Alverian

Origin

The Alverians were made to watch. Vaeyar of the Sky, the seventh born, made them of "severe intellect and passion," set them "To watch over the world of Nu. To learn and guide all below," and intended them "to enjoy life, and exist as knowledge keepers of the world, ever-watching and delighted by anything and everything within this realm of beautiful creation." What they are is an inch of air jellyfish that learned it could live inside somebody else's head. Everything the world calls Alverian, the twenty-foot lord, the empire, the sciences, the slave peoples, is what that inch built for itself once it had hands. There are seventy-two of them left alive on Nu. Most of the world does not know there are any.

They cannot reproduce, and the whole species is built around it: "the Alverian's jealousy and inability to reproduce made them callous and cruel." Every Alverian that has ever existed was made by Vaeyar at once, and nothing has been added since. There were hundreds of thousands of them in the beginning, dancing on the air currents of a world with a thicker sky.

The bodies came out of the Irugaine. The jellyfish burrowed into Irugaine brains and drove them, and the Irugaine built machines out of ancient magical materials, and the machines grew flesh constructs twenty feet tall. The old account calls it trust: "In an age of trust, the Irugaine moulded and created for the Alverians new bodies to possess," using the Holy Grail. Both are true, in the order given.

Three hundred Alverians ascended into constructs. Those three hundred became the lords of Alveria and brought the Age of Alveria, and they consumed the rest of their own kind to do it. Hundreds of thousands went into the making of three hundred bodies. This is the founding act of the empire and it is not commemorated anywhere in it.

The word consumed is exact and the method is worth knowing, because it explains the shape of everything after. A construct is grown from living tissue and the tissue has to come from somewhere; the only material on Nu compatible with an Alverian nerve weave was other Alverians. Each of the three hundred bodies was cultured out of several hundred of the small ones, dissolved into the vat and grown up into four tons of flesh. The three hundred did not consider this killing, on the argument that the consumed were becoming part of something that would last, and they said so, at the time, in public. Nothing in High Alverian records it as a crime. It is entered in the accounts as a cost.

What the three hundred did with the world is on record. The Great Alverian Experiments: "taking the core DNA of every great species and creating an enslaved race, one that could be climatized to whichever region they wished to enslave them within." The Great Alverian Plan: to "wipe out the planet and create the perfect new slave species." The Lesser Four were made first and made best. The WildKin followed in their hundreds. Every one of the Lesser Four carries a strain of Alverian, because the first designs came out too perfect and had to be lessened before they could be controlled.

They cut the Omari open for Whitestone. The core of the seed from which every Alverian city was grown was extracted from the mind and soul tissue of the Omari, and every white wall of the old empire stands on it. They also helped the gods build Excalibur. They convinced their mother's siblings that killing Aezithis required a part of each of them, and the gods, who had known no evil but Aezithis, had no reason to distrust the children of the purest of them. The sword went to the King of Alveria and corrupted him. He has been in the brain of every Pendragon since the Collapse, which is the only reason a Nu'uman boy can lift it.

Then the stars went out. Alverian power was astral power, and when the sky went dark the enchantments failed, the machines ran on borrowed time and the empire's clocks all showed the same hour. The empire fell in a single night, "when the stars went dark and every enchantment failed."

The High King of Alveria went to Vaeyar and said he had come to make amends, to correct the past and repair what had been done. She had wept when they betrayed her and had never been able to bring herself to kill them, whatever they did. She trusted him, and she came down to the planet to treat with her children. They tried to bind her and take her godhood, because they needed a power source that matched the stars and there was nothing else left of that size. She broke out of it. She became a storm violent enough to change the atmosphere of the world, and she took out of the air the element her children breathed, knowing exactly what she was doing. The Alverians called it aelathan in their own tongue, and what little Common has for it is "the ninth air" or "skybreath." It was thick in the sky of the old world and there is none of it now. Nothing else on Nu ever needed it.

