It was only a few moments after Onan and Zimri left me that the Munams arrived, for they had run, spurred on, apparently, by their great desire to meet me. In appearance they were like I had seen from afar: hairy and stooped, almost using their arms as legs, but not entirely. Their skulls were large and oddly shaped and their mouths were pushed out from their faces like an ape’s. A limp, furry tail hung down from their lower backs, and their hands had a tough, leathery appearance.
There were eight of them, and when they drew near, the foremost hailed me with an eager gleam in his eyes, like one who has long hoped and long been denied. His voice was low and gravelly, but not at all uncivilized sounding, as one would have expected by his appearance, and his facial expressions were equally as livid and distinctly humanoid. He began:
“Hail, the White Eagle, sent by the gods to deliver us! Hail the redemption from paradise, coming to bring us home.” With that he held out his arms and embraced me in a very warm, heartfelt manner.
“Hello,” I replied, somewhat embarrassed by my lack of authority.
“I am Ramma, leader of the Munams,” he told me, “And I welcome you in the name of us all.”
“Greetings, Ramma,” I replied, “I am Jehu.”
“We are joyous at your arrival, oh Jehu of the White Eagle.”
When he said this I had a flashback, a moment of memorial deja vu, when the present and the past are morphed together by one thought, when one idea from the past and the present exists in such a way as to connect the two times around it, forming a nexus between the two moments. I was brought back to two separate times, the first being my initial meeting with Onan, when I saw the muraled dome, the genetics of history, and its depiction of the events which were symbolically representative of Daem: the deformed man, the warring races, the worshipers of the White Eagle. The other was my arrival in the Temple of Time, when the King showed me the altar to Temis, the God of Time, depicted as a great White Eagle, wrought in diamond and grasping the altar in its talons. There was something about the White Eagle that connected itself to me inseparably, something that converged us into one form. I had a sense that it was somehow a key to the mystery of the end times, but I could not make the connection. I thought back to what Onan had said to me just a few moments before, that he and Zimri were close friends, and not enemies at all, while those on earth believed their rivalry was a serious conflict. Yet while I had two separate memorial deja vu’s, I could not make the connection between them to figure out what they meant.
“Tell me,” I asked of Ramma, “What do you mean when you call me the White Eagle?”
“The prophecy said that our kinsman redeemer, who would bring us out of the lands of desolation and into paradise, who would come to us like a giant eagle, soaring high above the sea. Across the ocean there,” he said, pointing to Daem, “Is Daem, the paradise land, wherein dwell our enemies the Zards and Canitaurs. They keep us off of the island and on the mainland by force, and here we have suffered ever since the great wars, in these desolate and barren wastelands, where there is neither life nor death, but only a hazy in between. An ancient one with wings like an eagle was to come and rescue us, the White Eagle, and under his guidance we are to be led to victory against our enemies.