated with tales of his savagery, but Ghanyr was once known as the master of the graceful tongue. He'd charmed his way through the entire Thieves' guild, and he soon charmed his way into her heart just, as she wormed her way into his. It was a strange kind of love, but love all the same, and they set about the rest of the war gleefully, fighting for justice and for the future. They were happy, Nikolak for the first time since her rebirth, and they changed the face of the world. All was well, up until they won.
The Cobra dynasty was disgraced, beaten, most of them captured, the rest in hiding. The last battle was fought, the general captured, the armies surrendered, and they turned their eyes not towards bloodshed, but towards the future. Nikolak was eager to rebuild, eager to see a line of Cottonmouths take up the throne, but the wisdom I granted Ghanyr gave him a terrible kind sight. In a moment of clarity, he saw forwards, past his own eventual death, far into the future. Without him, without the war, Nikolak would grow despondent. She would begin to fast, and then, to starve. She was nothing near the heartless monster she had once been, and now that the battles were done with, there was no source of food for her, no way for her to stay alive. In that moment, he saw far enough forwards that he knew what to do. In that moment, he looked through his soul, to Nikolak, and in that moment, he knew that his priorities had shifted. The empire must continue without him. Nikolak was all that mattered.
And so he gained resolve, the indefatigable determination to make something greater. Something greater than a rebellion, something greater than a nation... he would make a legend. As it stood, he would be remembered as a war hero... and in a thousand years, when all Nikolak had was his memory, that wouldn't be enough.
And so he killed. He started with the Cobra prisoners, then the prisoners of war, then enemies of the state, then anyone he could get his hands on. He perfect the art of torture, maximizing not pain, but terror. With each victim, he learned more about what the Naga feared, and with each victim, he inflicted further terror. Eventually, he mastered the art, so that he could utterly fragment his victims minds, rending them nothing but gibbering wrecks, screaming their throats bloody in the dark.
Nikolak didn't understand... not at first. She recoiled from the man she'd once loved, but every time she tried to hide in the depths of his soul, he forced her forwards, force-fed her on fear. He glutted her enough to last decades, but even that wasn't enough. It could never be enough. She would grow hungry, then weak, then fade into nothing, and he would sell himself to eternal damnation if it meant seeing her to eternal happiness.
He was the first public enemy of the state under the newly crowned Diamondback monarchy. His name on every mouth, his face on every tavern door. He travelled randomly striking at different cities across the breadth of the country within the same minute, raping and murdering and torturing until it seemed every Naga born under the sun knew and feared his shadow. And still it was not enough.
The three gods had sat out of the war; they were there to guide and protect, it was not their place to pass judgement on who would rule. But, with Ghanyr wreaking havoc for its own sake, they began the arduous task of tracking him, trying to find a time and place to put an end to his reign of terror. With the combined efforts of the other three gods, and Nikolak working against him from within, they cornered him. Trapped, outnumbered, and for the first time in his life, fighting gods of equal power, he knew he was outmatched. And he laughed. His final words spoke thus.
"You think you have me beaten... you think you're finally about to capture the mighty Ghanyr, demon of the wastes... you're wrong. You've caught my body, but you'll never catch my soul. For an eternity hereafter, I will inflict torment upon the desert. You are not safe. Your friends are not safe. Your children are not safe. In dying, my strength is immortalized; you'll never find enough of me to burn."
His eyes were empty, soul damaged, warped almost to the point of nonexistence, little more than a husk of a body continuing it's only purpose. Teach. Them. Fear. As he finished, he turned and bit himself, injecting the entirety of his poison reservoir into his body. His blood burned, veins melting as the poison destroyed him from within. It is said that echoes of his scream could be felt across the world, but the brave soldiers who watched him die said they heard only laughter, until the poison finished its fatal work. When they inspected the body, they found his words true; he'd amputated both hands and his tail, replacing all extremities with blades of dark iron, as he no longer needed fingers for tasks he could accomplish with magic. Before the guards could burn him, his ghost enacted a terrible magic on its own corpse, causing it to violently explode, scattering gobbets of flesh and bone for miles.
And so it was done. Ten thousand Naga combed the wasteland where he'd died, but Ghanyr had spoken true. They never found enough of him to cremate, and his soul was never put to rest. And so his legend grew, from the hunters, to the guards, to the taverns, to the farmers, until the entire nation knew the eternal fate of Rikh Ghanyr. His name remains a taboo, and every generation tells his legend in hushed voices, for his soul will forever haunt the wastes.
It took tens, nay, hundreds of years for Nikolak to truly understand the scope of what he'd done. He had made himself into such a legend that every sandstorm was said to be his wrath, every disease was his malice, and every turn of ill luck attributed to his disdain. One needed only to speak the name Rikh Ghanyr to send a chill of fear through the nearest Naga, his name hushed for fear of catching his attention.
And therein lay his true goal. For an eternity, the legend of Rikh Ghanyr would strike fear into the hearts of mortals, the only true legacy he could leave behind for Nikolak. When she realized, when shetruly understood what he had done, she wept. In his final months, she had cursed his name with the vitriolic hatred she had previously directed only to herself, but not once did he falter in his task. Never did he waver in his devotion.
For the rest of eternity, she would live to see his name drug through the mud, and if even once she dared to speak in his defense, his sacrifice, and the blood of so many innocents, would be in vain. This is her secret, this, the truth of Rikh Ghanyr. Take your journal young one. Take the words as I've spoken them and keep them safe, far from the Naga Empire, far from any who know enough of the Serpent tongue to understand the gravity they hold, for the gods, while immortal, are not unchanging. When the sky opens up and Nikolak reclaims the truth of her heart, then she may not need the Ghanyr legend, and the true heart and soul of Rikh Ghanyr may be told. In return for taking this burden, I grant you a boon. Name any question, and I will answer it. Lost secrets of the past or hopes for the future, they are all the same in my eyes."
He's stopped speaking... I- I need a moment to collect myself. I want to ask about my future... more than anything, I want to ask what path I can take so that Cappo and I can be happy together... but I can't. It wouldn't be right. There's only one question I can ask, and so I have. "What became of Ghanyr's soul?"
He paused for a moment, insisted that he'd just finished telling that story, but I persisted. He'd mentioned eternal damnation. Did that mean hell was real? And if so, was Heaven real as well? Is there life after death, on this world or in the next? What happened to Ghanyr's soul.
He smiled, then he laughed, hard enough that I feared he'd wake dear Cappo. He responded "With this question, you have proven that you're the only courier worthy to bear this secret. I offered you a boon, and so I shall tell you more than I intended. We are timeless. We do not sleep, we do not eat, and over the course of uncounted eons, we learned to be very patient. When Nikolak realized the truth, she began hunting. She remembered being bound, and Ghanyr's bones still echoed with the sound of her spirit. She found them, every fragment that remained of the dark prince of madness. There is a ritual that the Naga may perform over a corpse, to gather the soul of the long dead so it may be properly sent on its way. When the moon eclipsed the sun, she pulled power from both, and managed to pull together the phantom that still floated through the wastelands. Sheltered deep within her, hidden away from the outside world, he keeps her company, a part of her forevermore."
And he's up and left, without another word. At least he lit the candle again on the way out. Its odd, but I find I can't remember what he looked like, or even the sound of his voice. I just remember the words, as if my mind were an oak tree with an epitaph carved into it. Who... who was that? He spoke of the other 4 gods in third person, is he some other immortal spirit? I have one mystery solved, only to be replaced by another... tomorrow, I'll ask Cappo if there are any other figures in Naga folk-lore, aside from the four (five? Counting Nikolak) guardians.