Tsalmothua, Circa 17,000 BCE

Tsalmothua, Circa 17,000 BCE

Khotthu's wife began shrieking. The headman looked up from his carving, took in the situation at a glance, and then grabbed his prayer staff and rushed over.

A five year old boy was playing with a dead seagull.

Khotthu reached the children, and laying about hard with his staff fetched the child a mighty crack upon the head. The skin of the boy's forehead split, and he went tumbling, dropping the seagull.

Khotthu hooked the far end of his staff, its runes enured to protection from such evil, and pushed the carcass, flinging it again and again, until it fell into the stream and washed away.

Where had the foul thing come from, he wondered? Was it an omen? Had enemies delivered it to curse them? Or had this merely been some idiot children's folly? He had to investigate.

He turned back to the other children, almost toddlers. The one he had struck lay where he had fallen, his head visibly dented.

"Wh- Wh- Why?" a snivelling little girl demanded of him, snot running from her nose to join her tears. "He didn't mean anything."

Could she truly be this ignorant? Perhaps she was. Perhaps she'd touched it. Perhaps others had. Khotthu briefly considered slaughtering them all. But alas, he was famed for his soft heart.

Instead, he knelt, and beckoned the girl to come close. The other children watched.

"You see this?" he asked her, pulling down her lower eyelid. Of course she couldn't, he realized with the uncharacteristic empathy and insight which had made him famous among his people.

"You see this?" he asked again, pulling down his own eyelid so she and the other children could clearly see the white of his eye.

They nodded.

"It is a bad thing, it is death, small parts of it are in you and me. When the flesh leaves our bones, it is there too, this death we wear in us. It is in the teeth of the beasts that hunt and bite and kill."

He had their attention now. Some of the children were gingerly feeling at their eyeballs.

"This thing, it is the aspect of pain and suffering. It is hunger that gnaws. It is death, ever lurking, that waxes and wanes."

"This thing, he gestured to their eyes, to the direction the absent seagull had been flung, it comes each year," he told them, "it steals the light from the sky and the heat from the earth, it covers the ground, and kills all plants, the animals hide or flee from it. It brings the time of suffering and starvation."

"We didn't starve last time," an unruly child said.

The little girl punched him, knocking him down.

"Khotthu protected us from it," she said crossly. He found himself smiling. The boy clutched his eye. Was that a trickle of blood?

"As I protect you now," he told them.

"When I was a younger man, and reckless, I went traveling and had many adventures. One day, I came to this thing, and it was the middle of summer, but the air felt as if it was winter, the heat was stolen from the ground, but the sky was bright. I looked up, and this thing that you think all comes only in winter, it was there, greater than the horizon, shining and vast."

"What is this thing called?" the girl asked.

"It can have no name," Khottu told her, "for to name it would be to give it greater power than it has now. Know that it is the source, the colour of all death, of all suffering, of all evil. That it resides in all things, even us, that it seeks to devour all, that it waxes and wanes, but that it never truly vanishes at its weakest, and that at the end of all it shall be all that is."

He could tell by their looks that he had won them, he had educated them to the terror and awfulness. It was not just a colour, he thought, not like black or red or green or blue. Rather, the colour was a manifestation of the the mindless malevolence of the cosmos, impersonal and horrific.

He barred his black teeth for them. They barred their teeth back, exposing blackened gums and tongues and teeth. He knew this to be staining from the sour pupl of the Kulka root. What if he told them that beneath, their teeth were truly of the awful colour, that their bones were. He imagined their terrified shrieking.

He reached out a hand and tousled the girl's hair. "Tsaut's head is broken for his sin," he told them. "You may spend the day playing with him, but when the mothers call for sleep, you will bring his body to me for hanging and tomorrow, I will butcher him and you will each have a choice piece."

They cheered of course, as children must ever cheer innocently for murder and torture, and he set them off to make up their games upon the dying boy. The last he saw, the little girl was leading them in urinating upon the wound, causing the boy's body to flop and flinch.

It was all Khottu could do not to smile as he returned to his carvings. His heart swelled with happiness.

Kids, he thought.

--

Noticed one mistake in your last Tsalmothua post, you refer to the shaman and the children having "barried" their teeth, but I am sure you mean "bared".

Yep, typo. I'll go back and fix it.

