Foigan

Body

"Their skin is that of folded, tucked and puffed petals, with various skin pigmentations. Beneath, when unfolded at their most vulnerable, is a soft bright yellow smooth skin. Their forms closely resemble nu'umanoid structures, yet their faces look more insectoid. They have two normal sized eyes and two smaller ones, usually dark blue. Their fingers have tiny tendrils at their tip, and when they die, flowers grow out of them. Their teeth are sharp leaves, and they excrete an acidic liquid in their mouths." Six to seven feet, fifty to a hundred pounds, sixty to eighty years, the shortest-lived of all sixteen and "extremely intelligent" with it.

The intelligence and the short life are the same fact: a Foigan's vaan runs at a rate no other kin's approaches, so the body is finished in eight years, the mind is quick beyond anything in the forest, and the whole apparatus is spent by eighty. The two small eyes sit above the two large ones and read movement while the large ones read shape, which is why a Foigan catches an insect out of the air and a Trena does not know an insect has been in the room. Their skin is all surface and all respiration, which makes them the fastest of the sixteen to die of salt, tar or smoke, and the Petal Vale has standing watches for all three. At death "their bodies release a pollen into the air that heals ailing plants, and grows new petal flora."

Society

They are ruled as a flowering season rules: by turn, and briefly. The Petal Vale is governed by whoever is in fullest bloom, and bloom is visible, so the office cannot be argued about. Each spring the vale looks at itself, and the Foigan whose petals have opened widest and whose colour has come in strongest speaks for the vale until the next spring, and then folds and hands it on. Since a Foigan lives sixty to eighty years and blooms fully perhaps once, nearly every Foigan rules the vale for a year and then never again, and the ones who never bloom are pitied and never excluded. The consequence is a people with no long memory of its own government and no interest in acquiring one; the Foigan do everything fast, decide everything in a season, and leave the keeping of records to the Jakai, who are always slightly appalled.

Life

They eat insects taken out of the air with the acid in the mouth, pollen, nectar, and the soft inner tissue of fallen fruit, which the acid opens in seconds. They eat constantly and burn through it, and a Foigan denied food for a week folds up and does not open again.

They are one of the wet kin, and they get rot in the seams, which starts as a smell and ends as a hole. The Rieken cure it in running water and the Gourmun in the dark. The Foigan usually die of it.

Harvest

Taken from them: the petal skin, shed in sheets each season and gathered off the vale floor, which is pressed into a vellum that holds ink for a thousand years and is the standing paper of the Irugaine and of anyone who can afford it; the mouth-acid, which strips leather, cleans bone and blinds; and the death-pollen, which heals every ailing plant within sixty feet of a Foigan corpse and grows new flora out of bare dirt, and which can be caught in a hood if you are standing there when it happens. That last has made a market. A Foigan body is worth a farm's harvest to the wrong sort of Nu'uman, the Foigan know it, and every Foigan who travels arranges before leaving for a Shieken to be told where it went.