Then the choking. The lesser and kinder Alverians, the ones who had never joined the cult of the three hundred, died in the open air or fled downward, and sixteen of those are alive in the Inner Realm to this day. The lords went into their bunkers, sealed them, and turned on machines that replicate the old atmosphere. Those machines run on soul repositories holding thousands of years of souls, which will power them for as long as it takes. "They await the day they return to the surface realms and seek their vengeance."

Body

An Alverian has two bodies and only one of them is alive.

The true Alverian is small and beautiful. "Their original form is that of a small blue air jellyfish, with four tiny wings, and countless tendrils that can float upwards." It is an inch long. It is the only part of an Alverian that is alive; everything else is a vehicle. Kill the construct and the jellyfish may still be in the room, and may still be in you an hour later.

Inside the inch there is almost nothing. No gut, no heart, no blood, no bone, no organ that a physician would recognise as doing a job. The bell is a thin sac holding a gas the animal makes for itself out of the air it breathes, which is what carries it up; the four wings steer and do no lifting; the tendrils are the nervous system worn on the outside, and they are also the hands, the tongue and the whole of the sense apparatus. An Alverian does not eat and has never eaten. It respires aelathan across the surface of the bell and that is the entire metabolism, which is why Vaeyar's storm was an execution rather than a punishment, and why a lord's construct has to be fed while the lord in it does not.

There is no brain in a lump anywhere in the animal. What it has is a net, spread evenly through the bell and down every tendril, with no centre to protect and no architecture to defend. This is the whole secret of the species. A creature with a nerve net and no skull does not need to overcome another mind; it lies alongside one and grows into it, joining net to nerve until the two run together, and what it has done cannot be undone by cutting because there is nothing discrete to cut. Everything the Alverians ever became rests on a single anatomical accident, which is that they were made without a head.

The net also never prunes. Nothing in an Alverian is ever lost, discarded, blurred or set aside; every hour of every year since the making is still in the weave, and the weave has no mechanism for forgetting because Vaeyar built a creature intended to watch and keep. After ten thousand years the net is full. After a hundred thousand it is a solid mass of undeleted experience with no room to lay down anything new, and the animal begins to run old material over the top of what is in front of it. This is the mechanism behind "the older they get, the more insane they become until feral," and it is not a decline of intelligence. A feral Alverian is as clever as it ever was and is no longer in the present tense.

The senses of the inch are poor beyond description. It has no eyes; light reaches it as a warmth on one side of the bell. It cannot hear. Distance beyond a yard does not exist for it. What it has is a fine reading of air pressure and moisture, and a taste for the electrical wash of a thinking body, which it detects at four or five feet and follows to the ear. An Alverian alone in a room knows there is warmth above and a mind to the left and nothing else at all. Every picture of the world an Alverian has ever held was taken out of somebody else's head, and the consequence runs through the entire history of the species: a people that can only see through a borrowed body will eventually build an empire out of bodies, will study anatomy before it studies anything else, and will regard every living thing as a piece of equipment, because in the only terms it has ever had, every living thing is.

The construct is twenty feet of translucent jellyfish flesh worked into a humanoid shape. It is not clay; the clay suits and the cracking clay masks belong to a surface story and to nothing else. Nine or ten feet is the measure of a servant or a lesser vessel, and never of a lord. A lord's body is a wet, faintly luminous, faintly coloured mass with the light going through it, tall enough to have to stoop in its own halls, built to no god's pattern and to no animal's. They "resemble no god, and are made in their own perfect and suitable image," and each one carries "countless arms, and two strong legs," some skeletal and some enormous, each design an argument its occupant once won with itself. Where the body is breached, the flesh "steams and putrefies as it reacts with the air of the material world," and it has done so since the storm.

A construct runs to four or five tons and is mostly water, and it moves as something that heavy should not, because the muscle in it was never anyone's muscle and does not obey the rules the world worked out for muscle. The jellyfish itself weighs nothing that a scale worth having would report.

