Encyclopaedia Argollica

Sphinxes

The Flats of Calcheri are inhospitable, but beautiful at the same time. Rocky plains covered in sparse vegetation and dotted with the occasional olive tree give way to long, sandy beaches. Groups of gazelles or wild asses graze on the tough grass, and migratory birds occasionally settle down in the area on their trips north or south. An unforgiving sun shines on it all. But in the past, it was nothing like this. The humans who lived here of old, when it was a much more fertile land, were a particularly pious and scholarly people. Great academies and temple-pyramids arose. Many of them still stand, their walls adorned with large reliefs of gods and long-dead kings, while clay slabs rest silently in dead libraries, speaking of long-dead philosophies.

Perhaps one would expect the sphinxes who inhabit Calcheri to be influenced by these monuments and to adopt an attitude of wisdom and piety. Rather, they are the opposite of the civilization that once thrived there. The sphinxes love puzzles, and it wasn't long before, with the help of a few angels, they had deciphered the writings on the tablets and understood the meaning of the images on the temple walls. And they laughed heartily at how the men who made them had thought themselves so clever and intelligent, but were now nothing but dust in the wind.

What they did fall in love with was the formalities of it all. The strange scholarly words, the poetic metaphors, the grandiose images. This, they decided, was the true value in these works. They started mimicking the language, creating new convoluted terms and phrases from the building blocks provided by the texts as well as coming up with ever more elaborate and obtuse descriptions for even the most mundane of things. Riddling competitions became common, the sphinxes amusing each other with their linguistic acrobatics. Even their everyday language has become so full of metaphors, repurposed jargon and kennings that outsiders often struggle to communicate with them. They also devoted themselves to the art of illusions, from simple shadow puppets to elaborate spells, trying to create ludicrous and over the top images in imitation and mockery of those found on the temple walls in whose shade they live.

This pastime has also affected their broader philosophy. If you can talk in such a way that it has little relation to the reality referenced, if language can be so deceptive, is the reality underneath truly knowable? On top of that, optical or magical illusions and the many psychedelic plants in nature show that the body's senses aren't any better at perceiving reality. The sphinxes do not deny that, deep down, under everything, there is a core of something real, but they have come to the conclusion that it is so tangled up in layers of deception and illusion that it is ultimately unknowable.

Because of this, they have settled into a kind of hedonistic nihilism. After all, if reality is not knowable, why care about it? Why not have fun amidst all the smoke and mirrors? So they live simple lives, hunting when they're hungry, sleeping when tired, and otherwise amusing themselves with their ever-morphing riddles and the strange sights they can conjure up through magic and trickery.

Sphinxes do not really have anything in the way of a society. They live alone or in a small group with friends and family, without any overarching structures to govern them. In a way, this is not surprising. Their physiology makes them unsuitable for most activities requiring tool use, although some can compensate for this in a limited way through magic. Therefore they live much like apex predators elsewhere, albeit apex predators who take great delight in social contact and swapping stories and tricks. In a way, they are a people with a highly developed culture, but lacking anything but the basest level of social dynamics and no economics or politics to speak of.

The only thing close to an authority figure among them is the Great Prophet. This is not her actual title: the Great Prophet receives a long litany of titles, some stolen from the philosophical texts and royal annals the sphinxes ridicule, others inventions of their own, and to give the full list would simply take up too much space. Every five years the sphinxes gather at a large rock in the centre of the Flats, called the Rock of the Prophet after an ancient, unnamed prophet who supposedly gained his most important insights while meditating there. They hold a large contest and whoever has the most impressive illusions, tricks or wordplay is chosen to be the Great Prophet for the next five years. But the title is all she gains, for the sphinxes are far too irreverent to see much of a point in listening to an actual leader.

Despite this general attitude, where the sphinxes see everything, including the gods, as a farcical illusion, an air of holiness hangs about them. Part of this is simply the aura of the Flats of Calcheri itself. Even now all the holy men have left it and its temples are bare, the large monuments, combined with the strange colours of the plains at sunset and sunrise, have given it an air of holiness. However, the strange, unclear way in which the sphinxes speak stimulates this reputation as well, since it often makes their statements sound like veiled prophecies or divinely inspired words to outsiders. Every year supplicants will come to ask the sphinxes for a prediction regarding the future or advice on a course of action, in exchange for gifts. The sphinxes do not take these petitioners very seriously, but they happily accept the gifts and say some nonsense to get the visitors off their back. Some outsiders even travel the Flats to collect their sayings into large books of divination.

It might seem like I think that the sphinxes do not have any actual capacity to predict the future and that their prophecies should not be heeded. However, throughout my travels I have heard many stories where people claimed that their prophecies did come true in some way. This might simply be the mind projecting real events onto statements that are so vague and strange they could mean anything, but even so, their capabilities as diviners can not be entirely disregarded for now.

While most sphinxes have little regard for the gods or other cosmic forces, this does not go for all of them. It does seem that the image of the Flats of Calcheri as being close to the divine is not just a matter of empty reputation. Occasionally a sphinx will leave the Flats after receiving a vision, forsaking her brethren and going out to preach the message of some god or spread the word about some great universal truth. Of course, this only adds to the sacred aura that surrounds their species, and keeps the masses of supplicants coming...