Ulusaba, Mother of Rats
Introduction
Ulusaba is the human witch who created the skeva. This is the one fact upon which every skeva clan, shaman, and oral tradition agrees, and it is very nearly the only one. Everything else—her motivations, her methods, the precise nature of her experiments, the circumstances under which her subjects escaped, and the question of what ultimately happened to her—has been contested, embellished, contradicted, and re-contradicted across so many generations of storytelling that the truth, if it ever existed in a single coherent form, has long since dissolved into the murk of legend.
She is not a goddess. The skeva do not worship gods in the way that other races do, and Ulusaba occupies no divine position in their spiritual lives. She is something more complicated: the author of their existence, the intelligence that decided ordinary rats should become something more and then made it happen through a combination of alchemical engineering and magical transmutation so advanced that no one in the centuries since has been able to replicate or fully understand it. She played god with their ancestors’ bodies and minds, granting them consciousness, intelligence, and humanoid form without asking whether they wanted any of these things. The skeva exist because Ulusaba decided they should, and they have spent their entire history as a people trying to determine how they feel about that.
The answer, predictably, is that they feel divided. Some clans revere Ulusaba as a creator whose gift of sentience elevated them from the limitations of animal existence into a world of possibility and achievement. Others despise her as a torturer who used their ancestors as raw material for experiments that served her purposes, not theirs, and whose legacy is a people trapped between two natures—too intelligent to live as rats, too small and too hunted to live freely as anything else. Most skeva fall somewhere between these positions, holding Ulusaba in a state of conflicted regard that mirrors their own conflicted relationship with the existence she imposed on them.
The Woman
Ulusaba was human. The skeva oral traditions are consistent on this point, though the details of her humanity vary wildly between clans. She was old or she was young. She was beautiful or she was hideous. She was tall or she was hunched. She had dark hair or white hair or no hair at all. The physical descriptions are contradictory because the skeva who escaped her laboratory were rats in the process of becoming something else, and their memories of the woman who made them were filtered through perceptions that were themselves changing—rodent eyes giving way to something sharper, animal awareness expanding into consciousness that could register details like age and appearance but that lacked the framework to interpret them consistently.
What the traditions agree on is her presence. Ulusaba occupied space the way a fire occupies a room—not through physical size but through the intensity of attention she brought to everything within her reach. She was focused to the point of obsession, methodical to the point of compulsion, and possessed of a will so concentrated that the skeva who remember her describe her less as a person than as a force directed at a single purpose. She did not speak to her subjects except to issue instructions. She did not name them. She did not, as far as any surviving tradition records, acknowledge them as anything other than the material upon which her work was being performed.
She lived during the Age of the Old Gods, a period when magic flowed freely through the world and the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural were far more porous than they are today. The magical environment of that era made Ulusaba’s work possible in ways that it would not be in the present age, providing access to energies and techniques that have since diminished or disappeared entirely. She was a product of her time—not unique in her ambition to reshape life through magical means but exceptional in her ability to achieve results that other practitioners of her era could not match.
Her background prior to the experiments is unknown to the skeva. She did not share her history with her subjects, and the rats she worked on before granting them intelligence had no capacity to inquire about it. The skeva have filled this void with speculation that reflects their own biases: clans that revere her imagine a brilliant scholar driven by a genuine desire to expand the boundaries of knowledge, while clans that despise her imagine a cold experimenter whose interest in her subjects began and ended with their utility as test specimens. Neither portrait is verifiable. Both are probably incomplete.
The Work
Ulusaba’s experiments were not an act of creation in the way that a god creates. They were engineering—the systematic modification of existing organisms through a combination of alchemical processes and magical transmutation designed to produce specific, measurable changes in her subjects’ physiology, neurology, and cognitive capacity. She did not breathe life into clay or summon beings from nothing. She took rats—ordinary, common rats, the kind that infest granaries and nest in walls—and she rebuilt them from the inside out, altering their bodies and minds through procedures that the skeva’s oral traditions describe in terms that suggest both surgical precision and casual brutality.
