Giafvor

Body

The great blocks build: the biggest of the three, deep in the chest, with the full nine-horn crown, the keystone taking the load on the poll and the great lower pair working as a third pair of hands, a fulcrum for rolling a block and a brace to hold a course while the fingers are repositioned. The forelimbs end in the broad three-fingered hands that will set a two-ton block within an inch, which was the point of the whole programme, and in a Giafvor pair four of those hands work the same block.

Life

The bond is physical: paired Giafvor hum on the same note and drift out of it when separated, and a pair kept apart for a season will both stop eating. A widowed Giafvor does not take another partner. It finishes the Purpose it is under, and then most of them enter the Long Remembering early, and the Giafe do not call this a coincidence.

The Long Remembering is the ordinary Giafe death: the past stops being ordered and arrives all at once, and the one it is happening to knows it, announces it, settles its Purpose and walks toward high ground or toward water and does not come back. In a widowed Giafvor it simply comes sooner.

Society

A Purpose taken by a Giafvor is taken by two, and every people that has ever hired the build has had to learn that it is hiring a pair and cannot split one. The work is the heavy work: quarries, shipyards, gate-blocks, the courses of a wall going up. She Who Set The Keystone Twice raised the same gate-block into the same arch four hundred years apart for two different empires and remarked on it both times.