by Ethagon
To Isma —
It is good you came to me about your curiosity. Had you asked this of most other scholars, they could not have given you an answer. Even with me, there are not many sources I can help you with, I'm afraid. You've found yourself interested in a rather obscure figure of the Ortothan mythos, with no relevance to any scholar who does not follow the Sidhe Hypothesis. Captain Ahab is one of many mythical figures involved in the ancient Yeren-Fae Space Race. I am a bit curious myself how you found your interest in the character. Does your interest come from the book or is Ahab your lens to look at the Space Race?
I've compiled what I have on hand about the topic. These are three letters, all preserved by space for many millennia, until we plucked them out of the sky. We can thank an ancient and persistent Ortothan tradition for them. Think of it as a letter thrown into the void, not truly meant for any recipient, a typical message in a bottle, only it travels through space and not by sea. For an historian, space is thankfully the much more preserving medium.
— Eiv-Scholar Elias Samuel
I.
As you have not mentioned your background in your message, I found it best to start from the beginning. The Yeren-Fae Space Race saw two kinds of vehicles. The whale, bioengineered by the Yeren and the skyship, which in any normal account would look just as you would expect of a normal ship, crafted by the Fae. The tradition of the skyship then dates all the way back to the Ancient Fae Empire long before humans took over the planet.
This first letter is also one very important for myself, as it was the first proper evidence we had of the Sidhe Hypothesis.
To the Old Hytoth, to my home,1
It has been many years since we fled heavenwards. How much of you is still there, I wonder? Of the spiral harbour, or the gods' stade? Of the great cave web, barely anything remained even before we fled. Subject to such unprecedented greed for places, I must fear all destroyed. The cave web ripped apart, all gods slaughtered, the harbours unspiralled. No less would I expect of the Tyrant Queen.2 No less do I expect of the great Unmaker who cannot grasp it is the freedom that makes a place. I'm sorry we had to flee, leaving you for her to undo.
Though I will mourn your loss to Winter and oblivion, you can rejoice in your children being safe and sound. It was just as the Sky Keepers had told us: Just like the light blue of the sea gives way for the long-travelled to the deep blue ocean, so does the azur and cloudy sky hide a deeper sky, drenched in a blue bordering on black. You have seen it before. Every night heaven retracts to show the deepsky and its eternity of stars.
The Keepers think the sea to be a shallow reflection of the extremes of their domain. Would it take but a month to travel from island to island, that same trip would be extended to years in the world above. Similarly, a ship could not be carried as by water, the air only giving it the freedom to fall, they said.
It is this last point in which they thankfully proved wrong. Are not both sea and heaven a domain of the free? Do they not carry the same blue? If the sky is to be a reflection of the sea how else should one travel it than by ship?
Oh, the tragedy for no one had ever treated the deepsky like the sea and so it had become unruly. Any sea names we gave to it, it tried to reject, shifting it off-road3 when it proved too burdensome to part with the name entirely.
But in our flight we were no less stubborn than the way you knew us, of that I can ensure you, old home. So many patches of the deepsky did we name on our journey, each time rejected, each time the journey continued off-road. It was a long journey. Of this, I wished the Sky Keepers to have proven liars as well, but no. Ten years it took to sail, no one to accompany us but the freshly named seas. Truly the deepsky is a space of emptiness.
Until it wasn't.
Oh, our new home, I so wish you could see it. It pales to you, First Hytoth and my birthplace, but I'm eased in the comfort of knowing my children hold this place in their hearts the same way I do you. A new home. A second chance. The Second Hytoth.
Yet as much as this knowledge warms my heart, it aches just the same they will never get to know you. Generations will go by, knowing nothing forevermore about their ancestral birthplace. We, the older Fae who can never truly settle in, will remember. Yet time does stop for only a few of us and before long only the Seven will remember you.
Oh, the Seven! You will be happy to hear all your protectors who survived Mab's massacre that day made it to our best home. It was them, the Koru-teusa who spotted what would be the Second Hytoth. Always the first to rise and the last to sleep, our holy defenders.
In their name, we have settled seven of many islands in the deepsky orbiting around a continent of ice and water.
For now, the colonies have remained off-road. Other than Earth, there seems to be no lighter sky here. all stone transitions directly to the deepsky, as if these islands are eternally trapped in a cold night more anathema to life than any sea could ever be.
Perhaps coming generations will placate the deep, reach an agreement and place upon these worlds a heaven like home. Or perhaps these places shall remain as when they were first found. There is also beauty in that.
Will we travel further? Perhaps, if curiosity strikes us. I doubt it will for a long time. A hearth must be built first before it can be properly left. If any will leave it will be the older Fae like me. When our future is secure where else would a never-homed-again heart reach?