The work was iterative. The earliest skeva traditions describe multiple generations of experiments, each building on the results of the last, each pushing the subjects further from their animal origins and closer to the humanoid form that Ulusaba apparently envisioned as the endpoint of her process. The early iterations were failures—creatures that gained partial intelligence but could not sustain it, bodies that achieved humanoid proportions but could not function in them, minds that expanded beyond rodent capacity only to collapse under the weight of consciousness they were not yet equipped to carry. These failures were discarded. The traditions do not specify how, and the skeva do not ask, because the answer would require acknowledging that the road to their existence was paved with the suffering of predecessors whose only crime was being born too early in the process.
The later iterations succeeded, and the success was comprehensive. The skeva that emerged from Ulusaba’s laboratory possessed humanoid bodies scaled to roughly half human height, bipedal locomotion, manual dexterity sufficient for tool use, and cognitive capacity that matched or exceeded that of the human children Ulusaba presumably used as her developmental benchmark. They retained elements of their rodent heritage—enhanced smell and hearing, natural climbing ability, the compact musculature that allows their bodies to squeeze through spaces that their skeletal structure should not permit—but these were features, not limitations. Ulusaba had not merely made rats smarter. She had created a new race, designed from the ground up to be capable of surviving in a world that would never welcome them.
The Laboratory
Ulusaba’s laboratory was located on or near the Steel Islands—the volcanic archipelago that lies off the western coast, known in the present age for its exotic metals and as the seat of the Sorcerer’s League. The skeva’s oldest oral traditions describe the laboratory’s environment in terms consistent with volcanic geography: black stone, the smell of sulfur, heat rising from the ground, and the constant low rumble of geological activity that the early skeva’s still-developing minds interpreted as the breathing of something enormous beneath their feet.
The laboratory itself was subterranean, carved into the rock beneath one of the islands’ volcanic formations. The skeva describe it as a warren of chambers connected by narrow passages—an irony that has not been lost on a people whose own settlements follow precisely the same architectural pattern, as though the instinct to build in warrens was encoded into them alongside their intelligence. The chambers served different functions: some held the alchemical apparatus that Ulusaba used for the chemical phase of her transmutation process, others contained the cages where subjects were held between procedures, and still others were filled with the books, scrolls, and artifacts that documented her research and provided the theoretical foundations for her work.
The laboratory’s volcanic location was not incidental. Several skeva traditions hold that Ulusaba chose the site specifically for its geological properties—the mineral-rich water, the geothermal energy, and the exotic compounds produced by volcanic activity that provided raw materials for her alchemical processes that could not be obtained elsewhere. The Steel Islands’ reputation as a center of arcane knowledge predates the Sorcerer’s League by millennia, suggesting that Ulusaba was drawn to a location with an established tradition of magical research and access to the rare substances her work required.
Whether the laboratory still exists is unknown. The skeva have never returned to find it, partly because the Steel Islands are distant from the urban environments where most clans have settled and partly because the prospect of finding the place where their ancestors were made provokes reactions ranging from reverent pilgrimage fever to visceral dread. The few skeva who have traveled to the Steel Islands on other business report that the volcanic landscape has been reshaped many times by eruptions since the Age of the Old Gods, and whatever structures Ulusaba built may have been buried or destroyed by geological activity long ago.
The Method
The skeva’s understanding of Ulusaba’s methods is fragmentary, derived from the confused perceptions of subjects who were undergoing the transformation while it was happening and who therefore experienced the process from the inside rather than observing it from a position of clinical detachment. What they describe is a blend of alchemical treatment and magical transmutation that altered their bodies and minds simultaneously, each change building on the last in a sequence that Ulusaba had apparently planned with meticulous care.
The alchemical phase involved the administration of compounds—liquids forced down their throats, substances injected beneath their skin, vapors inhaled in sealed chambers—that initiated physical changes in the subjects’ bodies. These compounds triggered bone restructuring, muscle redistribution, and organ modification that gradually reshaped rodent anatomy into humanoid form. The process was painful. The traditions are unanimous on this point, describing the alchemical phase in terms that leave no room for the interpretation that Ulusaba’s subjects underwent their transformation comfortably or willingly.
