The Birds (PG) by Miriel

Title: The Birds
Author: mardahin
Rating: PG
Author's Note: Um, so this didn't go at all where I had expected it to. I am very interested to hear what anyone thinks of it. It's a look at an aspect of the Genii life that I'm not sure anyone has poked at, yet, as well as an unexpected look into Kolya's motivations.

ETA: Mild correlation with Irresponsible, but nothing major and certainly nothing you'll recognize if you haven't seen the ep (which I haven't; I was informed second-hand).

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For as long as anyone can remember, the Genii have lived underground. They may walk in the sunshine on those days when the Ring of the Ancestors awakens, but they live underground. It is where they laugh, and sing, and truly smile. When they smile at all, that is, which isn't often.

They live underground, because theirs is a legacy of betrayal that stretches back more than ten thousand years. Back to the day when the message came from the Ancestors that help would not be arriving as promised. The Genii were too few, the Ancestors said, and scattered between too many worlds to defend effectively; the resources for the war would be better used elsewhere. So the Genii did what they did best, and persevered. For their efforts, they were very nearly extinguished.

The pattern was repeated again and again over the years - first the Shinaak, then the Hoffans, and by the time the Kitar withdrew their promised allegiance, the Genii had ceased to be surprised. Alliances were made to be broken; this was the the truth that the Genii learned at the cost of countless lives.

When the Athosians appeared through the Ring of the Ancestors, the Genii offered nothing but what could be seen upon the surface. They spoke not about resisting the Wraith or the city that they struggled to rebuild deep within the heart of their world and the hundreds who sheltered there while they worked. The Athosians seemed content with that; they were a simple people themselves, by all appearances, and asked for nothing more than Tava beans in exchange for very high quality leathers. In time, relations between the two cultures progressed to something approaching 'friendly, but distant', and all was as well as could be in a galaxy ruled by the Wraith.

Underground, the Genii used the new leather to make better gloves for the workers who tunneled ever further to expand the hidden city. For the welders who worked to strengthen the supports that had failed one or ten or two hundred years before. A year after the next major culling hit, the city was deemed finished and the power levels sufficient to support the current population. The survivors flocked to the safety represented by walls of stone and metal, glad of something that could once again be called their own. In keeping with the need for secrecy, every citizen would serve a spell on the surface. They would grow the food that was needed to feed those below, and they would maintain the image that had been so painstakingly crafted.

There was one family who did not set foot upon the surface, tied instead to the rock in a way that few could understand. They were the bird keepers, those who tended the small lives that insured so many others. A strange breed of exile within their own society, they knew not the light of the sun or the touch of the stars; their lives were contained within the flicker of torches, the songs of the birds, and the endless prayers that the songs never stop. The birds were, like the Genii people themselves, descendants of survivors who had crawled from the rubble of that first horrific culling. They, like their ancestors, stood guard over their human keepers in the endless black of the tunnels and never complained.

Every once in a while, one of them would return to the city looking for a spouse, and decide to remain among the people that they guarded so fiercely from such a distance. The last to take the journey to the city was a boy named Acastus.

Marked as an outsider by the paleness of his skin, he struggled desperately to find a place in the light of the deep city, in that strange mixture of above and below. When his turn on the surface came, it was marked by pain as his skin adapted to the harsh light of the sun, but he survived it just as he had survived the cave-ins that struck in the outer tunnels. Despite his status as outsider-within, he toughened and progressed well through the ranks of leadership; soon enough, the lessons of allegiance and betrayal flowed within his veins as surely as did the blood of the keepers.

An unspoken rule amongst the Genii is that the keepers do not leave their world. A few may leave the tunnels - all leave for a time, to seek spouses, but most for no more than a few months - but none may leave the safety of the homeworld. It is deemed bad luck, for the secrets of the birds to venture beyond the Ring of the Ancestors. By the time he became a leader within the military, Acastus Kolya's past as a keeper had been all but forgotten, and no one questioned his right to lead a strike team after those who had inevitably betrayed them.

Then came the culling, and the earth trembled and shook in a way that it had not within the living memory of the Genii. Those on the surface died; those underground survived, or nearly all. In the confusion, there were a handful of casualties that were not discovered until almost a year later - outliers, who lived outside of the immediate boundaries of the city. Upon their discovery, many of the more traditional Genii took the deaths as a sign of things to come, though none could agree upon what that was.

It was the day Ladon Radim proclaimed himself Chancellor of the Genii that the last bird died, a victim of neglect in the wake of its keepers deaths. One year later, to the day, Acastus Kolya died with the sound of birdsong in his ears, on a planet without a single man-made cave.

~ Finis ~