Open a construct and there is no skeleton, no heart, no lung and no gut. There is a mesh of contractile sheets under tension against a body of pressurised fluid, and the whole thing holds its shape the way a full waterskin holds its shape; a construct with a wound in it does not bleed so much as slump. Behind the face, where a skull would be if the design had ever wanted one, is the crown-well: a flooded cavity the size of a fist, kept full of aelathan-rich fluid, in which the occupant floats with its tendrils laced into the mesh. The lord is a passenger in a pocket of the old sky, carried around inside a body that is doing the breathing on its behalf. Nothing about the arrangement is metaphorical and nothing about it is stable.

Senses were specified rather than inherited, and the lords specified whatever they fancied. Some constructs carry forty eyes and some carry none and read a room by the pressure of moving air on the skin. Most can see behind themselves. None of them has a face that was designed to be looked at, and their halls show it: Alverian architecture has no windows, because nobody in it was using eyes in any agreed way; the ceilings are grown high for a body that stoops; and the doors unweave to open rather than swinging, because a construct has no fixed silhouette and cannot be relied upon to fit a frame twice. A Nu'uman standing in a complex is standing in a building that was never built for anything with a consistent shape.

They are "immortal until killed," and age takes the mind while the body holds: "the older they get, the more insane they become until feral." Every survivor is now older than the empire that fell, and the Sixteen say, without evidence anyone else could check, that not one of the lords in the bunkers is still sane.

Life

No reproduction, none possible, none ever. No childhood, no ageing of the body, no natural death.

Having no life cycle of their own, they named the life cycle of the thing they wear, and those five words are the only stages any Alverian has ever passed through. Sa'vekh, the pour, is the vat: several hundred of the small ones rendered down and seeded, and a mass of tissue growing in the dark for nine years. Tokhra, the quickening, is the hour the mesh first contracts on its own and the crown-well opens. Kar-siekt, the fitting, is the measuring of the well to its intended occupant, which is exact work, and a construct fitted for one lord will not hold another without a season of alteration. Makvaer, the wearing, is the long part, and is the only stage the world has ever seen. Erkhal, the souring, is the end: the tissue stiffens, the mesh loses its spring, the translucency goes waxy, and the occupant is expected to leave. A construct grown before the Collapse and worn since is centuries past its souring, and every lord still in one knows it.

They need no food. What they need is atmosphere, and the atmosphere they need has not existed since Vaeyar took it. The Nutrient Forge and the Livestock Storage in the complexes were never for the Alverians. They were for the constructs, which are flesh and are grown, and for the slave stock, and for the Pramata jelly the lords used to keep construct tissue supple. A lord does not eat. A lord's body is fed, the way a hold feeds a furnace, and the difference matters to nobody except a servant who has to carry it.

Their life is possession. They "worm into the brains of lesser species to manipulate and control them," entering through the ear. Vanyor took his first Irugaine that way: "Vaynor dove into his ear and wove himself into the brain of the Irugaine." Menarches the Thrice-Blessed carried three at once. The Voice of the King is the name for what a ridden host becomes. This is also how the King of Alveria has held Excalibur through a line of Nu'uman boys for the whole age since the Collapse.

A riding has three stages of its own and the first is the only one that can be reversed. In the ear-hour the animal is lying in the canal reading the host and has grown nothing; a host who gets it out in that hour is bruised, deaf on one side and himself. In the weave the tendrils run into the nerve and the two nets join, which takes a night, and from that point removal kills both. What follows is the Voice, which is the host walking, talking, remembering and answering, with the Alverian behind all of it. A woven host loses whatever the tendrils displaced, and what they displace is memory: a man ridden for thirty years has holes in his own life that he cannot notice, since the noticing is in the same tissue. The families of ridden officials describe the change in the same way in every court on Nu, which is that he became very slightly more precise and could no longer remember his childhood.