The magical phase involved transmutation—the direct application of supernatural energy to accelerate, stabilize, and refine the changes initiated by the alchemical compounds. This phase is the one the skeva understand least, because the magical processes Ulusaba employed operated on levels that her subjects could feel but not comprehend. They describe sensations of expansion, of boundaries dissolving, of awareness flooding into spaces that had not existed moments before. The moment of cognitive awakening—the instant when a rat’s awareness became a person’s consciousness—is described in every skeva tradition as the most disorienting and terrifying experience in their collective memory. To go from animal perception to human understanding in a matter of hours or days, without preparation, without context, without any framework for processing what was happening, was an ordeal that the skeva consider the original trauma of their existence.
The magical heritage that modern skeva carry—the innate aptitude for certain forms of magic that their shamans and witches develop into functional abilities—is understood as a byproduct of the transmutation process rather than an intentional gift. Ulusaba did not set out to create a magical race. She set out to create an intelligent one, and the magical residue of the process she used to achieve that goal lodged itself in her subjects’ bodies and passed to their descendants, becoming a permanent feature of skeva biology that Ulusaba may or may not have anticipated.
The Subjects
The skeva do not know how many rats Ulusaba transformed before the process produced viable, self-sustaining individuals capable of independent survival and reproduction. The oral traditions suggest that the final successful cohort was small—dozens rather than hundreds, a number consistent with the resources that a single researcher working in an isolated laboratory could manage. These individuals constituted the founding population from which all modern skeva descend, a genetic bottleneck that skeva shamans believe explains certain characteristics of their race: the rapid reproduction rate that compensates for small founding numbers, the physical uniformity that suggests limited initial diversity, and the universal magical aptitude that indicates all modern skeva carry the same transmutative residue from the same set of original procedures.
The subjects’ experience of their own transformation is the most consistently preserved element of skeva oral tradition, passed from the founding generation through their descendants with an urgency that suggests the original skeva considered it essential that their children understand what had been done to them. The accounts describe confusion, pain, fear, and the overwhelming disorientation of consciousness arriving without warning in minds that had not existed moments before. The early skeva did not understand what they were. They did not understand what Ulusaba was doing to them. They understood only that they were being changed, that the change hurt, and that the woman performing the changes viewed them not as individuals but as iterations of a process she intended to perfect.
Ulusaba did not name her subjects. She numbered them, or marked them, or distinguished them by the procedures they had undergone—the traditions vary—but she did not grant them the recognition of individual identity that a name implies. The first skeva names were chosen by the skeva themselves, after their escape, and the act of self-naming is considered one of the foundational moments of skeva identity: the instant when they ceased to be Ulusaba’s experiments and became people with the authority to define themselves.
The Escape
The skeva escaped Ulusaba’s laboratory out of fear for their lives. This much is consistent across all traditions, though the specific circumstances that triggered the escape vary between clans. Some traditions describe a moment of crisis—a procedure gone wrong, a subject dying on the table, a realization among the newly conscious skeva that the woman who had made them intelligent intended to continue experimenting on them regardless of the cost. Others describe a slower accumulation of understanding: the growing awareness, as their cognitive abilities matured, that Ulusaba viewed them as products rather than people, and that products which fail to meet specifications are discarded.
The escape itself was chaotic. The skeva were newly conscious, still learning to navigate bodies that had been reshaped days or weeks earlier, still struggling to process sensory input through minds that had not yet developed the filters necessary to prevent cognitive overload. They did not plan their flight with military precision. They ran. They scattered. They fled through the laboratory’s passages using the instincts that Ulusaba had not been able to engineer out of them—the rodent’s ancient knowledge of how to find gaps, how to squeeze through spaces too small for a pursuer, how to disappear into the dark when something larger and more dangerous is looking for you.
