Ramsu
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The ramsu are great winged beasts native to San Ema, greatest of the three moons of Elgo Gey, resembling vast manta rays and capable of soaring above the moon's violent weather. Their domestication is the foundation of San Ema's nobility and, by extension, of the martial reputation of the Accord of the Kayan Ji. By long usage the word denotes both the beasts themselves and the riders who fly them — the ramsu-riders being widely regarded as the finest skybearers of the Sëriq̃in River and the most feared military force upon it.
Description[edit]
Ramsu are manta-form fliers of great size, adapted to the turbulent skies of San Ema and capable of holding altitude above its storm systems. The dynamic and hostile weather of the moon — which drove its population to build its great cities within the mountains and eventually beneath the surface — makes flight above the storm layer the only reliable means of crossing the sphere, and the ramsu the only means of achieving it.
History and the Rise of the Houses[edit]
The earliest noble families to rule San Ema were breeders of ramsu. It was through the domestication of the beasts that the three greatest families took control of the moon, and their subsequent struggle for sole mastery of it produced San Ema's first global conflict.
The ramsu therefore occupy a peculiar position in San Ema's self-understanding. The moon is celebrated across the River for its philosopher-kings, its public debate, and its conviction that leadership must arise from reason and be chosen democratically — yet the houses that established its order did so from the backs of animals, by force, and against each other.
Military Role[edit]
Within the Accord of the Kayan Ji, San Ema is the martial moon and the ramsu-riders its instrument. Their discipline and unity are held to be unmatched, and their reputation alone has been credited with ending wars before the first arrow was drawn. The Accord's standing as one of the two superpowers of the River, alongside Nervak, rests substantially upon them.
Ramsu-riders are commonly deployed alongside the alchemists of the Kayan Ji, delivering incendiary compounds from altitude. This combination — riders, flame-syrup, and alchemists together — is the specific force Queen Bayar demanded of the assembled monarchs at Levens as the price of her cooperation, for use not against a rival crown but against the carnivorous jungle of Penketh itself. It had been proposed earlier, and rejected, as a means of dislodging the heretic knights from the caves of the Shizula Kota on Pleuthair.
The Levens Prohibition[edit]
Ramsu cannot be flown over Levens. The yarvets of that sphere detect them almost immediately and rise in aligned flocks to tear them apart in the air, devouring the innards and letting the carcass fall. Few riders survive.
No scholar has explained it. Since the yarvets and the ramsu evolved on separate spheres and never shared a sky, no inherited rivalry can account for it; the reaction appears to be an accident of two ecologies meeting. Some hold it territorial, others that the birds simply relish the flesh.
The consequence is strategic. When the Rawkin kings lost the gate nexus beneath Bræcwyn Hold and the Aether Thrones stood empty, the ramsu-riders were the only force in the River capable of reaching them by air — and could not. The thrones remained unreclaimed for generations as a direct result.
Terminology[edit]
Ramsu is used for the beasts, for their riders, and occasionally as a collective term for San Ema's military caste as a whole. Context usually resolves the ambiguity; formal Accord usage distinguishes the beast from the ramsu-rider.