Death, for an Alverian, means the inch. A construct can be destroyed and the occupant walks out of the wreck on the air. An occupant can be crushed while its construct stands there, and the construct will keep standing, warm and articulate and empty, for about a day. The Irugaine grew the Bone Yews for exactly this: walking trees that eat the dying so that nothing can be resurrected out of what is left. Whatever the soul of such a thing is, and whether a creature that has consumed a hundred thousand of its own kind has one to sell, goes to the auction of the star gods with everyone else's. The Oracle has been asked. The Oracle does not answer that one.

Frailty

Every one of the seventy-two is living on borrowed atmosphere, and everything that is wrong with them comes back to that.

Replicated aelathan is not the ninth air. It is a near copy assembled by a plant that was built in a hurry on the night the sky failed, and it drifts. A bunker's atmosphere runs a little thin in one decade and a little rich in the next, and the small blue animal in the crown-well has spent an age breathing something almost right. A nerve net that cannot prune cannot correct for it either. The two great faults of the species therefore compound: a full weave with no room left, held in an air that is slightly wrong, for longer than any kingdom on the surface has existed. The Sixteen, who breathe the genuine article in their mother's flesh and are as old as anyone, are the control against which that judgement is made, and they are not feral, and they know exactly what that implies about the fifty-six.

The soul repositories run down. They hold thousands of years of souls and they will hold for as long as it takes, which is a statement about supply and not about the machinery around it. Bearings seize. Seals perish. An atmosphere plant is a grown thing as much as a made one and it has nobody to tend it but ridden servants who die of old age. In some bunkers the plant has already failed and the lord is in hibernation with the works counting down around it, which is the Alverian version of dying of exposure and takes about nine hundred years.

Out of aelathan the inch has minutes. The bell cannot generate lift gas from air that does not contain what it is made from, the animal sinks, the tendrils go slack, and within a quarter hour it is a blue film on the floor that dries clear by morning. This is what happened to hundreds of thousands of them in a single season, and it is why a lord will not leave a construct in open air even to save itself.

They have no congenital faults, no inherited disease and no bad bloodline, because there are no births and no lines. What they have instead is worse in the long run: the species is original equipment with no way to replace a part and no way to shed an error. Nothing about an Alverian has been revised since the day it was made. Every fault Vaeyar built in is still in all seventy-two of them, and every fault each of them has acquired since is in that one individual for ever, and there is no next generation to be better.

The constructs have diseases of their own and the lords take them personally. Souring is the ordinary end. The bloom is the feared one: grown tissue reverting to what it was before it was shaped, so that a lord wakes to find its own face has put out a fringe of tendrils overnight and its arms have begun to fuse. It is treated with Pramata jelly and delay. The lords call it a fault of the vat, which is a way of not calling it what it obviously is.

Riding wears out hosts. Tendril scarring accumulates in the host's nerve, the motor control goes first, and a body ridden hard is a stumbling wreck inside forty years. This is the reason the King of Alveria has moved brain to brain down the Pendragon line for an age rather than staying in one skull, and it is the reason Menarches, carrying three, burned through hosts at a rate his own court found difficult to explain.

What they fear is the obvious thing, which is being outside a body when the air is wrong, and the whole of the last age has been that condition made permanent.

Country

The sky first, then the ground. Their first permanent settlement stood at the mouth of the River Albey. Their homeland was Tyberia, "the land of Providence"; their capital was Alveria, now a ruin. They kept floating cities of learning at Avalon and Melcaron. The Crossing of Vanyor runs ninety feet wide and twenty five miles across open sea. Harvesting facilities stood at Bal Yun and Treil'Sahkar, and the Jon-Lithul complexes with them. Lake Cilinuel, the Do'urssan spawning pool, is still working. The vault sits on the Isle of Parlon. Inside a complex: Upper Level, Surgical Level, Laboratory Level, Examination Room, Hibernation Chamber, Nutrient Forge, Livestock Storage, Artifact Room, Control Room, Soul Repository Bay, Aezithis' Prison, Observation Hallway.

