Plane-walkers Guidebook

Chapter 3: Rác (Celestial Blade), 'chicken little.'

As much as I want it to be, this is not a story about an underdog hero who stopped an alien invasion. Honestly, it would be much... much... much better if that was the case. Instead, though, what we have are 30-something meters tall flesh-eating raptors. No! Not the dinosaurs, I mean the birds-of-prey, hence the nickname 'chicken little' given to it by a French Plane-walker back in the day of the Indochina War. It should NOT be confused with Roc, either! That's a whole different race of creatures, which, surprisingly enough, despite the similar name, is not even remotely related to Rác.

While we're still on the subject of name meaning and potential misunderstanding of said name, I should probably point out that the creature's name, Rác, doesn't mean the same thing as the "rác" you'd often hear modern Vietnamese say. Believe me, I'd made the same mistake when I first read about this, too. The "rác" in Vietnam's language these days is in the Kinh people's tongue, meaning garbage. Meanwhile, the creature's name is in one of the ethnic minority groups' dialects, and I'm not entirely sure what it means, either.

1. Story Summary:

Rác made an unexpected appearance in the fable 'The celestial blade' and served as the main antagonist for the first half. The story followed a cowherd who saved a golden turtle from a trap. To repay his savior, the turtle told the cowherd a place where the fairies would bath and advised him to steal one of their magic scarfs, as, without it, they can not fly back to the Village of the Fairies. Now, before we go any further into this, there are two things I must address.

Firstly, I know! It's a plain and uncool name. But that just showcases how lazy the Vietnamese Walkers were in naming things back in the day, as already mentioned in this guidebook's foreword.

And secondly, while we're on that, I should probably clarify the term "Fairy," especially to you Western walkers. This was one of those cases when things got lost in translation, and now we're just too used to the term to bother correcting it. "Tiên" in Vietnamese is an umbrella term for the fae, nymphs, celestial, gods, and pretty much any other type of immortals on good or neutral alignment. Fairy was the translation chosen for "Tiên," which had been the case for all translations of official documents in the past century. So, when you read "Fairy," I need you to keep in mind that it doesn't exclusively refer to the fae but could be something else entirely. This particular case could either be fae or celestial, as the context doesn't specify.

Back to the story at hand, the fairy whose scarf was stolen eventually fell in love with the cowherd and agreed to marry him. Whether this was problematic or not, I can't really say. Our ancestors had different definitions and lived separate lives from ours. And it's not our place to judge them. Anyway, the two of them then led a happy life and had a son together. Pretty standard in our worlds of gods and demons, right? I'm sure Croatian Plane-walkers would think of She-Wolf. Or maybe some of you have heard of the story of Cowherd and Weaver Girl from China. That one became famous even among the mortals. This particular tale doesn't play out the same way as the other stories you might have heard of, though. The ending itself was a topic of debate between Vietnamese Practitioners. One side believes it ended in a massacre, while the other says it pulled a night of the living dead shenanigan. I won't be going into specifics details now, knowing how all the adrenaline in your walkers' heritage making reading a chore for you guys. But rest assured. Later in this guidebook, when we talk about the artifact itself, we will explore what happened.

Anyhow, the boy found his mother's scarf, and the fairy returned to the Fairies Village to visit her parents. At this point, there are pretty much two versions, and she made two different decisions.

In one, the fairy doesn't say anything about her mortal family until much later on in the story.

In the other version, she told her parents about their new son-in-law and grandson and wanted to return to her loved ones but was forbade from doing so. The reason might be that some of the fairies viewed themselves as superior to humans and didn't want their pure blood to be tainted.