Forward by the Author
My friends, this biography almost killed me. This is my thesis work and the culmination of months of dangerous study. I am writing to you now from my bower at an undisclosed location, where I currently rest with three broken limbs and more than a few shattered nerves.
Effete shortwing academics such as myself are not particularly known for venturing across the water to West, where land is so rare as to be the continent’s most precious resource. But this continent was where our ancestors first arrived to this world—and yes, it is now unequivocal truth that we are not natives to our planet, as I was first to discover at the ruins of Atom on that wretched continent.
The coarse facts have been spread throughout Intun and East at large, ferried by news-mongers who have yet to finish my associated published paper. They will soon realise that they have missed the most fascinating details of our history. Naysayers have already decried me a heretic and I regret to agree with them, but it is true that my findings are heretical. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I say that a little bit of heresy might vastly improve the quality of our lives and understanding of the world at large.
A martyr, however, I am not. For this reason I do not attach my name to this record. Shortwings being as we are – all quite alike and common as muck – I am confident in my ability to remain anonymous to my readers while still revealing enough to prove myself a credible source. You will need to take rather a lot on faith, when you read this. You will need to suspend your disbelief that we are aliens on Siren. And you will need to accept that every one of us is a product of intentional design – not by some god, and not by so-called ‘evolutionary theory’, but by the ancient first settlers at Atom.
I will write a detailed account of my explorations another time, when I have healed from their rigours. I felt it more important to release the results of my study first, rather than let it become a vanity project with myself its hero. Instead I will preface each chapter with a description of the relevant source texts, including where and in what condition they were found.
On to the source texts themselves. I have created this biography to provide an introduction to the first Sirenian, Ishmael. The phocids of the Southern Spiral know Ishmael as offspring of the moon of the same name, and the ruler of the high tide. The inhabitants of Odr’s Sleep in the far North take a less literal interpretation of Ishmael’s moon and consider him a common ancestor. Harpies in my home Spire know him less, though–without revealing too much of my own bower–we have a mythological figure of the same name; Ishmael, who arrives to punish the crime of hubris.
It was a great surprise to me to find that Ishmael was a real person, and indeed that he was the first person born on this planet. Others arrived, yes, but he took his first breath here, before anyone else. My phocid companion was remarkably unsurprised by the discovery, and could even provide a little local Spiral folklore to illustrate the stories told of Ishmael’s life, which I will include as footnotes in the relevant chapters.
My source texts are extremely varied. Some describe Ishmael from the point of view of those who settled in Atom. Some are his own writings. Some are even a format which projects moving images onto walls, which I will also describe in a coming paper to be published. The technologies many visored longwings preserve sit in rot and ruin in Atom, proving, once and for all, that it was a society more advanced than our own. For the purpose of this introduction and my prefaces, I will refer to this as Precursor society, though in the source text they did not refer to themselves as anything but ‘settlers’ or ‘colonists’.
In those ruins, my party and I discovered things which we still have no words to describe. As a result, many of my interpretations are direct and untranslated, in the hopes that later, with greater understanding, we might return to the source and make more accurate interpretations. Many of these concepts were considered so commonplace to Precursor life that no one bothered making concrete definitions for the benefit of the scholars who might once hope to study them. Precursor society stems largely from a place called ‘Earth’ which we surmise to be the Precursors’ location of origin.
From this, we move on to the most puzzling concept of all. The concept of Humans. I took it to be a clan name at first, given the texts’ referral to Ishmael, a type of proto-phocid unique at Atom, as Human when the other people in the records did not very much resemble Ishmael at all. But Humans were in fact a species. Humans were bipedal and lacked feathers, though their faces will be familiar to any modern Sirenian, because they resemble our own. Once I succeeded in translating the scientific notes surrounding Ishmael, all became clear, and it was this shocking truth which forces me to write under a pen name.
Every modern Sirenian is a Human. We descend from the first-born Sirenians, who were designed – by techniques as purposeful as an artist’s brushstrokes – to occupy the particular range of morphologies which we now inhabit.
Precursor Humans arrived here, to this world, and knew their bodies were poorly adapted to survive here, lacking mechanisms of flight or aquatic mobility and being unable to breathe our air, or eat any of the foods we take for granted. So they engineered those mechanisms to develop in other Humans, which were birthed and raised at Atom in its prime in a series of successive generations, the last of which will likely be my most controversial uncovering. The engineered Humans – Sirenians like you and I – were not privileged members of Atom. In fact, we were a sort of labour underclass to them, who would brave the sea and sky of Siren outside Atom’s bubble where the Precursor Humans could not venture.
Ishmael was the first of this underclass, and was originally intended as merely a first concept, a rough draft of what phocids and selkies would become. He was a fascinating person who I believe is deserving of the great length of this biography and worthy of being the first introduction to the lives of Precursors that many modern Sirenians will experience. Where at all possible I have avoided editorialising Ishmael’s life, instead presenting it as it happened. We find not a revolutionary hero or an icon of tidal vengeance but a person born into a state of great confusion and neglect. He was a Human like his peers but was treated as inherently lesser, hardly a person at all, and he did not conform to expectations of graceful victimhood.
Welcome to the beginning of the world.