Forever in love
Bave Estarin
Here we find the basis of the Sidhe Hypothesis. While contemporary opinion holds both the destroyed First Hytoth and the Second Hytoth we currently live in to be the entire multiverse, the letter suggests a much simpler origin: home.
Some now unknown and since destroyed nation on earth takes the place of the First and the home of the space-faring Ortothan Fae following them the place of the Second Hytoth.
Of course, it can just as easily be argued for the letter to be metaphorical, as so many of the "letters to space" turned out to be.
What is certain is the existence of the Ortothan colonies surrounding Uranus and their usage of "skyships".
II.
With the first letter coming from a time when the Fae Empire was just finishing up its expansion, this one can be dated to a time when the Empire was comfortably settled enough for Queen Mab to reach into space and, more importantly, the seven colonies.
Here you can also see the reason why so many scholars doubt the "Letters to Space" as a credible source. While it appears to be a message from an Admiral of the Fae Empire to his Queen, it cannot be read as anything but satire.
Still, satire is not useless to us, and you can find the same sentiment, if not as ridiculed, being espoused later by Captain Ahab and his followers.
To my royal master, Queen of all she knows and aspirer of all she doesn't,
Forgive her Terribleness for this assumption, but I feel like you have forgotten your royal servants. I arrive late to my fleet, my throat still sore from all the shouting,4 but I find you gone.
Returned to your Empire that is so far away. What was the purpose of this grand hunt? Is this not a great place to conquer and pillage? If you have been plagued by the notion of how to transport resources of the colonies back to the Imperial Core, rest assured that such a thing would be logistically utterly impossible. No, we are here because the act of conquering is in itself its own best justification. What purpose is there of space, sky, or island if not to be owned? No greater prestige can be found than in ownership.
I, of course, understand your grand act before you left.5 If one cannot secure conquest the next best thing is to deny someone else the pleasure of owning. Our conquest is an eternal race and anything can be yours, or not at all.
It is what I heard after that concerned me. There are ugly rumours that say you reached inside the wound of reality and in return, it reached inside you. All that desire for conquest now flows out of that wound, bleeding pillage and destruction.6 Turned against you, the rumour continues, the wound is said to have birthed a creature reeking of conquest and besting you, my queen, in both power and single-mindedness. No, this cannot be. There could be no entity that exceeds you in these qualities. I will hope for your return and wait here forevermore.
We will guard our post. We will sneer at the enemy, as they keep strong against the evergrowing stream of monsters pouring from the rift, not considering that we might be second in line, should their guard fail.
In service to a Queen that isn't there,
Admiral Grandstand
Later records suggest the originally seen as blasphemous practice of "skipping" from pocket dimension to pocket dimension became common practice in later years of the Ortothan space trade, purely for how much it sped up logistics. While "Admiral Grandstand" is assumedly not a real figure, his mindset likely was. There is evidence of a Fae legion having left the Empire for space and never returning. The letter itself implies a continued interaction with the left-behind legion.
And while the Voruteut are unfortunately very real, I remain unconvinced it was their presence which caused Mab to end her conquest of the solar system early.
III.
The final letter I have included is the only one I have at hand in which Captain Ahab has been directly mentioned. This one can be firmly dated after the fall of the Fae Empire, firmly within the Age of the formerly enslaved Yeren — the Age that came directly before humans became the dominant species. While exact dates still elude me, based on the mention of Mirgrom the Giant, this letter would have been written around 50 millennia after the first letter.
Of course, many things had changed for the Ortothans during this time. Ever so slowly the Seven Colonies expanded their seaways to reach even planets outside the solar system. In the meantime one Yeren megacity reached into space for political prestige.
It is here, the colonies met the whaleships of the Yeren. And while over the millennia the once-stationed legion of the Fae Empire had intermixed completely with the rest of the colony, the sentiment supportive of the Empire had survived until the present day.
The letter itself is a Yeren writing towards his leader on earth.
To First Citizen Mirgrom the Giant,
The Fae here have a peculiar tradition of throwing letters in bottles into space with the thought, but not any real hope, it might reach their intended designation. In lieu of the possibility of actual communication, I will follow in this ritual. Truth be told the prospect of a letter without any real recipient does free up all burden of how my letter might be perceived, such that I may truly talk freely.
In this matter, I must then still wonder if you truly knew what we would find. I thought your talk of an enclave of the Fae Empire hidden in space to be propaganda to mask your worldly ambitions. "See the only nation of Yerenkind which has brought the wonders of nature into the depths of space." Only the accidental vestige of truth you have stumbled over like the trees under your throne, makes your propaganda not less of what it is.
We did not find a remnant of the Fae Empire, but a rich culture of imperial fugitives. A nation already with the technology, but not the will, to begin the exploration of space in earnest. However, I do not fully understand their magic which gives them the power to travel on water where space should be. It is a more convoluted method than the slow certainty of the whaleship.
