"Votann set us amidst the heavens. The Ancestors mastered the void. The darkness between the stars holds no terror for us, for we are as much at home in the vacuum of space as we are with our boots firm upon planetary bedrock."
A sigil commonly used to represent the Kin of the Leagues of Votann as a whole.
The Ancestors are the multiple, deceased generations of the Kin of the Leagues of Votann who have come before the present day. They are viewed with almost spiritual reverence by the Kin, who believe that the purpose of their lives is to live up to the perceived ideals of their Ancestors, a belief that drives them on to illuminate dark new corners of space, to witness sights no Kin before them has, and to engage in adventure and battle across the vast span of the galaxy. Essentially, the religion of the otherwise overwhelmingly secular Leagues is one of Ancestor worship.
This belief is given more credence by the fact that the Votann, the self-aware machine intelligences that guide the Leagues, have long accepted into themselves the accumulated -- and often duplicate -- cerebral data of endless generations of dead Kin and their self-aware robotic constructs known as Ironkin in a custom known as "returning to the Ancestors." As such, the Votann earn their other moniker of "Ancestor Cores", for they truly do contain the accumulated wisdom and experiences of every Kin and Ironkin who has ever lived.
It seems likely this custom was once purely practical, part of the same pragmatic routine that saw the bodies of the fallen recycled for nutrients and raw materials. In more recent millennia, however, it has taken on an element of religious ritual that has seen mountainous drifts of accumulated cerebral data drown even the hyper-advanced mind-cores of the Votann.
All Kin desire to rejoin the Ancestors upon their deaths, with their bodies and minds offered up to the Votann in the belief that their experiences will enrich the machine minds and aid future generations of their people.
Living up to the ideals of their Ancestors by providing the Votann with the accumulated experiences of their lives is a major motivator in Kin Oathbands setting out to fight as soldiers of fortune in the wars of other starfaring races, for doing so allows them to learn much from their temporary employers -- not least the movements of potentially hostile foes and the locations of rich caches of resources. They then return to their people more grizzled and wise than ever before.
The tradition of returning to the Ancestors also provides the Leagues' Kindreds with their greatest means of sentencing transgressors in their society. It is viewed as a waste of resources to incarcerate those Kin so aberrant that they would commit cardinal crimes against their own. Murder, extreme wastage and abject failure have but one possible punishment. That they might no longer burden their family, the culprit is sent into exile from which vanishingly few ever return. At the same time, their name is told to the Votann, so that the Ancestors know who has failed them and can forbid the transgressor entrance into another Kindred or league.
To the Kin the true horror of this sentence is neither death nor loneliness, but rather that they will never be permitted to join the Ancestors. Their entire life and all of their experiences are thus rendered meaningless. The Kin say of this fate that it would be better never to have drawn breath than suffer it. The thought of exile is one of the very few things that inspires true dread amongst them, and its threat does more to stay the hand of lawbreakers than would any amount of corporal punishment or fire and brimstone religious dogma.
First Ancestors[]
The First Ancestors are mysterious beings of myth and legend who supposedly were responsible for the creation of Kin society and the first Leagues of Votann many Terran millennia ago.
It is possible that the Ancestor Cores retain records of all Kin history since their earliest days. If such information survives, however, it is likely buried beyond recovery. Accordingly, even the perennially thorough and practical Kin have been forced to accept that -- after a certain point -- their ancient histories blur into myth and legend.
The Leagues of Votann are named in honour of the legendary entity called Votann, who is also known variously as the "Primal Ancestor," the "Gilded One" or the "Stonemind," amongst others. In some Kin myths, Votann was not one being but many, and is sometimes depicted as a group of gleaming golden figures or a wheel of graven stone faces.
In other myths, Votann fashioned the first crucibles, then raised the Kin up and sent them sailing into the dark void -- before oceans of fire and flesh rose to swallow them. Some myths speak of Votann as the eldest and wisest of the First Ancestors, themselves little more than ill-defined, shadowy presences shown in many different forms in Kin depictions -- both humanoid and otherwise -- where they are depicted at all.
With typical pragmatism, the Kin accept that their myths are too contradictory, allegorical and suspect to be cited as possessing a definite basis in fact. None of this troubles them overly. Steeped as they are in tradition and dour realism, the Kin feel less need than Humans to don the armour of faith. They are not frightened by the inexplicable.
Instead, they accept reality as they see it to be; if there are matters in their ancient past of which they have no understanding then -- unless those matters suddenly become relevant to their present -- the Kin set them aside. Of course, the psychoactive Kin known as Grimnyr continue to interface with the Ancestor Cores in the hopes of asking the right questions to unlock portions of their ancient history. Most do this more out of simple curiosity and a desire for completeness, however, rather than being motivated by some existential need.
For all this, there are certain articles of lost history that all Kin deem indisputable fact. They call these the "First Truths." It is a First Truth that their earliest Ancestors departed the Kin homeworld -- almost certainly pre-Imperial Terra during the Age of Technology -- millennia ago aboard fleets of sublight, interstellar generation ships known as Long March vessels.
It is a First Truth that the Kin were a cloned people from the beginning, and that the robotic Ironkin have been with them since those earliest days. It is a First Truth, also, that the First Ancestors of the Kin set out in their Long March vessels as miners, prospectors and void-dredgers, charged with exploiting the riches of the heavens.
When the Kin under the direction of the First Ancestors chose to enter and inhabit the hazardous region of the galactic core, it was the First Ancestors who were responsible for the introduction of the majority of the stable, genetically-engineered mutations known as cloneskeins into the Kin genetic pool. The cloneskeins were intended to better adapt the Kin to their new enviroment allowing them to work harder and more efficiently and better defend themselves.
Sources[]
- Codex: Leagues of Votann (9th Edition), pp. 12, 15