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Tenzin Dolma - Printable Version

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Re: Tenzin Dolma - Tenzin - 09-26-2016

In this part of the world they call us rākṣasa hatyārā, the light that keeps the darkness at bay. We come in two sorts; those that baulk at ending the demons with human faces, and those that don't. I never knew on which side I would fall until I became one of those demons with a human face.
~*~
There is a school in Leh that houses strange and unwanted children. The villagers abandon them sometimes, or call upon the rākṣasa hatyārā to mediate. Contrary to popular superstition, most of us cannot scent evil, and even the most hardened of our kind do not like to kill younglings without good reason. It is rare to find tiyanak or any other creatures that cloak themselves in innocent flesh when we are called to this job. Nearly always the children are just children, and yet the people look upon us to help them: it is what we do. We cannot leave them, and if we cannot kill them, we must take them somewhere else.

You could call them unlucky, but it is not a bad life. I would know.

The monks are kind. They give the children names, teach them to read and write, and to meditate. Many have difficulties and disabilities - the reasons they find themselves orphans. Others are able-bodied and sound of mind. There is a superstition among some that offering a child to the rākṣasa hatyārā brings good luck. I'm not sure, but sometimes I speculate that it was something we started. We train them, after all, and the best are allowed to wear the saṃsāra. Schools like the one in Leh are our foundation.

I was of the latter, a girl-child offering. My parents were poor, and perhaps I was but one extra mouth to feed. I don't remember the family I came from, but I bear them no ill will. This life has suited me, and perhaps saved me in later years, when the changes came.

As a girl I loved to read, and devoured the histories they gave me. The myths and legend and lore. They fed us these tales early; still stories when we were children and knew no better. We meditated thrice a day, and exercised in the dusty courtyard. Our bodies grew lean and strong following the graceful forms of kalaripayattu. I remember these years fondly, but the memories fade under the weight of all that I have seen since. It is a strange nostalgia to cling to; Leh Town is bleak; an array of mud-brick buildings stretching in a great canvas of desert brown. Nothing green grows. But this is where I grew up, and it is a home I miss at times.

At twelve, those with aptitude are moved to a monastery, and upon that anniversary I numbered among them.

My monastery stands in Alchi, a small village by the Indus. The road to it ribbons steeply into the Himalayan Range, following the brown waters of the river into the sweep of the valley. It is a very small village, little frequented by tourists - and we get few enough of those in Ladakh anyway. The people who call Alchi home are rustic and live to old ways. But the monastery itself is very important to us. The monks are still kind, or so I found them, but the regime becomes stricter. At twelve, we are no longer children.

I began to learn the history of my people; the Athari, or so they are called in other parts of the world. We follow the teachings of Buddha here, in Alchi, and our paths have diverged - we are very far from Rome. But still we learn and respect our roots, and so too we learn of the other schools within DIII, and how Ladakh is unique. It was my first introduction to the understanding that not all demons wore obvious masks, and that one day it might be expected of me to kill what looked to be a normal person. I remember finding it confusing; an antithesis to the things Buddha taught, but even when the lama explained I was too young to understand it then. We do not advocate it in Alchi - for which I am eternally grateful. Our hand is cautious; we kill sparingly, and not without thought, for every life taken is a chip against our own souls.

But in those beliefs, we are of the minority. I learned it first back then, but understand it much more acutely now.

I delved wholeheartedly into my new studies. The deeper histories have always fascinated me; the digging out and dusting off of truths in the myths and superstitions of different peoples. I have always made an effort to make myself scholarly, and I know now that we harbour many ancient texts and artefacts in Leh. It has been my honour to study some, and it continues to be among my passions despite its incongruity with my other talents. As often as I trained my body I grew my mind. I revelled in them both. I still do.

Some years passed in Alchi before the changes first began. It started with voices. Whispers really, a gentle tugging, like waking dreams. At first I was able to ignore them, though I could think of no rational explanation for their presence. They began to disturb my meditations, itching into my calm with an urge to run that training did not satiate. I admit I became difficult with my teachers, my usual focus fraying at its edges, my temperament suddenly unpredictable. I fought it, afraid of what I was becoming, and yet unable to stop it. But where my composure suffered, my martial prowess excelled. Grace had always favoured me and I enjoyed the drill exercises. Now there was a viciousness in me, like an animal clawed its way out of my skin.

Our education was swift; by fifteen our learning extended to the field. Jammu and Kashmir is sparsely populated, and Ladakh in particular seems a barren place to foreigners. I have heard the craggy landscape likened to the moon or the planet Mars; it is very bleak and grows very cold. Lynx and snow leopard stalk the mountains, though it is very rare to see them. Ibex and bharal wander too, and many many varieties of bird. Sand foxes. Marmosets. And wolves.