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At first I was slightly confused. Anyways, just curious, but are there natives other than the Tsalal on Green Antarctica? Even perhaps some not descended from the Tasmanians? Just wondering is all.

Don't think so. At this point in my thinking, all the humans on Antarctica are descended from the single founding group of Tsa. A few other Tasmanians might have made it there later on here and there, but odds are that they didn't survive or reproduce. Its possible that they might have, but their genetic contribution would be minimal.

I'm kicking around the possibilities of having some Fuegans show up. If there's some fun angles, I might go with it. But at this point, either it didn't happen, or if it did, it had no impact whatsoever... ie, bunch of funny light skinned people show up starving on some beach, survive for a few weeks or months, and then get slaughtered by the locals... or at best, make some minimal contribution to the local gene pool.

I'm still kicking it around though.

This thread is pure nightmare fuel. I can't wait to read more!

Gosh! I've read your timelines. This is like Mick Jagger coming along, stopping to watch a street musician and giving him a compliment.

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Seriously, it's very well done. Can't help but think that this is portends some sort of more formalized religion, which one imagines will be impressively nihilistic. Question: since white is feared/loathed, conversely, is black venerated?

One thing with religions is that despite their allusions to permanence, they morph damned fast. Look at all the permutations of Christianity in the last two thousand years. Going back to the pantheons of the Egyptians, the Greco-Roman, and the Germano-Scandinavians, its remarkable how they fluid they are over time.

But yes, the aversion to the colour white is likely going to be deeply ingrained in religions and cultures throughout their history. It's pretty close to a universal principle.

Partly, this represents the immense culture shock and misery that Antarctica's winters represented to the founding people, an initial psychic scarring so profound it never went away.

Partly it represents the accumulated experience of a lot of winters, particularly bad winters. When the sky turns white, when the glaciers are on the move, when the sea freezes, these are all very bad things. The association of whiteness with death, misery, starvation, frostbite, missing limbs, predators, diseases, disaster, etc. etc. is reinforced for tens of thousands of years, so it gets pretty ingrained.

That said, different cultures and different theologies will offer their own peculiar spins on the subject.

Some will venerate black or possibly green or red as the polar opposite of the white. But nothing will ever quite be comparable to the soul shrivelling awfulness of white. Think Godzilla vs the Easter Bunny, only the Bunny's most dedicated proponents will see it as an equal contest. -

Another thought: these people (can't remember the name you've picked) doubtless have truly dismal diets, and spend half the year huddled in a cave trying not to freeze to death. Will they be pygmy-esque, or will the constant violence effectively serve as a selection mechanism for the large/strong?

A bit of both, I think, it'll even out. Over time, the Tsalal, as they move into middle human era and agriculture, will have more control over food supplies. I think that they might be on average a bit shorter than Europeans when Cook encounters them, but still within averages.

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Finally, do you have any sort of system for the language, or is it random? I ask because I just read the bit about the Doom Sloth, and "Shagui" sounds like "Killer Ghost" or "Killer Devil" in Chinese.

Hmmm. I suppose I should fess up.

In small part, this Timeline is inspired a bit by the Edgar Allen Poe novel, 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.' To cut to the chase, ''"Pym is a fellow who gets hooked up with a south sea expedition which after long preamble, enters the circumpolar currents. Passing through cold and stormy waters and fields of ice, Pym's ship finds itself sailing into a region of warmer waters and encountering an Island containing a strange race of utterly black people who are called the Tsalal living in a state of savage grace - essentially, south sea islanders at the south pole. Pym and the crew are welcomed, but the Tsalal prove treacherous, burying the larger part of the crew in a triggered avalanche, and gathering an armada of canoes from neighboring islands to overwhelm the European ship. Pym and a companion by luck manage to escape, fleeing in a lifeboat with a native prisoner. Along the way, they find and debate evidence of Tsalal writing and signs of a greater civilisation. It becomes clear that the prisoner, and all Tsalal are terrified of the colour white, and that even their teeth are black. The prisoner literally dies of fright. They find themselves in a current which draws them faster and faster towards the pole, until they find themselves in raging cataracts, and out of the mist appears a gigantic manlike shape...."'' and there, the narrative ends as a cliffhanger, possibly because Poe has no idea how to finish it.

