The Whistling Bank

Body

Being distributed, it is the one thing in this class with no load to carry wrongly and no joint to wear out. Everywhere else the rule holds: a crooked bone at the top of an animal is a column of failing joints all the way to the ground, the cartilage goes in the first third of a life, and the deformity deepens every year. The Whistling Bank has no column and nothing to deepen. Its asymmetry is spread across a couple of hundred feet of mismatched parts and costs it nothing.

That is the best guess anyone has as to why it is the oldest thing set down here. Nobody has watched an Abomination from its beginning to its end, so nothing about its age can be stated; what can be stated is that the fault that kills the rest of the class is the one fault it does not have.

Frailty

The segments detach when it is disturbed, and the detached segments are hungry. This is why it kills without hunting, and why a thing that has never pursued anything has a reputation. A traveller in a narrow ravine passage has to choose which wall to walk near, and the whistle is the only warning given.

Tongue

Nothing in it has ever answered a question. Whether there is anything in it to answer is not a thing the world has any means of settling, and nobody has been in a position to try twice.