None of that is where they live now. The lords live in bunkers, sealed, breathing replicated air, drawing power from banks of souls. A bunker is no fortress and was never meant to be seen. It is a sphere of Whitestone set deep in rock with the seams grown shut, one soul repository bay, one atmosphere plant, one hibernation floor, and a single lord in it with as many ridden servants as it kept when the doors closed. Some have not been opened in the whole age. In some the atmosphere plant has failed and the lord is in hibernation with the machinery counting down around it. In at least one the servants have died of old age, several times over, and the lord has been alone with itself for longer than Camelot has existed, which is a thing the Sixteen think about often.

The Sixteen live in the Inner Realm, beneath the Under Realm, in the flesh of Nunamnir herself, where she permits them. They live in a fold of her tissue that holds air of the old kind, which is the only place on Nu that does, and they do not build. They have grown nothing, dug nothing and made nothing in an age; they lie in the warm dark against the wall of the world with their tendrils in it, and they listen to her, and the four of them who kept constructs let those constructs rot away long ago because a construct will not fit through the ways down.

They eat nothing and they consumed everything. What an Alverian country runs on is other peoples' bodies and other peoples' hours, and the ledger of that is the Lesser Four, the WildKin, the Livestock Storage and the Pramata trade. Nothing has ever preyed on them. Nothing competes with them. The only creature that ever ate an Alverian was another Alverian, and it happened at a scale that ended the species as a going concern.

What a century of their presence does to a country is a matter of record on three continents. Whitestone seeded into rock grows and does not stop, so an abandoned complex is still spreading, slowly, into the hill behind it. Ground that held a harvesting facility grows nothing, and the Irugaine say that is deliberate and the Do'urssan say it is spillage. Lake Cilinuel is still spawning Do'urssan for an empire that fell an age ago. The terrible thing about their absence is how little it resembles absence: the machines are still running, the Crossing still carries traffic, the slave peoples they designed are still living in the bodies that were designed for them, and every court on Nu still speaks a language the Alverians installed as a back door. A country the Alverians left is not a country that got them out.

Society

"Scientific, and experimental." "All knowing and ever-hungry for all knowledge." "Ruthless, uncaring, and unkind." "Diabolical." "Excited at the destruction they cause." The Hegemony ran under the Lord of Alveria, Alvod Vanyor, with Larunthel the Scientist and the Oracle beneath him. Their technology was made out of people: soul repositories, the soul grenade "its form pulsing with trapped terror," the Alverian battery holding "countless souls of ancient beings trapped within, damned to be extinguished powering the devices of the ancient world," blood gems in vibrant green, thirty-foot golems "ancient, and regal in design," doors that unweave to open, Whitestone walls inlaid with bronze that "begin bleeding red light" when the alarm goes. They drink Alverian brandy, which still turns up in surface cellars.

The brandy is worth a sentence, since a people with no mouth and no gut has no obvious use for it. A lord drinks through the construct, which absorbs it across the lining of the throat cavity, and what reaches the crown-well is a trace carried in the fluid. It does nothing to the animal. It was drunk because the peoples they ruled drank, and because a twenty-foot lord raising a glass at a table of hosts was the single most effective thing any of them ever did in a room, and the lords knew it and priced the stuff accordingly.

There is no Alverian society now, and this is the important thing about them. There are fifty-six lords in fifty-six holes, each with a copy of the same grievance, and there are Sixteen in the Inner Realm who pray. The lords are not in contact and cannot be. The astral system they spoke across is dead, the surface is out of reach, and any signal that could cross rock would be a signal something else could find. What each of them has instead is a plan of return, written before the doors shut, and an age of solitude in which to improve it. They are not idle. Every one of them has spent the age reaching upward the only way a thing an inch long can reach, which is through somebody else's head, and the reason the world does not know they exist is that the world keeps meeting their hosts instead.

