Goalder
The Goalder are the most comparable of the sixteen to a modern Nu'uman, and the least like one in how they spend themselves. Ten feet of muscular, fatty, slightly translucent bark with green root veins running directly beneath it, they convert light at a rate no other kin approaches, and the whole body runs hot, fast and wasteful. A Goalder at noon in summer can lift what a Trena lifts. A Goalder in winter sleeps most of the day.
They burn a vaan out in two centuries, and this is understood by everybody including them. A Goalder sees perhaps a hundred chiefs and remembers none of them, is governed for half the year and not at all for the other half, and does not care in the slightest what is taken from its dead, because it is not there. That last makes them the most harvested kin on Nu.
Body
"The most comparable to modern day Nu'umans, their skin is a slightly translucent fleshy bark, and their bodies have muscular and fatty qualities, with subdermal green root veins seen through their skin. They look angry due to their heavy upper brow and bulgy bright yellow eyes. Hair made of vines, with a beard of leaves. Thick leaves grow out of their skin to form a natural skirt, hiding the lower half of their overall thick form." They have "life threatening strength" and a short life to spend it in. Eight to ten feet, eight hundred to a thousand pounds, one to two hundred years.
The strength is a sap trick and it is being paid for: the green root veins run directly under a translucent skin so that light reaches them everywhere, the Goalder converts at a rate no other kin approaches, and the whole body runs hot, fast and wasteful. A Goalder at noon in summer can lift what a Trena lifts. A Goalder in winter sleeps most of the day, and a Goalder at a hundred and eighty is a slow, grey, thin thing that its grandchildren carry about. They burn a vaan out in two centuries and this is understood by everybody including them.
Society
They are ruled as grass rules a meadow, which is to say hardly at all. The Goalder have a Summer Chief, who is whoever roared loudest at the first thaw and is obeyed until the first frost, and then nobody is obeyed until the next thaw. A Summer Chief who tries to be a Winter Chief is sat on. Their short lives make this work; a Goalder sees perhaps a hundred chiefs and remembers none of them.
Life
They eat everything. They graze the meadow like cattle and hunt the meadow's edge like wolves, and a Goalder will eat a Boalden if it comes to that.
A Goalder denied food for a month does not starve so much as deflate, the fatty bark going slack and translucent until the veins show like a map, and the other kin find the sight unbearable and the Goalder find it funny.
Harvest
Taken from them: the skirt-leaves, which are thick as hide and make a raincloak that never rots; the vine-hair, which is rope; and the translucent bark, which the Nu'uman surgeons of the colleges want because they can see the veins through it. The Goalder do not care what is taken from their dead, because they are not there, and this makes them the most harvested kin.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where Haalvenmoor lies on the map of Nu
- Why a Goalder burns out in two centuries where its neighbours last for thousands of years
- What holds a Goalder meadow together between the first frost and the next thaw
- Whether any other kin defends Goalder dead, given that the Goalder will not