Fiction:Ssik Culture

Welcome, stranger. Worry not, unlike most others of my kind, I have no intention of harming you. The culture of the Ssik? Yes, I know that. While my people are brutal and warlike, we do keep records. I suppose I should start with the Conquest of the Mmig.

The Conquest of the Mmig
In year 2 BC, under the Skull Moon, to you that's Galactic year 120045, our people were diverse in culture and binary in form- the upper caste Ssik'Liih and the lower caste the Ssik'Fyyth, now referred to as "Shock Troopers". For centuries now, we had been at planetary war, on and off. Alliances were made, cultures exterminated, and lives ruined. Liih Tzinx of the Mandibular Moon had created in the city of Drrek a cult around himself, and the bodily modifications he could preform. In fact, we have a record of one of his speeches. The translation is rough, but the message is there.

"Our kind, the stronger, smarter Liih and the low Fyyth have existed unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years. We have, for all that time, striven for unity, for happiness, for peace. We have found war. Our children are left without a family of home; our sick and dying without healing of respect. The savage, animal tyranny of the Tl'ekh warlords have brought us nowhere. The old system, with the Tl'ekh who proves himself strongest leading hordes to senseless battle, must be obliterated. It must martyr for our righteous cause- the cause of the Ssik'Mmig! I have toiled since the Tibial Moon on creating a third caste- the Mmig of which I speak. We will become rulers of this new world, the chosen few, to rule, as is told by the great one, LaDucaray! Rise, people of Drrek! Our bloodlight hour is at hand. We must revolt!"

Now that's a lot to take in. Let me start- Tl'ekh is the ruler of an army, as you surely have surmised. The position of Tl'ekh is ancient, in fact modeled after the Alpha status of my kind's pack hunting ancestry, and, disregarding cultural formalities such as ceremonies and outfits, had remained almost unchanged from it. At that point, however, the Tl'ekh ruled over vast swathes of land and armies that reached populations of over ten thousand. While those numbers aren't impressive in these days of interstellar colonization where armies are counted in trillions, it was enough to control large percentages of what was at the time the only world available.

LaDucaray is our War God and a subject of much debate among scholars. To be honest I do not believe in most religion, but LaDucaray has some substantial evidence behind his existence- reports of his appearance, personality, and message are almost exactly the same, despite coming from sources that supposedly had no contact with each other. He has made eerily accurate predictions- in fact, he mentions in one text a Liih by the name of Tzinx conquering the world. I suspect he is real, but not as Godly as my culture believes. Doubtless though, LaDucaray is immensely powerful.