Whether Ulusaba attempted to stop them is disputed. Some traditions describe her pursuing them through the laboratory, furious at the loss of subjects who represented years of work. Others describe her watching them go with the clinical detachment of a researcher recording an unexpected result. A third tradition, maintained by a small number of clans, holds that Ulusaba opened the doors herself—not out of mercy but because the escape was itself a test, a final evaluation of whether her subjects possessed the survival instincts necessary to justify the investment she had made in their creation. The skeva who hold this view find it the most disturbing interpretation of the three, because it means that even their act of rebellion may have been part of Ulusaba’s design.
The skeva who escaped the laboratory dispersed across the mainland, traveling by whatever means their small bodies and limited experience permitted. Some followed waterways. Others stowed away on vessels. Still others simply walked, moving through wilderness and along the margins of human settlements until they found the hidden spaces—sewers, caves, abandoned structures—where they could establish the first skeva communities. The journey from the Steel Islands to the mainland is remembered in skeva oral tradition as the Scattering, the period of dispersal that transformed a handful of laboratory escapees into the seed population of a race that would eventually spread beneath every major city in Uhl.
The Fate of Ulusaba
Ulusaba’s fate is unknown, and the skeva have long since accepted that it will remain so. She lived during the Age of the Old Gods, an era that ended in a cataclysm which destroyed civilizations and killed divine beings. Whatever became of a single human witch operating from a volcanic island laboratory is a question that the passage of millennia has rendered unanswerable through any means available to the skeva, and most clans have made their peace with the absence of a definitive conclusion.
The general consensus among modern skeva is that Ulusaba is long dead—not because they possess evidence of her death but because the span of time since the Age of the Old Gods exceeds any plausible human lifespan, even one extended through magical means. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and the simplest explanation for Ulusaba’s silence across five centuries of skeva existence is that she died at some point during or after the Fall of the Old Gods, her laboratory destroyed by volcanic activity or the cataclysm itself, her research lost or scattered, her life ending the way all mortal lives end—quietly, finally, and without resolution of the questions she left behind.
Some skeva shamans maintain alternative theories. A few argue that Ulusaba’s mastery of transmutation may have included techniques for extending her own lifespan, potentially allowing her to survive far beyond normal human limits. Others suggest that she may have applied her own methods to herself, transforming her body the way she transformed her subjects, though toward what end and into what form is purely speculative. These theories are minority positions, entertained by shamans with a taste for speculation but not widely held by the broader skeva population, who find the prospect of their creator still being alive somewhere in the world more unsettling than reassuring.
The question of whether Ulusaba had students, collaborators, or successors who might have continued her work is occasionally raised but never answered. If her methods were documented—and the laboratory traditions suggest they were, describing chambers filled with books and scrolls—those documents have never been found by the skeva or, as far as they know, by anyone else. The Sorcerer’s League, which now operates from the Steel Islands, has never demonstrated the ability to replicate Ulusaba’s transmutation, suggesting that if her research survived, it has not fallen into the hands of anyone capable of using it.
Legacy & the Skeva Divided
Ulusaba’s legacy is the skeva themselves—their bodies, their minds, their magic, their culture, and the existential uncertainty that comes from knowing you were made rather than born. Every aspect of skeva existence traces back to the experiments conducted in a volcanic laboratory by a woman who never asked her subjects whether they wanted to exist, and the skeva have spent their entire history as a people reckoning with the implications of that origin.
The division in skeva attitudes toward Ulusaba is not a simple disagreement that time will resolve. It is a fundamental fracture in skeva identity, a question about the nature of their existence that admits no comfortable answer. If Ulusaba was a visionary who gave them the gift of consciousness, then the skeva owe their creator a debt that can never be repaid and that casts the hardships of their existence—the hiding, the persecution, the marginality—as a price worth paying for the miracle of awareness. If Ulusaba was a torturer who used their ancestors as raw material for her ambitions, then the skeva owe her nothing but contempt, and the hardships of their existence are the direct consequences of being created by someone who did not care what happened to her creations after they served their purpose.
Most skeva live between these positions, holding both in mind simultaneously without committing fully to either. This capacity for ambivalence is itself one of the defining characteristics of skeva culture—the ability to hold contradictory truths without demanding resolution, to honor and resent the same figure, to be grateful for existence while questioning the terms under which it was granted. Other races find this ambivalence confusing or unsatisfying. The skeva find it honest.
