Fleet fliers, shephards of the heavens

So Barker named these three eyed flying sophonts hláka because of course he did; and he made them not only inscrutable and irrational but also unreliable and incapable of communicating their values and inner world, because of course he did — I've referred to this a couple of times, insha'allah I'll pull up the Blue Room listserv file where he explains how many human cultures are incapable of ever understanding each other, with the takeaway being "and why would i want to understand some dirty tribesman, and what do i care if they don't understand my sophistication", and also condescension that they have the right to be primitive and proud if they please to.  I hope I'm not exaggerating, in my memory it was brazen and dismissive. The peccant point being, why should he make up comprehensible aliens? Then players might want to play them, instead of this nice legionary of the Emperor's Own XXIV Child Molestor Regiment, they wear big red hats! I know you like big red hats and scheming.

The hl word is in some damn conlang; they have their own references, some of which can even be approximated by speech organs of human and shen: Sah, and Akkk; in documents and legal instruments, they prefer to be known as Sheppards of the Heavens. An archaic name, derived from a human name of their home region among the stars, is Ensifer, or the Ensis.

Sorqite shepherds are more sophisticated than their distant kin, colonists lost on the world around the star Sinistra. This is in part because Sorq is still in the normal universe, kind of, not a closed-off pocked dimension. The sky is full of stars, and sheppard social activities and culture makes constant refference to the sky and stars, far more so to the earth, where they keep herd animals, but generally do not love them. Every star has names and qualities, mythology and a range of moral and rhetorical functions; the stars are rather like extended members of the family, or a stock of onlookers whose reactions can be predicted and responded to — hilariously, boldly, saving face and deflecting blame from tense and contentious interactions with other flyers.

A common aesthetic and religious praxis in all sky sheppard settlements is the "dirt heavens" or "mud sky": arranging stones of various colors, sizes, and textures on the bare earth. The mud sky is not a game or an amusement; it is one phase of a lifelong system of cosmological theurgy. The stones and their protocol encode astrophysics, self and community, much memorized history, and so on; the reverie of gazing at the stones is a deep and fulfilling cognition, with immense alterations to subjective experience of time and language. 

The shepherds of heaven perform various magics and esoteric arts from within memory palaces that they have built up since before they could fly. These memorious spaces are held to be independent of any one flyer, and are part of the common inheritance of lineages and cohorts.

In the vaults of their memory palaces, the flyers build astral bodies, doubles, and ancestral gestalts.

A young flier finds one of the ancients to pattern themselves on, moulding one's personality and demeanor to conform to a venerated figure of the past. 

The double moves between self, association of like-souled contemporaries, the tests and reservoirs in the Palaces, and eventually conduit to Ancient. [unpack, Taha!]

The Double may abruptly leave its original to become a haunt, to merge early with the gestalt, or to flee the enemy entities. Abandonment is a major crisis, long to recover from, and the shephard must start over with another ancient; become a magician (who make their own double that is not aligned with ancestors, but with planar beings (demons), abstract ideologies and magical principles, or even flyer idealizations of humes, shen, and other species of the League, shameful mud-feet all, despite all their power); or live as a sort of holy fool. 

[this needs totally rewritten, i was either very high or very autistic when i wrote that, anyway, i partied.]

[Because Tekumel hláka have lost contact with this very ancient lore and transpersonal knowledge, they are all fools.] — Sorq flyers practice architecture, metallurgy, mining, trade, and use gliders and towed drogues for air cargo — crews harness to lines to fly big ones. Together with Sorqi optics, gliders are even more important auxiliaries in ware, and are postal carriers planet-wide.

Shephard courier and diplomatic channel express — mercenary agencies.