The Greater Four

The gods of Nu were born upon the face of their mother Nunamnir and the back of their eldest sibling Aezithis, and the first thing each of them did with their freedom was make something to own. "To begin, they would all create a species that they could call their own, and thus we have the Guardians of Nu's domain." Four attempts survived. They are the Greater Four, "native to the planet, having been created to be its caretakers," each set to hold a realm against everything that would come for it.

The order is a matter of birth. From Orton of the Great Ocean, the fourth born, came the Omari, seahorse-formed guardians of the sea. From Irus of the Wild, the fifth born, came the Irugaine, "guardians of life itself," made lesser in wit than their maker so that he would always win the hunt. From Tantis of the Mountain, the sixth born, "came none, as he could not create." From Vaeyar of the Sky, the seventh born, came the Alverians, small blue air jellyfish of "severe intellect and passion," set to watch the world and keep its knowledge. Aezithis, the first born, tried last and worst: "having failed in learning the lessons of life, would birth the Thojar, half made and cold as stone."

What separates this tier from everything beneath it is authorship. Every people below the Greater Four was spliced in an Alverian facility out of a stolen frame and an animal graft. The Greater Four were made by gods, out of intention, and they are older than the Hegemony, older than Excalibur, older than the Empire that now argues about them in committee. Two of them do not die of age at all; one passes its life into its children, one holds its life in clay that can be remoulded for ever. One is nearly extinct by its own hand. All four remember the god war because they fought in it.

Authorship shows in the anatomy. The spliced peoples are variations on one frame, and a surgeon who has opened a Nu'uman can find his way inside a Do'urssan, a Papillian or a Boalden by guessing. The Greater Four share no plan with the frame or with each other. One keeps its mind in its stomach and its ancestors in the mind. One keeps a single green knot at the centre of sixteen unrelated organisms. One is an inch long and wears a body four tons heavy that was grown for it in a vat. One has no fixed inside at all, and will have a different one by winter. Four gods worked in isolation and solved the problem of a living body four incompatible ways, and every physician's college on Nu teaches the Greater Four last, briefly, and badly.

None of their gods keeps an afterlife for them. Every promise of one is make-believe, and the souls of the Greater Four go where all souls go, to the auction of the star gods, which none of the living know.