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urRu
"the old and wise ones"
"They're partly old wizard, partly some sort of strange animal." - Brian Froud
"Wisdom is not for knowing but for understanding."
"A word spoken is a step taken."
"Darkness imprisons the light. Darkness destroys all beings, covets all energy. It is evil."
"Look upon life -- your life, like all other lives -- as a cycle of fate."
When, at the instant of the last Great Conjunction, the urSkeks were divided into two races, it was the Mystics who took on the sorrows of the world. Although they had inherited the mystical wisdom of the urSkeks, they were powerless to use it outside their own valley, since the division had robbed them of their ability to act. Their hopes for redemption rest on Jen.
Gentle and aging visionaries, they are obsessed solely with their collective inner life. This strange and impractical clan ventures forth from its home in the Valley of the Stones to await the return of harmony to the world.
They are so immensely old and slow and huge and abstract from everyday things.
They have lugubrious faces with aged and wrinkled eyes. The skin on their faces is old and deeply lined in runic patterns. Their faces are thrust forward on long, thick necks that are covered with manes of thin, grey hair. When they walk, with their heavy, slightly swaying gait, on their powereful legs, their massive long tails are not heavy enough to counterbalance the weight of their heads. They have to lean on walking sticks, which they hold in front of them with one of their pairs of forearms, while their hind arms hang down towards the ground. Their great mournful heads are ponderous with wisdom, perhaps, or with memory, or with listening.
Their immensely slow and considered movements are made weightier yet by the garments each of them wear, something between a coat and a saddle blanket. They are fashioned to the individual by a system of knotting threads. The complex pattern of knots form a cybernetic store for each wearer's thoughts. Their garments are dusty and worn with age, but the colors have remained fast and the threads have not frayed because no scissors were used.
Everything they teach is by precept. They cannot give examples, not only because of their different physical beings, but also because the knowledge they have is absolutely conceptual. Nothing happens, nothing is apprehended, but it is instantly translated by the urRu into an idea and matched with all the other ideas accreted over the eons like the dust on their garments. The spirals and runes in the skin of their heads are grooves of coded thought, representing a symbolic interpretation of each urRu's total past, from which, at any moment, the future might be projected by one who can systematically construe the signs. The habitual sadness of their expressions and the marked slowness of their low, resonant speech is evidence of their cerebral natures. Anyone who has never met the urRu might suppose, at first, that they labor under a collective guilt, such is their lack of spontaneous action.
On each hand they have three long fingers and a thumb.
When one of them dies they seem to evaporate, like a pure spirit. It's as though the weighty body had never been more than an idea in the mind of whatever it was that had inhabited the flesh, an idea that had now been forgotten, discarded. Whatever it was had passed on to another, invisible idea.
Their walking sticks are carved from one thick branch of hard nutwood.
They have a slavish quality and a collective obsession with rituals. It affects everything in their lives, even the ordinary business of a day - sleeping, eating, walking, talking. They are turned inward, away from the world. They are collectors of knowledge for its own sake.
They have evolved as a species of neither gender, and it is therefore a subject of which they have no concept.
The urRu are, by definition, no threat to the Skeksis any more than the mirror is a threat to the face.
To the urRu, passage through time is along a net or web: at every moment they chose one way or another, at every moment they move to a point where different strands from the past met. At great intervals all the strands of this net of time are gathered together at the conjunctions of the suns.
They have a technique of twining uncut threads, which can be separated only by chewing, thereby partly amalgamating the ends. (To cut a thread would be contrary to all urRu beliefs.)
The tail, to the urRu, symbolizes balance and responsibility.
All the spiral structures of the urRu both express order and bring it about.
The urRu use their higher arms when power is needed, their lower arms for manipulating. Direct correspondences of acupuncture points and the arrangement of spiral centers in their cloaks is foreign to urRu thought; a hidden connection is deemed stronger than an overt one.
UrRu cuisine relies entirely on the stirring together and blending of ingredients, and on protracted simmering. The technique of grinding in great bowls is used for herbal preparations.
Augury from the twisting of balanced stones is much practiced among the urRu. It is related to divination through the patterns of stone that itself traces out a spiral path can be particularly informative.
The urRu have an almost Celtic veneration for the harp, since it incorporates the principles of both the triangle and the woven cords.
The following are the ten urRu:
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