Surviving our inhospitable climes is a necessary skill. We are vulnerable out here, and have only ourselves to rely on. Our tech is limited, and perhaps counts among the least of our assets because of its unreliability. Nature is a wonderful teacher, but also a harsh one. To become rākṣasa hatyārā she is the first obstacle we must conquer, though to make an ally of her is even better. We have few enough of those when hunting down the creatures of myth and shadow.

My first time alone in the mountains I had chosen a spot sheltered from the bite of the cold desert wind. My fire had failed, my fingers numbed by my efforts to reignite it, frustration hailing shame hard upon my shoulders. The breaths I tried to take for calm needled ice in my chest and I could feel my temper bubbling, even as I knew it was foolish. In such an unbalanced state, the whispers found me unguarded - but not so much that I missed the flicker of a shadow in my peripheral.

"Man-child, man-child."

I only saw the one at first, but after a moment realised they fanned all around me, eyes glinting in the failing light. The Ladakhis do not love wolves; they harry and attack our livestock when food is scarce, and must be driven off. But they are rarely so bold. I blinked, still connecting the images in my mind with the creature stood before me. I felt no fear, but do remember an unravelling. I needed warmth and shelter to ward off the night, but such necessities blanked from my mind. The wolf made a gesture I can only translate as an invitation.

"Run with us."

So I ran.

I am not sure what eventually called me back. It is my belief that my human soul is too rooted in my body to shuck entirely. I had a life in Alchi, and responsibilities I already took seriously. At first I considered that I had simply been a wolf in a previous incarnation - and maybe this is true - but it does not fully explain my capabilities. The monks had believed me dead. When I returned they took me by the arm and locked me in a room deep under the ground. Only later did I discover how my eyes had become golden. That I had been missing three whole days.

Another school of rākṣasa hatyārā might have slit my throat there and then; I was clearly human no longer. I raged in my prison, clawing my fingernails to bloody stumps in my efforts to escape. I am not sure what stayed their hand. The lamas visited me daily despite my howling temper - and I regret to admit I was not kind to them. They read to me. All my favourite texts. Perhaps they only meant to study me, to learn from my transformation before they completed their duty. I'll never know. I tried to listen, but the wolves plucked incessantly at my mind, curious as to what I was. Their memories far outdistance ours - I misunderstood that at first, and did not ask questions. I thought they were as clueless as I.

The dreams eased my passage back to sanity. The old grey who first visited me was a complex mix of scents and images and sounds, padding on silent paws, his bushy tail swishing in the dust. When I think of him even now it is of a pup plunging into the rippling reflection of the moon in a lake, and the smell of night. Moonchaser. Mirth and youth, but also a sense of what was but no longer is. The moon remains a part of his identity, but as a symbol of his wisdom - that which exists always, the constant companion, the undeniable truth. As he has always been to me. The colour is a part of him too, a testament to the white and silver in his ruff, and a far easier moniker for a human like me to comprehend. Which was how I came to think of him simply as Silver.

'Some two-legs run with us always,' he told me. But the words pulsed as feeling, as images; things hard to describe, for they are simply visceral. Acceptance, brotherhood, whole. 'But the desert is not kind to two-legs' – flashes of starvation, madness, injuries from harsh terrain – 'and their bodies wear down.' A sad inevitability, but short-lived joy. 'Some find balance, and remain brothers and sisters for longer. We miss them when they roam with the two-legs, in the many-big dens of two-legs, but they always return.' Longer joy, acceptance if not complete understanding.

The epiphany did not sink in straight away. Locked in that tiny room, I warred with instinct a long time before I finally scented compromise. It did not have to be all or nothing. I did not have to choose.

With my humanity came my freedom. I spent many long days in meditation before I was allowed to return to my training. It turned out there was precedence; a monk across the border in China, named Tai Djin, who had lived and died many years before I had even been born: the werewolf of Shaolin was what they called him. He might have been a myth entirely, as is so much of the lore we study and extrapolate, but I inhaled every scrap of information about him nonetheless. If the wolves knew of him, they did not know him by such a name, as they do not know me as Tenzin. Still, I find the stories a comfort.

I grew slowly accustom to the wolves in my head. They roamed many many miles away, but treated me as pack and kin and often intruded upon my thoughts - at least until, with the blossoming of familiarity, we agreed boundaries. To combat the loss of their distance - a sentiment I fear I will always struggle with in this urban world - I thrust myself into my training. We are expected to dedicate long hours to our art, but the question hanging over my suitability for the saṃsāra fuelled my efforts and kept me busy. I felt I had more to prove, and certainly my tests were more rigorous than they were for others.