Poe was a devotee of Hollow Earth theory from around that time. The notion was that at the poles, there were entrances into an inner earth which was warm and full of life. Only the outer regions of the poles therefore were cold and lifeless, the closer you got to the polar entrance, the warmer it would get. The journey of the Pym narrative borrows so much from the theories of inner earth that it's considered a 'Hollow Earth' narrative, though arguably, his character never actually makes it into the inner earth and there's no real proof that what he's coming to is an inner earth entrance.

Anyway, having worked out a Green Antarctica, and needing to people it, bits and pieces of Poe's story have become something of an inspiration - the name of the people, their blackness, their terror of white, and the transpolar channel.

Poe, and Pym's narrative became very influential in 19th and early 20th century American letters, and thus particularly influential on Howard Philips (HP) Lovecraft, a seminal American horror writer. There are direct references to Pym, particularly birds screaming 'Tekeli-Li' in Lovecraft's 'Mountains of Madness' where a university expedition goes to the frozen antarctic and discovers the remains of a lost non-human civilization, some remains of which are not altogether dead.

Among the surviving relics are the Shaggoths, who are essentially giant amoebas with the size, power and speed of freight trains, possessed of a deadly inhuman intelligence and unspeakable monstrous nature.

The Shaggoths are partial inspiration for the names Shaghut and Shaghui, who are definitely not giant amoeba with bad attitudes. Frankly, a trip to super-amoebaville would be too much, even for me.

Rather, I'd extrapolated ground sloths colonizing Antarctica from interchange with South America. I've never understood the success of Ground sloths - small brains, not many teeth, slow moving, hobbling along on the sides of their feet. They should have been roadkill on the evolutionary superhighway.

But amazingly, they were one of the most successful lines in South America, and one of the few that not only survived the joining of North and South America but actually invaded north, making it as far as Alaska.

Not only were they successful, but some of them got big. Megatherium, the largest ground sloth was the size of an elephant and could rear up onto its hind legs, to stand eighteen feet tall, with a possible reach of up to twenty four feet.

And apparently, they could be dangerous. Studies of their claws and forearms indicate that the muscles were hooked up for fast slashing, allowing the animals to defend themselves. A Megatherium could probably decapitate a grizzly bear. One theory holds that the Megatherium may have been an occasional carnivore - glyptodonts, a literal armoured tank of an animal have often been found turned upside down. Some thing that the only animal big enough and strong enough to flip a glyptodont over for a meal was Megatherium.

Anyway, if they could be so thoroughly successful in South America and North America, I figured they'd make a good go of Antarctica. The Shaghut is not Megatherium, but a sort of parallel development of ground sloth, strong family resemblance, but a bit larger and a whole lot meaner. The Shaghui is a smaller edition of the Ground sloths, big enough to be a beast of burden.

Antarctic sloths differ in some ways from the south American cousins. Their forelimbs are larger and heavier, their claws more robust, and their necks are longer and more horselike. They have rounder heads, larger eyes higher set and non-obvious ears.

And the fact that they're sloths is the other inspiration of their name. Sloths have long shaggy fur. Shaggy.... Shaghui. Don't hit me.

Turning now to language overall, I have to plead weakness.

The founder population of Antarctica were primordial Australians, from the Tasmania region. The Tasmanian Aborigines are now extinct, during the founding time, Tasmania and several regions that are now islands were all linked to the mainland. Seas rose, Tasmania and other lands became Islands. The population on the related islands survived for a time, but eventually died off. On Tasmania itself, they were killed off by European contact.

Were I sufficiently well versed, I'd have liked to have taken my Tsalal language from those Proto-Tasmanian/Australian roots circa 36,000 years ago, and develop from there. But not only does that information no longer exist, but the closest relatives of those people are all long extinct.

So basically, I work without a net. A little bit of Poe, a little bit of Lovecraft, some shaggy dog thrown in.

I'm not nearly the linguist to be able to put together any coherent ideas for a Tsalal vocabulary or even a naming system.

The only notion that I'm using for even a rough guide goes back to Lovecraft, who in naming his deity Cthulhu wrote that he wanted something difficult to pronounce, as if originally spoken by non-human vocal apparatus. So, whimsically, some of my Tsalal names are designed with anti-pronounciation in mind.

Anyway, nice to hear from you. Love your work.