Last Updated:
 |
CEILICAN |
|
REVISED |
CALIAH
A long time ago, the world was a dream. No, I'm not being cute - it was. All our kind were dreamed into existence. Well, most dreams didn't like thinking of themselves as figments of anyone's imagination, and they willed themselves into forms and took credit for their own creation. We call those guys 'prodigals', but that's another story. Have you ever seen a Dream walking? Well, take a look in a mirror, kid. King and Queen cat dreamed us up after a long night of lovemaking, and we became the best and worst sides of passion.
The source of these dreams was Ahu and in her loneliness she dreamed the Nyota Jamaa; Nala, the first mother, Rahjah, the maker and Calash, the unmaker. From their Dreams came the Cat Folk, You and me and the other Tribes, the Simba, the Bagheera, even the Ajaba. We are all children of Ahu, we are all pixie dust adrift on the winds of formless Chaos, we are all Dreams! More importantly we understand passion, even the dark passions such as anger. We understood the rage that drove Calash to birth Asura and we understand Asura itself. The tale of Asura beginning is a part of our Caliah, and I will repeat it to you as I first heard it from my Kuasha.
Calash looked upon his anger incarnate, and he was both troubled and pleased. "Go across the world," he commanded, "and take root in the cracks between my brother's works. Let that which is pure stand whole, but erode that which is impure from within." Calash sat in the rubble of His anger and watched the evil spirit depart. He assumed Asura would only destroy the workings of His hated brother, but he was wrong. Quite wrong.
The many parts of Asura became a multitude and nestled in the broken places. From the living rocks to the beating hearts, Asura darkened the world. Some places, he became like Gods; in others, like serpents; in still others, he swirled into storms or leeched the life from vital places. His essence became raksasha, vampires, demons, dakat. Others would call him Banes or ghosts or chaos spirits, but we know them all for what they are. All are one, and that one is Asura. He tells many tales, but all of them are lies. He is rage made manifest, and he coils within us all.
The Killi call us the curiosity of Gaia, and that seems to me to be a perfect way to describe the Bastet as a whole. But our Dark father knew that some secrets were too deeply hidden and that the other tribes were too fast, too proud or too large to discover them. He needed a tribe who could slip through the cracks of the world and find the buried secrets of the earth. He needed a tribe who could find out where his Rage had had taken root. Calash dreamed the Ceilican for his own ends, to act as his eyes and to root out Asura in all the darkest places of Gaia.
He sent us across the globe to cozy up with the Shadow folk and the monkeys. He made us smaller than the other Tribes that we might be less threatening to our targets, and that we might follow them into all the dark places they crawled. We sat in the trees of the rain forests and watched the Maya talked to the snakes, we lapped the never ending flow of blood at the foot of the Aztec pyramids. In India we watched the Divs and the Djinn teach humans magic and in Africa we crept silently behind the wizards as they entered the lightless caves for forbidden wisdom. In Europe we were the favoured familiars of the Wyck and the choice of bedmates for the fair folk. Everywhere mystery can be found there were Ceilican, and we grew to revel in the shadows.
We can be a nasty folk when we set our minds to it, and those that danced with us set themselves apart. Passion takes us at times and we are prone to forget our manners and our morals in the face of hedonism. All Bastet like sex, but the Ceilican seem to require something a little darker in the bedroom. We all wind up with kinks and its easier to find each other through Fetish chat rooms than by following ancient Glyphs in the forests. Our rural kits befriend Witch doctors and mystics, sharing their sweat lodges and Dream quests into haunted cities while those who are at home in the urban scene are wont to sit at a computer and ferret out secrets from the internet. We are drawn to the darkest elements of society, those who have been stained by the hand of Asura, and thus we will fraternise with Vampires and mages, with Faeries and Ghosts, but not with the Asura themselves. As I said we can be nasty, we can be hedonistic, we can be decadent, but those of us who are corrupted are torn asunder before the other tribes can get a wiff of the weakness. Those who fall to Asura are rarely subtle and the only thing worst than revealing our continued existence to the world, would be to be revealed as some sort of Feline strain of Black spiral Dancers!
Our closest and dearest among the Shadow Folk were the Fair ones, the trooping fairies of the Northern lands. England was our favourite playground and together with the Cait-Sith, the Cats who were still dreams, we partied like no other creature ever partied before or since. Ring Dansers they called these Ceilican, because they did indeed dance the fairy rings, and the rest of the Ceilican showed them respect for their crafts. The Ring Dansers were the closest to Dreams and they gathered the most fleeting of secrets. If only they had not let the Glamour of their surrounding blind them to the dangers, if only the enchanted wine had not loosened their tongues.
Some of us fell to the poisoned teeth of the Asura in battle, and others fell to their seductive whispers, but our worst fall came from a betrayal from our allies. In Europe the Unseelie, Faeries whose souls were closer to Calash than to Rahjah, our truest friends, they discovered our Yava from a loose lipped Kitten and they put us in silver chains. We became slaves of the Fae and we were nearly wiped from the north of the world. Eventually the Ring Dansers found a way to change their Yava and some of them escaped the Dream prisons to warn the rest of us, but we are few enough now in those regions to walk in fear of the Fair folk. The Ring dansers have new yava that the Changelings do not know, but the rest of us are the same as we were first Dreamed and we cannot dare risk a confrontation.