Eaveth'mor
The Eaveth'mor is the largest thing the locked genome makes and the rarest thing in the species. Eighteen feet upright, dark brown shading to black, with a yellow beak the length of a forearm and a wingspan that shadows a farmyard. The General used them as the arm of his reconnaissance: a thing that could see a wall and then take it.
Perhaps a dozen remain. All of them are old, all of them are in the oldest chiefdoms, and none has flown in living memory of the peoples below. They remember every siege of the Scourging exactly, at the speed it ran, and they are said to be the ones who most want the call to come.
Body
Eighteen feet upright, dark brown shading to black, with a yellow beak the length of a forearm. The wingspan shadows a farmyard. Everything the base Eaven has, this morph has larger: the dorsal keel carrying the wings along the whole length of the back, the ribcage of hollow struts stiffened inside like honeycomb, the nine air sacs running out of the body cavity into the bones, the claw that extends to a foot of curved blade and locks out and will not retract under load. At this size the claw does not tear an unarmoured person in two so much as remove them from the argument.
The eye is the Eaven eye and fails the Eaven way, the outer field first and the distance last, so that the world of the oldest of them has shrunk to the crown of one tree. The memory does not fail at all. An Eaveth'mor that watched a city burn in the Scourging can still smell it, at full strength, on demand and sometimes without demand.
Frailty
The morph is dying out by arithmetic and not by violence. The two-egg clutch and the ring of resin that make the ordinary Eaven strong make a giant's chick too slow: within its first days the stronger of two drives the weaker over the edge of the nest into the fire, and in this form the elder does not always win. Very few hatched after the collapse.
The wing-root does the rest. Nine hundred pounds coming out of a stoop puts everything through the dorsal keel, and this morph is heavier than that; a torn keel does not heal straight, and an Eaven that can glide and cannot climb cannot get back into the tree, and there is no arrangement in their society for carrying one. What remains sits in the topmost hollows of the oldest chiefdoms and does not fly.
Regard
The peoples below have no account of them at all, because none has flown in living memory. The learned who fear the call fear it most because of these. They were built as the arm of the General's reconnaissance, they hold every siege of the Scourging entire and unsoftened, and of all the Eaven they are said to be the ones who most want the order to arrive.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How many are actually left, since a dozen is an estimate made from outside
- Whether any of them could still fly if the order came
- What they did in the Scourging that the chiefdoms still recite