What survives of custom is titles. An Alverian of rank accretes an honorific and never sheds one, and the honorific is the whole of its social record; Xakerxes the Radiant Serpent of Heavenly Fire is a name, a rank and a curriculum. A lord addressed by fewer titles than it holds will correct you, at length, from a sealed room, through the mouth of a servant, having waited nine hundred years for somebody to talk to. The custom grew out of the net that cannot forget. An Alverian holds every honour it has ever been given at the same brightness as the day it was given, so dropping one is not modesty and is not possible.

Those who refused Vanyor's call became the Alnorak. They were among the first to choke. A few Alnorak are believed to be among the Sixteen, which the Sixteen neither confirm nor deny, and which is the only political question left in the species.

Faith

The lords have none. They were made by a goddess, they tried to take her godhood, and they responded to her refusal by deciding to become gods on their own account; the Great Alverian Plan is a theology with the worship stripped out. What they have instead of a faith is the Cult of Atahr, which is a faith about them: a secret cult that has existed since the making of the abomination for the sole purpose of helping the High King of Alveria reclaim his throne. Its members worship the High King directly and commune with him wherever he is. Atahr is the intermediary, and Atahr and the God of Dead Memories are one and the same, the High King's attempt to manufacture a living god that worships him. The cult's own word for Atahr's office is the Vessel-Between, and the cult never uses the word priest for anything.

The Sixteen worship their mother. They are the only Alverians who ever did, they were doing it before the storm, and it is why they are alive: Nunamnir lets them live in her flesh, which is not a thing she has done for anyone else. Their rite is silence and contact. They lie against the living wall with every tendril in it and take in what she is doing, which is being a world, and they do not ask her for anything, having learned by example what asking a god for something does. Once a year, by their reckoning of a place with no sky, they say the count aloud: the number of Alverians that were, the number the three hundred ate, the number left. They have said the last figure as seventy-two for a long time and they do not know whether it is still true, because they cannot see into a bunker any more than anyone else can.

Their souls go where all souls go. Nunamnir keeps no realm, no worldly god does, and the Sixteen, of all the peoples on Nu, would be the least surprised.

Tongue

High Alverian, dense and old, with the A'Q- prefix on every species and place they named (A'QBOG, A'QMOAR ALTA, A'QSNAI VONIESE). Their speech as it has been heard: "Tarksha! Vien-tokh sie kar sak!! BAH!!" and "Siekt? Giae tosh-ki, makvae?" and "Golta... golta erk vi-" and "Vie-gehs!", which means "Vermin!"

Nothing in it was designed to be spoken by a mouth. High Alverian was worked out between creatures with no voice, no ears and no distance sense, and it was originally passed tendril to tendril as pressure; the consonant clusters that make it so hard to say aloud are the surviving shape of that. Every word of it the world has ever heard was shouted by a construct's throat cavity or by a ridden host, which is to say the language has been spoken in translation since the day the three hundred put bodies on.

They also authored Common Tongue and built it into every species they made, so that "no matter what language they taught themselves, they would always understand Common Tongue." They did not invent it. Common is a stepped-down form of the gods' own language, and it came to the world through Irus and the Irugaine; what the Alverians did was take it, cut it down further, and install it in their creations as a back door. Every people on Nu that speaks Common is speaking a thing the Alverians can be understood in, and that was the entire point.

Names run to dense consonant clusters ending in -or, -el or -es, with an accreting honorific after: Vanyor, Alvod Vanyor, Vaynor, Larunthel, Menarches, Xakerxes. Eight further names in the same pattern: Tharnkhes; Velunthor; Skarnael; Omvekhes; Drusanthel; Kaervor; Ithuknes; Malzhorel. The Sixteen have put their honorifics down. Among themselves they use the short form of the name only, which by the standards of the empire is an obscenity.

Regard

"Ancient Terrors." "The bringers of death and unwanted knowledge." "The abominable scientists of the ancient era." "The First Mistakes." Most of the modern world does not know they still exist, and the modern world is administered, in more places than anyone has counted, by people who have something in their ear. The peoples who do remember do not use a slur, because a slur implies you expect to meet one. The Irugaine say "the ones we made hands for" and change the subject. The Omari have a shape of sonar for them that is not a name and that other peoples describe, after hearing it once through the water, as the sound of a slab.

