Truth of Self

(Posted on the forums by Persida, 07/02/2015)

What has come to be known as moonskin is simply what we, the Rakash, truly are.

Though our people had different words for it so long ago when the horrors in the sky caused the loss of our original physical forms, Katamba's scarring was also our own undoing.

However, as in all things there is a deeper truth, a deeper Us.

Wracked as we were by the suddenness, the fear, the disorientation of that, the moment of our First Change, many thought it was the coming of the end of all things. The stripping of our forms was seen as yet another aspect of the mutilation of one of Mrod's many Faces and the full loss of another -- harbingers of the eventual nothingness to come when all was fully lost.

So great was this painful thought, that the earliest of the stories to remain with us from this time speak not of the destruction of Grahzir as coming first, but of Katamba's sudden, inexplicable darkening presaging a great explosion in Mrod's Kingdoms. It was thought that this explosion; attributed variously to destructive magical forces great and small, and even, in despondent, hushed whispers, to us having angered Mrod and Him bringing this upon us as His punishment; caused the true damage to Katamba and the wholesale disappearance of Grahzir.

Every Rakash from the most aged to the youngest of our children was brought together in our pain, our loss. We were always one, but at that moment we learned that were truly One. It was in this learning that we came to our prayers, to our Great Supplication. We prayed to Mrod as the common knowledge says, but also to Enelne and to Coshivi, for our Oneness is Their Oneness. Do not mistake me, I am not speaking as a Prydaen here -- our gods are not as theirs -- I say simply that what we are, They are: we are the Pack, we are One, we are Us.

Perhaps it was this knowledge that was the intended lesson, no matter what the cause of the calamity that brought about our change, for in our prayers we did cry out of our Oneness with each other, with the world, with the heavens, with Them, and the Leader of the Great Pack did answer. We were not lost, we were simply different -- as was the world, as was the heavens -- and along with the cycles of change that we had already known was placed another, the coming and going of our moonskin.

We change -- yet we remain ourselves. We are many -- yet the Pack is always One. We were mutilated into unnatural forms -- yet we are never more aware of the truth of our being.

Katamba's scarring was also our undoing, but from every end we begin anew.

We are Rakash. Our moonskin is our Nature, both in its coming, and in its going.

- Ticetar, Cleric of Siksraja