I suppose I shall give you some credit for your stroke of luck. There was indeed an incursion of the Fae Empire many aeons ago, but the armada the Queen left behind has intermingled with the local culture for many years. Little remains of it.
Unfortunately, little is still far too much, and sentiments positive to the Queen seem to not have been entirely buried. Indeed, while our arrival was widely rejoiced there are elements not happy about the state of the "slave race". No wonder really. The seas back on earth have long atrophied from the lack of attention and with no way for any message to cross the gap, the mistake to think the Fae Empire, which called itself eternal, to be still standing is in itself a forgivable one to make.
Not as forgiving am I how the pro-monarchic sentiment has taken root in about a third of all sanctioned seamen. Not active mind you, but officially registered. The former would be far harder to find out on such short notice. I worry, they may be a thorn in any ongoing relationship with the Seven Colonies. I have seen it in their captain's eyes. They wish to uphold the long-lost order of the Empire, put the Yeren back into their "rightful place". Not short after our arrival it was, that some Captain Ahab attacked our whaleships.
He later reasoned, he had just come back from a voyage and had assumed our whales to be monsters like the Voruteut. But I could see it in this Ahab's eyes. He knew exactly who was on that ship. Nothing we could do at that point. The Colonies' legal system does not account for Yeren life, how could it? Never had these Fae encountered a creature unlike them. It remains to be seen if we will be given a special status as foreign ambassadors or simply have all rights transferred.
Disregarding this coming storm, our stay has the chance to blossom into a great trade relationship. As naive as these Ortothans seemed on the surface, they are at heart a culture of warriors. It is the native's claim Second Hytoth is at all times at risk of being destroyed by the aforementioned Voruteut. They fight an eternal fight against this horde of abominations which found its origin, so some say, in a rift left behind by the Fae tyrant. I will say, the frontline of this war is too far from me to part how much of this claim falls to fact and not religious dogma, nor is it of much interest to me.
To their credit, even with war being such an integral part of Ortothan society, they nonetheless do not wish to be dominated by it. They were more than happy to trade both goods and knowledge. Anything that would broaden their perspective to not fall into the rot of routine which makes one not better than the Voruteut in their single-mindedness. Such a desire to well and truly live can only be admired.
Wimny Purr was able to trade some of his inventions, the 'bees' if you recall, to a most interesting substance the Ortothans had acquired from a planet full of desert. They call it 'gris' and in it, I see the future. Certainly, I could see in it a chance of a much faster return to Earth than anyone could have imagined. Instead of the years-spanning journey of sending our whaleships into space, the gris could shorten that distance to the wingspan of a dragonfly. I will not post any details yet, I must first check the correctness of my calculations. More gris will be required for my experiments. I'll have to convince Purr to give away more of his bees, maybe even some milk.
I will try my best, so this discovery does not leave my closest cycle, but I fear it will not be without repercussions. It has been a long time since the Ortothans had any genuine interest in space exploration. There is a constant background noise of old captains who want to end things on their terms and sail out to fight oblivion, but there has not been any grand effort to break beyond the confines so bordered by the unknown since said desert planet had been discovered.
But what we are planning? Even among the Ortothans not fallen for the monarchist sentiment, this invention might ignite the spark of space exploration to hitherto unknown heights, as now there is another against whom you could measure your success. Worse yet, that monarchist Captain Ahab has kept an eye on our operations since his first encounter with the whales.
He's been lobbying to keep our whaleships out of the Seven Colonies since then. Thankfully while he can be considered a figure of importance among many of the monarchist captains, neither is he of much political importance nor could he even be considered the leader of the monarchist movement. As such his demands have fallen on flat ears for the true powers of the Colonies.
Still, I have observed a proclivity to push the grandeur of his person. Some go as far as to call Ahab a direct descendant of some Fae Admiral in service of the Queen. Like idiots who have no idea how much genes mix over literal aeons of time.
He wants war, but he will settle for competition over slaughter.
We will make our way to the stars and experience the wonders of the cosmos. This is a certainty as sure as I draw breath. I am just worried about who will accompany us on the way.
Best Regards,
Morch
It is not much, but I hope I could help you. If you are interested, there are other figures of the Space Race of which we have more detailed accounts, that I could share with you. I should clarify, I do have more mentions about Ahab with me, but it will take a while until I've hunted down all passages. And ultimately the documentation at the time was overall not that concerned with Ahab, so I don't know how his life went on. I cannot even tell if the historical Ahab had a connection with the white whale as many have rumoured. Outside of my accounts, perhaps the Library might also hold answers for you. It would not surprise me if they had information about the Space Race I have not heard of before.
Otherwise, maybe you would be interested in a personal conversation? I could help you narrow down what it is that interests you in the Space Race. Whatever your decision, I wish you good luck on your search.
