Ia and the Beast

Ia and his disciples had set up their camp one evening as they always did. They hewed some small trees into firewood and lit a fire over which they could prepare their nighttime meal. They had just finished lighting the fire when a voice called out from the twilit wilderness beyond the light of their fire. The voice spoke in a language which Ia's disciples could not comprehend, but Ia replied gamely in the same tongue. He then said to his disciples, 'I have invited this guest to our campfire for the evening. Pay him no attention or mind and heed not any of his words, if you glean even the smallest bit of meaning from his foreign speech.'

A swarthy guest stepped into the ring of firelight, and he was clad in furs taken from forest beasts, and he wore a cap made from the skin of a fox. He bore a spear and he leveled it at Ia and asked a question of him, and Ia replied with honesty in his voice. The man gestured to the campfire, to the stacked bundles of wood, and to Ia's disciples who went about their business in the woodlands. But, as Ia had bidden, they continued their routine as always, and they ignored the man's increasingly furious ravings.

At the end of his patience, the man thrust his spear skyward and chanted in a booming voice, but Ia said a short word and the man's invocation grew silent and still, though his motions remained frenetic. He was brought low through Ia's power, and he charged forward to stab with his weapon at Ia, but the thrust did not land as intended. Ia grabbed the spear's shaft and broke it, and he humbled the furious man who was a man no longer, but a bear possessed of tangled black fur that reeked of sweat and worse things.

The beast roared a dreadful roar and grabbed up Ia and crushed him against its hairy chest and rent Ia with its fierce claws, but Ia would not be laid low, and he cursed the beast twofold, first to wander and act in confusion, and second to remain in the bestial form it had elected to take. Ia banished the creature after laying the twofold curse upon it, and it ran away howling in despair.

'Holy Ia,' Creasssin said, falling to his knees in awe, for Ia stood before his disciples with no sign of battle upon his unmarred body. 'Why would you welcome such a strange and fearsome man to our campfire?'

'You were never in any danger. His powers are cousin to those of Being, but they are lesser in many ways, for his can only dwindle in efficacy. His ilk shall be excluded from our ranks, despite being a distant cousin to us, because this cousin is marred of spirit despite how similar those powers may seem to those we wield. The ilk of that bear which was once a man cannot coexist with you wardens of the Truth. They stand outside our providence by choice, and they will be among those to surrender when Truth's enlightenment spreads across the land and they are weakened by its merest touch.'