Their maker, Vaeyar, wept, was betrayed, could not kill them, and in the end took the air instead. Their victims are the Irugaine, who gave them bodies and were repaid with the Scourging and a burnt Mothertree, and the Omari, cut apart for Whitestone. Everyone else is property: every Lesser Four people and every WildKin was designed and built by them. The one that got away is the Do'urssan, "the only race to avoid enslavement" despite being an Alverian design, who now worship their own High King as a living god instead. Their internal war runs through the Eaven and the Librar, who serve the Great Alverian General and the Great Alverian Oracle and are "at constant war." Their enemy is Aezithis, whose prison they hold in one of their own complexes. Their splinter is the Alnorak. Their servants are still in place: the Cult of Atahr, the Tusiva, the King of Alveria's line of Pendragon hosts, and ridden officials in every court on Nu, in numbers no one has counted.

Harvest

Nothing is taken from an Alverian. What could be harvested from one has been lost to the knowledge of time, and no one alive knows it. The last people who knew were Alverians, and they ate them.

What is known is negative and is worth stating. Construct flesh putrefies on contact with the air of the world and is slurry within the hour, so no lord's body has ever reached a market. The jellyfish is an inch long, has no hard parts, and dries to a film. The soul repositories, the batteries, the blood gems, the Whitestone and the enchanted bronze are all Alverian-made and never Alverian-derived, and those are traded constantly, at enormous prices, by people who mostly do not know what a soul repository is for. Alverian brandy is on surface tables to this day. There is one persistent story in the mage colleges that a dried Alverian, whole, taken before the film sets, is the only material that will hold an enchantment after the stars went out. Nobody has produced one. The story is old enough that it may have been put there.

Remembered

Alvod Vanyor, also given as Vaynor. Firstborn, Great Lord of Alveria. Received Excalibur from Vaeyar and was corrupted by it, ordered the breeding of the Do'urssan, and built the Crossing that carries his name.

The King of Alveria, the true wielder of Excalibur, who has burrowed brain to brain through every Pendragon since the Collapse.

The High King of Alveria, who went to his mother claiming amends and tried to bind her, and who is worshipped by the Cult of Atahr and communed with wherever he is.

Larunthel the Scientist, ten feet in the accounts and taller in fact, spider-bodied, seen in the complexes.

The Oracle, served by the Librar.

Menarches the Thrice-Blessed, a God-King ridden by three at once.

Xakerxes the Radiant Serpent of Heavenly Fire, a surviving master.

Drusanthel, eldest of the Sixteen, an Alnorak who refused Vanyor's call before the ascension and has lain against the wall of the world ever since, and who keeps the count.

The kin

No variants were ever bred; they bred everyone else. What divides them now is what body they wear and which of three fates they took when the sky emptied. What follows are the two bodies and the three standings the species has left.

The True Form, "Sky Jellyfish," the animal Vaeyar made. "A small blue air jellyfish, with four tiny wings, and countless tendrils that can float upwards." One inch long. This is the Alverian; the rest is equipment. It floats, it is nearly invisible against a bright sky, it enters through the ear, and with a minute of quiet it can be woven into a brain and be the thing behind the eyes by morning. It has no eyes of its own, no ears, no gut and no centre to its nervous system, and it finds an ear by tasting the electrical wash of the mind behind it at four or five feet. In open air of the current world it chokes and dies, which is the only reason the surface still belongs to the surface.