Those Who Revere Her
Skeva clans that revere Ulusaba tend to emphasize the result of her work over its methods, arguing that the gift of consciousness is so profound that it transcends the circumstances of its delivery. These clans view their creator as a figure of extraordinary ability whose achievement—the elevation of animals into people—places her among the most significant individuals in the history of Uhl, regardless of her personal motivations. They do not claim she was kind. They do not insist she loved her subjects. They simply maintain that what she accomplished matters more than how she felt about it.
The reverent clans tend to maintain more elaborate oral traditions about Ulusaba, preserving and embellishing stories that portray her in favorable terms—a brilliant scholar who chose rats because she admired their adaptability, a visionary who saw potential in the smallest and most despised of creatures and proved the world wrong by actualizing it. These traditions serve important cultural functions, providing the skeva with a creation narrative that frames their existence as intentional and meaningful rather than accidental and exploitative. A people who believe they were created with purpose have a different relationship with their place in the world than a people who believe they were created as a byproduct of someone else’s curiosity.
Reverent clans often maintain small shrines or commemorative objects dedicated to Ulusaba’s memory, placing them in prominent positions within their settlements as reminders of the creator who made their existence possible. The rituals performed at these shrines are not worship in the religious sense but acknowledgment—a recognition that the skeva did not make themselves and that the being who did make them, whatever her faults, gave them something irreplaceable.
Those Who Despise Her
Skeva clans that despise Ulusaba focus on the methods rather than the results, arguing that the pain, fear, and violation inherent in the transformation process cannot be justified by any outcome, however beneficial. These clans view their creator as a torturer who treated sentient beings—or beings in the process of becoming sentient—as experimental material, subjecting them to procedures that caused suffering without their consent for purposes that served no one but herself. The gift of consciousness, in this view, is not a gift at all but an imposition—a condition forced upon creatures who had no say in the matter and who might have preferred to remain as they were.
The condemning clans maintain oral traditions that emphasize the suffering of the original skeva—the pain of transformation, the terror of awakening consciousness, the dehumanizing conditions of the laboratory, and the desperate fear that drove the escape. These traditions serve as cautionary tales about the abuse of power and the dangers of treating living beings as means to an end, providing moral frameworks that the skeva apply to their own conduct and to their assessment of other races’ behavior toward them.
Some condemning clans take their rejection of Ulusaba further, viewing the act of self-naming that followed the escape as the true moment of skeva creation—the point at which they ceased to be products and became people. In this interpretation, Ulusaba made the raw material, but the skeva made themselves, and whatever credit is due for their existence belongs not to the woman who engineered their bodies but to the individuals who chose to survive, to flee, to build communities, and to create a culture from nothing. This view rejects any debt to Ulusaba and locates skeva identity in the acts of self-determination that followed the escape rather than in the transformation that preceded it.
Oral Traditions & Competing Myths
The skeva maintain no unified account of Ulusaba’s story. Instead, each clan preserves its own version, shaped by its historical experience, its geographic location, and its position on the reverence-condemnation spectrum. These versions share certain core elements—the human witch, the volcanic laboratory, the transformation of rats, the escape—but diverge on virtually every detail that falls outside this minimal framework.
The Giving Fire tradition, maintained by clans in the reverent camp, portrays Ulusaba as a Promethean figure who stole consciousness from the domain of the gods and bestowed it upon the humblest of creatures, demonstrating that intelligence and worth are not the exclusive properties of the powerful. In this version, the pain of transformation is acknowledged but framed as a necessary cost—the birth pains of a new race, unavoidable but ultimately justified by the life that followed.
The Cage Breaker tradition, maintained by condemning clans, centers the narrative on the escape rather than the creation, portraying the founding skeva as prisoners who liberated themselves from a captor whose plans for them included continued experimentation, vivisection, and eventual disposal once she had extracted the knowledge she sought. In this version, Ulusaba is a villain whose only positive contribution to skeva history is that she underestimated her subjects’ capacity for survival and self-determination.
