Eavenhul

Body

Smaller than the base at perhaps twelve feet upright, dark in the body with a pale head and neck, longer in the leg and quicker on the ground than in the air. The frame is the Eaven frame: two harnesses of bone, the wolf's forelimbs off a heavy shoulder girdle and the wings off the dorsal keel, a chest that is mostly air sac, and the extendable claw that locks out under load.

What the morph favours is the night half of the Eaven sensorium. The wolf runs stronger in them than the eagle and the night sense is the sharpest in the species. Moving under the canopy in the dark, an Eavenhul is working from a picture built entirely of smell, in which a camp is a shape with an age to it, and fear has its own note, and a lie told by a frightened man an hour ago is still hanging in the air of the tent. The day eye is the same eye every Eaven has: a column counted at a mile, and nearly useless inside twenty feet.

Society

They are the Watchers of most chiefdoms, which in the chain of command the General left is the rank that goes out and comes back. They hunt in lines of five or six below the canopy, silent, running down anything the wing cannot lift, and they yip and answer one another in the Alverian tongue in a way that carries for miles and is taken by travellers for animals.

Everything they see goes into the dusk recitation and no further. The colony murmurs its whole archive round each to its neighbour every night of the year, in rain, in siege and in mourning, and an Eavenhul that reported a smelled thing in the form reserved for a seen thing would be driven from the tree and hunted by its own. Their taboo is to be seen, and the punishment for the one who saw is the same as for the one who was seen.

Country

The floor and lower canopy of the god tree forests: cold wet country under a closed canopy, the trunks going up out of sight, the light green at the bottom of it, and the roads and river lines that run through it. These are the parts of the Eaven country that anybody else ever walks through, which is exactly why this morph works them. Woodsmen call the black rich ground beneath a colony's crown a fat wood and plant it and do well out of it for two generations, and none of them has ever worked out where the soil came from, and none of them goes up.