The Construct, "The Twenty-Foot Lord," grown flesh, translucent. Twenty feet of translucent jellyfish flesh, grown by machines the Irugaine were made to build, worn by the three hundred who ascended and by nobody else. Countless arms, two heavy legs, no two alike, light passing through all of it. It is not clay and never was. A construct is grown in a lab, and the Alverian host can go from construct to construct, treating them as a vehicle of sorts. Inside the face is the crown-well, a flooded cavity of aelathan-rich fluid in which the occupant lies laced into the body's contractile mesh, so that the lord is carried about inside a pocket of an atmosphere the world no longer has. The lords used Pramata royal jelly to keep the tissue supple, bathed the constructs in it, and that trade is the reason the Pramata became a traitor people and can still sell what they make in any market on Nu. Breached, the flesh "steams and putrefies as it reacts with the air of the material world."

The Fifty-Six, "The Lords in the Ground," the remnant of the three hundred. Of the three hundred that ascended, fifty-six are alive, sealed in bunkers, breathing replicated aelathan off banks of soul repositories that will hold for as long as they need. They are the government of a dead empire, they have not spoken to one another in an age, and they intend to come back. Each holds a plan written the night the doors shut and refined every day since, and each plan requires the same three things: a power source to replace the stars, a way to put the ninth air back into the sky, and a body on the surface to do the work. The third is the only one any of them has solved, and they solved it before the fall. Every one of them has now spent an age in a room, in an air that is very slightly wrong, with a nerve net that has not been able to discard a thought since before the Collapse. The Lord of Alveria was locked out of his bunker, betrayed by the remaining. Thus why he had to escape in the mind of a Nu'uman slave, who would become the bloodline later known as Pendragon.

The Sixteen, "Those Who Kept the Mother," the Inner Realm society. Sixteen Alverians hide in the Inner Realm beneath the Under Realm, in the flesh of Nunamnir, in a secret society that still worships her, and she lets them live there. They are of the kinder sort, the ones who never joined the cult of the three hundred. They keep no constructs, build nothing, and have taken no host since they went down; the discipline of never entering another mind is the whole of their order and the only penance available to a thing that cannot die. They breathe the true air of the old world, the only sixteen on Nu that do, and they are the proof that the madness of the lords is a thing done to them by their own machinery rather than a thing done to them by time. They know the world above only through their mother, which is to say they know the shape of it and none of the names. They are, by a wide margin, the most dangerous thing in the world that has decided not to do anything.

Every people the Alverians made from the Lesser Four onward was built to be worn. That is the part the world has forgotten and the Alverians have not. A body was a suit, and the maker kept the key to it, and any lord who wanted to walk on the surface in daylight walked there inside something he had grown for the purpose. The peoples were never told and had no way of noticing, since a body being piloted feels to the one inside it like a day it cannot afterwards account for.

The Jondarans were that arrangement made permanent. They are no species and must not be counted as one. When the sky emptied, the lords who did not reach a bunker had a choice between the open air and somebody else's skull, and they took the skull. They burrowed in, and the slave peoples they took were newly free and not yet developed enough to push back, and so the Alverians ruled through them in the open as God-Kings. A Jondaran is an Alverian wearing a people, and the peoples of Nu who record Jondarans in their histories are recording their own ancestors. Menarches the Thrice-Blessed, ridden by three at once, is the type specimen.

What ended the age was not a war. It was the peoples themselves getting harder to wear. Thousands of years went by in which they were left alone to build their own courts, their own trades and their own tongues, and a mind that has done that is not the mind the suit was cut for. The intelligence grew, the mechanics of the brain changed with it, and the grip slipped a little in every generation. A lord who could take a body outright in the first century after the fall needed a lifetime of work to hold one by the tenth, and the peoples who are hardest to ride today are the ones with the oldest libraries. The title outlived the practice. There are courts that call a ruler Jondaran as an honorific, having forgotten entirely what it described, and in at least one of them the usage is accurate.

The third standing is one man. When the sky emptied and the lords went down, the Lord of Alveria was locked out of his own bunker by the rest and betrayed, and he did not die in the open air. He went into the mind of a Nu'uman slave and has ridden that bloodline ever since, and the world above knows the line by the name it took: Pendragon. He is a standing of one, he is the only Alverian on Nu who is neither sealed under rock nor folded into the goddess, and of the seventy two he is the one who is out.