Giafe'on
The Giafe'on is the elder build: the longest-lived and the largest-crowned, heavy-coated, slow, and the build that most often reaches four thousand years and beyond. Then-Who-Carried-The-East-Wall, who reached six thousand and whose recitation of the eastern road took nine days, was a Giafe'on.
They are called prophets by other peoples and they are not prophets. A Giafe'on that tells a city what is going to happen to it is not seeing forward; it is recalling, exactly, the eleven previous occasions on which it saw this precise sequence of decisions taken, and reporting how each of those ended, and it is right about as often as that method deserves, which is often enough to have built the reputation.
Body
Heavy-coated, slow, and the largest-crowned of the three: nine horns at their greatest size, the keystone tall, the great lower pair sweeping forward past the ears and running six feet from base to tip on an old one. The coat goes pale with the centuries under a guard layer shed in slabs every hot season. Age does not take the body down. The body stays sound to the last century, and what wears out is the capacity to carry what has accumulated.
Society
They serve as witnesses, as counsel and as the keepers of the walking, and the recitation of the routes is theirs to hold. A Giafe'on present at an oath, a treaty, a marriage or a trial is the only unimpeachable record in the world, and cities pay them in salt and clay to stand at the back of the room and say nothing, and a recitation called for afterwards is delivered flatly, in the original voices, for as long as it takes.
There is no rank among the Giafe. There is age, and age is deferred to absolutely, and the deferral is practical, since the older one has more of the world in it. In practice that means the Giafe'on are deferred to by everybody, including by the other two builds and by the cities that host them.
Regard
A hot-country city with a Giafe'on in its yard will tell a stranger so within a minute of his arrival, and will call it a prophet, and will be corrected politely and not believe the correction.
They also carry the Long Remembering worst, and the sight of a Giafe'on standing in a road at midday answering somebody who died in the last age is the thing their own people find hardest to look at.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How the keepers of the walking pass the whole of the routes on, and to whom
- What a Giafe'on is paid for counsel, as against a witnessing
- How long the Long Remembering lasts in an elder build before the walk toward water