FFM 2025 4: From Fear to Fear

Back to the world of Beyari and Steirdrar. Today, I present you some Beyari backstory (and some worldbuilding into the powers that be) from long before she ever meets Steirdrar.

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The first memory Beyari has is fear. Indistinct, blurred by a toddler’s lack of comprehension. But she does remember the feeling of something dangerous watching her and what she would, at a later age and with better understanding, describe as a toddler’s equivalent of “if I don’t move or make a noise, the monster can’t find me”. She remembers the instinct to remain still and silent, never making a noise no matter what discomfort she was feeling. Making noises was for calling for help if the monster did find her, or something along those lines her toddler self must have thought.

She remembers the day the monster disappeared. The adults were riddled with fear and something stronger that she could not name then. But the monster disappeared and Beyari was not afraid anymore.

Only, she still does not make a noise unless she has to. At a later age and with better understanding, she would muse it was something like the survival instinct remaining active even outside of danger. Instead, she tries to reach out in other ways, through the fabric that connected them all, but the adults do not hear her.

She is almost four, lots of difficult terms she does not understand having been spoken of her during numerous doctor’s visits, when someone finally hears her. An older child who could speak — Onzen, she said as her name. Onzen translates for her that day and allows the adults to understand what she needs. More difficult terms are said but Beyari senses that Mom, Mama and Dad are all relieved to finally get answers to their worries.

The gift of Mind is said of her in a confused tone starting from that day. Beyari remembers it being said of Onzen too but with a neutral tone, not that she understood what it all meant until years later.

She is six and still mute when she spots a survivor in a shipwreck that happens near her field trip. The injured person, clearly not a Pryzis despite shining almost like one in the fabric of the universe, cannot hear her mind, but the tablet she has for speaking with those she cannot reach with the gift of Mind yet lets her communicate with them. She does not know what she is doing when she swipes at the fabric around the person when her instincts tell her to do so. The action heals the burns on the person.

The gift of Healing too after all, the adults say, and some add, no wonder she is taking her time learning people things. Beyari does not understand what they mean until years later.

She is seven when she manages to will her mouth to speak. She stares at the gigantic non-Pryzis who resonates with her instincts somehow. Her first words are, “What is your gift?“

The non-Pryzis — a Gheiah, Beyari later learns — blinks and tells her, “Movement. What’s yours?”

“Mind and Healing,” Beyari tells because she does not understand what the resonance means.

The non-Pryzis frowns and, after a while of pondering, challenges her to a race to the marketplace. Beyari wins somehow.

The gift of Movement too?! And she was verbal with a shaman?! the adults exclaim and start to whisper, Is she an Inzin? Beyari does not think she is; she is no legendary hero or infamous villain, after all, and Inzins do not have mutism or other big things that made life more difficult. The adults say she is still too young to be tested for the gifts of the powers that be reliably, but she is made to take the tests anyway.

She is ten, two years into having been declared an Inzin and training in all gifts — she did have them all, so clearly that there was no doubt she was an Inzin — when she, naive and overwhelmed by the pressure of her station, bonds with a shaman of the Wara Order who is on her planet on an assignment. The man has no choice but to take her to his order to be trained as a healer shaman, with other shaman orders helping with her other gifts.

It must be the will of the powers that be that she leaves, the adults reason when she leaves. Beyari knows better but says nothing about it.

The pressure does not ease. If anything, it grows, as she needs to learn the ways of the Wara shamans on top of the gifts.

She is fourteen when she learns to understand the full ramifications of being an Inzin — a messy breakup with the enby shaman apprentice she was dating, her thorough and irreparable infertility a dealbreaker for xem. She tries to take a vow of celibacy in response to the heartbreak but the elders do not let her. Instead, they tell her, “The Order admires your willingness to commit to that, but until you are of age in the eyes of both the galactic law and your people, we cannot accept your vow.”

Beyari hates that for a long time, but at a later age and with more maturity, she deeply respects the Order for not taking advantage of her naive recklessness.

She is eighteen when a routine mission turns cursed (once again, only worse this time) and she witnesses via Sight as the shaman she, in naive unthinkingness, bound to herself is tortured to death. She is not skilled enough to rescue him and the help from so hopelessly many star systems away arrives too late.

She does not listen to what the adults say.

She walks away from what she had intended to be her entire overlong life.

She is twenty when she gets tired of wallowing in self-pity and the endless pain of the broken bond. She throws herself into the world of hunters and privately vows to deliver payback to the monsters wearing civilized beings’ skins who had destroyed her life.

She is twenty-five when she re-learns fear, this time as the monster from her first memory.