Back to The Book of Ninety and Nine Doomed Cities
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Before ever the Progenitors came to Dhomin, the tales of the hradar relate, there dwelt in that land people of the race of the Sun-Eaters. The Sun-Eaters are a kind of men that came from the dark places between the stars, among the hosts of men that came with the Gods to Tsai. They stood as tall as three hradar, and had no flesh, only bones that slipped together like the shell-pieces of insects. They smelled like the plants they ate, like tsorovon and lhishamon and tsefets, and were made of a stuff like trahs, but purer, like what is called mother-of-trahs. They had but one kind, both man and woman, and each could beget children on itself if it so wished. Like most kinds of men, Sun-Eaters had two arms and two legs, and two hands also. In addition to these they had two wings, and like bats or dhiim a winged tail, but they could not fly beneath the sun, only in the dark spaces between the stars out of which they had came. The Sun-Eaters cut their wings and tattooed them, like hradar ornament their skin, to signal the clan to which they belonged and the honours they had received. And their eyes were not like eyes at all, but only shallow gouges cut in their skull, two by two, and filled with a stuff like crystal blood. They loved only the night, when the dark spaces between the stars draw near to Tsai, and did not go about beneath the sun.
The Sun-Eaters came with the Gods to all the lands where the hradar dwell, to Great Dhomin and Hezreel and Gharmor and Oqhoz, and Tuluq beyond the Great Sand. They planted the desert with tsorovor and lhishamon and tsefets, and plants greater than these that have vanished from Tsai, all of which they had brought with them from the dark places between the stars. They raised themselves tall cities of trahs by secret ways which are lost to the living, and in these cities of trahs they endured for many thousands of years, as a wonder for future ages to wonder on. Then they vanished, as a teaching for future ages to remember. The great-souled ones of the hradar teach that the Sun-Eaters had made a bargain with the goddess Tshuraq to obtain souls, as their ancient tales say they did themselves, but that they were more susceptible to desoulment. It is said that they perished utterly during the age when water fell from the sky, for their souls were washed away and they could not live as soulless things, but instead made great pyres of their cities. The ruins of their burnt cities roasted under the sun, until the hradar or other kinds of men came and cut them away, and exchanged the sweet-smelling remains for knives and needles and orphaned babes, until today there is only one that remains, and it is in a secret place known only to a few of the hradar, who hold it sacred to their god Aththaam.
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