I have since discovered there was much discussion over my fate. Historically the Athari have always hunted my kind because we are so often driven mad by the transformation. We are rare, far rarer than the rougarou we are often confused with, thus we usually die young. In both surviving and recovering my wits I presented a quandary that would only grow as the years passed; the fever-deaths of the 30s were finally surmounting, and the first godlings were emerging from their own transformations.

Perhaps we have always known that the spirit force would return, for we have always had a tradition of oracles and healers, and those people are always tied to the monasteries and thus fall to the watch of the rākṣasa hatyārā. We accept that the possession of spirits is not always a benevolent experience, that the outcome is unpredictable, and yet we seem to have had fewer deaths in this part of the world. I believe it is the meditations. The spirits are powerful, but meditation makes the vessel of the body and mind stronger.

In Ladakh it is important to understand we are isolated; not quite a part of India. Some surmise that the rākṣasa hatyārā here have fallen from the true path, and in the years I have travelled since I have indeed, at times, witnessed a scathing edge to the inspection of my tattoo, once it is recognised where I am from. The truth is that we do not kill the spirit-possessed unless our hand is forced. But we don't know what to do with them either; a debate that has been ardently raging for the past decade. Like with those abandoned children, though, we must do something, for in the meantime the spirits only grow in strength.

Thankfully, the spirit-possessed number few.

Even more thankfully, it is not my decision what is to be done with them.

I think I am watched as closely as the spirit-possessed - or I was back then, at least. I would hope by now I have proven both my loyalty and my prowess, but even the tattoo does not keep me wholly safe; I am acutely aware of my vulnerabilities, even among my brethren, and thus keep my secret close to my chest. I wish I could share more freely how valuable an ally the wolves have become; they have an acute sense of evil, and understand far more readily than us the fine balance between those creatures that are a threat and those that aren't. My own senses are greatly enhanced - my sense of smell especially. But there are penalties, too. I miss my pack, and it keens a great aching loss when I allow myself to dwell on it. My mannerisms have changed. I see things differently. My smile has a wolfish cast. And sometimes I still battle the urge to run.

I was seventeen when I took the vows and ink, and it is my proudest moment. Our saṃsāra are always serpents, the design and colours distinct to the monastery in which we learned. My arm has become something of a tapestry since then, and I have roamed far across Asia. Silver lives only in the dream now, but I am often drawn home. The rākṣasa hatyārā are revered in Ladakh. The lamas are the vital intermediaries between the human and spirit words, and we are its protectors. We are mediators and guardians, our presence venerated, for though we are trained for war we smooth ruffled feathers as often as we spill blood. We are an integral part of society; a secret kept in the open, unspoken but understood in the myths and stories that surround us.

Even in the villages of southern India we are respected. Our people rove great distances, favouring a nomadic lifestyle in order to travel where needed. In the cities our influence is less grand, and our hunting takes on more secrecy. Still, many people will gladly open their homes to those who bear the mark, particularly when it is a home where the elders remember. We are few enough that we usually travel alone, unless need dictates a coordinated effort. So it has been for an age. But news of late begins to trouble us, and word from the CCD's heart sinks like claws in my chest. Silver is unsettled and his brief visits raise my hackles. He speaks of the Destroyer, an image I struggle to unpick in my desperation. I am left with only fear and determination.

My pack urges me to go where they can not. They nose and growl at the trail, agitated by their limitations. I am reluctant to leave them, as much as they wish I could stay, but duty binds us all. They tell me I am not the only one of my kind urged to Moscow; that all the wolves feel it, and they draw us towards the danger in the hope we can contain it. Apprehension tinges my confidence in my abilities. I do not relish meeting my Athari cousins or acclimating to their strange ways. But I trust my wolves.
Description:
Strong brows, prominent cheekbones and full lips. The gold of her eyes is darkened almost to black by contacts. She is tall and lean; strong-limbed, athletic, and favours dark, practical clothing, though is fond of embroidery. Tenzin collects good luck charms and wears them on leather thongs about her neck and wrists. Her hair is black and often braided in various styles. Weapons lay concealed on her person, as well as other essentials. The arm with her Athari tattoo is inked with many others, each with personal significance.

She is a practitioner of kalaripayattu, a martial art that originated in the south of India.

Personality:
Duty and honour form the foundation of her personality. Though independent she enjoys the company of others; she is loyal, and places great importance on her social interactions. Meditation and exercise help temper her more wolfish instincts. Discipline has shaped her life and she is naturally tuned to respect hierarchy, erring towards the side of formality with strangers. But beneath lays a spirited woman, quick to smile and banter, and not unaccustomed to mischief. She is inquisitive and bold. Still a young pup, Silver would say; a trait apt to get her into trouble.
RP History Edited by Tenzin Dolma, Jan 20 2018, 03:48 PM.