The Unfinished Work tradition, maintained by a smaller number of clans that occupy the middle ground, holds that Ulusaba’s experiments were incomplete when her subjects escaped—that the transformation process had additional stages that were never implemented, and that the skeva as they exist today are not the final product Ulusaba intended but an intermediate form that fled before the work was done. This tradition raises uncomfortable questions about what the skeva might have become if the process had been completed, and whether the characteristics they view as limitations—their small size, their vulnerability, their marginal social position—are consequences of an interrupted process rather than features of a finished design.
Sites & Relics
The skeva possess no confirmed sacred sites associated with Ulusaba, as the laboratory’s precise location on the Steel Islands has never been verified, and the skeva’s dispersal from the archipelago during the Scattering took them far from their place of origin. What they possess instead are traditions about places—descriptions preserved in oral history that identify the laboratory’s general location and characteristics without providing the specific information necessary to find it.
The laboratory itself, if it survives, would be the most significant site in skeva cultural history—the place where their race was made. Skeva attitudes toward the prospect of finding it mirror their attitudes toward Ulusaba: reverent clans view the laboratory as a place of origin worthy of pilgrimage, while condemning clans view it as a place of suffering that should be left buried. The practical difficulties of searching for a subterranean installation on a volcanically active island chain have rendered the question academic for most of skeva history, though occasional proposals to organize an expedition surface among the more adventurous clans and are debated with more passion than the proposals usually warrant.
The relics associated with Ulusaba are few and of uncertain provenance. Some clans claim to possess fragments of the alchemical apparatus used in the original transformation—glass vessels, metal implements, ceramic containers bearing residues of unknown compounds—carried away during the escape by founding skeva who grabbed whatever was within reach as they fled. Whether these objects are genuine artifacts of Ulusaba’s laboratory or items acquired later and attributed to the founding era through wishful thinking is impossible to verify. The clans that hold them treat them with the careful ambivalence that characterizes skeva culture: too important to discard, too uncertain to trust, preserved against the possibility that they might one day prove significant while acknowledged as objects whose significance may be entirely invented.
The routes of the Scattering—the paths that the founding skeva took from the Steel Islands to the mainland settlements where they established the first permanent communities—are remembered in oral tradition but not physically marked or maintained. These routes serve as narrative landmarks rather than geographical ones, their significance lying in the stories attached to them rather than the ground they cover. Some clans incorporate the Scattering routes into coming-of-age traditions, requiring young skeva to retrace portions of the founding journey as a way of connecting to their origins, though the routes themselves have changed so dramatically over the millennia that the modern journeys bear little physical resemblance to the original flights.
Concluding Remarks
Ulusaba is gone. The woman who made the skeva is almost certainly dead, her laboratory probably destroyed, her research likely lost, her motivations permanently unknowable. What she left behind is a people—small, resourceful, stubbornly alive, spread beneath the cities of Uhl in communities that the surface world barely knows exist. They carry her work in their bodies and her magic in their blood, and they have done more with the existence she imposed on them than she could possibly have predicted, building a civilization from sewers and shadows and the relentless refusal to disappear.
Whether she deserves credit for this is the question the skeva will never resolve, because resolving it would require knowing things about Ulusaba that she took to her grave—whether she intended the skeva to survive independently, whether she cared about their welfare beyond its utility to her research, whether she would view the sprawling, hidden civilization they have built as a vindication of her work or a failure of her control. The skeva do not know, and they have learned to function without knowing, holding their creator in the ambivalent regard of a people who owe everything to someone they cannot fully trust, cannot fully condemn, and cannot stop thinking about.
She made them. They made themselves. Both statements are true, and the tension between them is the engine that drives skeva culture—the perpetual negotiation between gratitude and resentment, between the miracle of consciousness and the violence of its delivery, between the woman who decided they should exist and the people who decided what their existence would mean. Ulusaba is gone, but the question she left behind—what do you owe the one who made you?—is as alive as the skeva themselves, and it will remain alive for as long as there are rats who walk upright and remember, with pride or with fury or with something in between, the witch who taught them how.