Enar

The Enar stand roughly chest-high to a human but nearly three times as broad. Their bodies and heads are composed of chitinous gray plate, with no visible eyes. Their mouths are located behind mandible-like grasping fingers. Their legs are tipped with cloven talons resembling human hands. The number of limb-arms varies among individuals -- four, six, or eight -- possibly indicating different sexes. No two figures depicted in the bas-reliefs of Akterumu appear alike. Their limbs have a segmented, carapace-like appearance similar to the Exalted's armored bodies.

The Enar communicate in a distinctive clicking language, with each syllable separate. Their inscriptions use a notched angular script described as spiked characters stemming from a central groove, rising or falling like perturbations of a sound wave. In Cielcin theology, the Enar sought to free themselves from the physical world and from the trap of material existence -- what the Cielcin call the Lie. Their high priest bore silver mechanical limb replacements. The Enar conducted a ritual mass suicide in the inner sanctum of Miudanar's skull, dissolving into black fluid after their high priest drank from a black glass amphora carved from the Watcher's bone. The fluid dissolved them, an act interpreted as severing their connection to the material universe. The treasures of Akterumu -- their weapons and machines -- were taken by Elu's people after the Enar's extinction.

The Enar are the First -- the first servants of the Cielcin gods who preceded the Cielcin in worshiping and serving the Watchers. They built Akterumu on Eue, described as the oldest city known -- old even in the day of Elu himself, whose own civilization was ancient. The Enar were already extinct before the Cielcin emerged from beneath Se Vattayu. They colonized the stars before humanity diverged from apes. Their galactic empire is depicted on stelai as burning entire races, sterilizing planets, boiling seas, and torching green hills to glass; their conquests are concluded to have left the galaxy barren when humanity arose. The Watchers demanded they destroy creation, but the Enar failed in this work. They burned a billion worlds in their attempt and were destroyed, perhaps by Utannash and his champions, before completing their task. Approximately two thousand Enar conducted a ritual mass suicide in the inner sanctum of Miudanar's skull, dissolving into black fluid. Syriani Dorayaica calls Akterumu a monument to the Enar's shame and failure -- and to Cielcin glory. Miudanar had ordered the city itself protected and Elu forbade its desecration, though the interior was stripped. Much of the rest of Akterumu's contents were destroyed by subsequent blood-clans to build worldships. An ancient Cielcin -- Elu or a prince named Araxaika -- performed an iconoclasm in the inner sanctum, sanding smooth every Enar relief and replacing them with Cielcin circle-writing, sparing only images of Miudanar itself.