Libra'an
The Libra'an are the scriveners, and they are not a lesser house or a servant line. They are a caste of the one locked genome, thrown by the same eggs as the rest and recognised in the first year by the weight of the leg and the set of the skull. A house does not choose what it gets. It raises what hatches and gives it the work its body can do.
Seven feet, wingless or near it, with the cloak reduced to a short black mantle of stiff quills and the legs long and heavy and the feet armed with a single straight claw that can open a man. The skull is lighter and the neck will bend, which is the whole of the difference, and it is the reason this caste can sit at a desk and the rest cannot.
Body
Seven feet, wingless or near it. The cloak that makes a Librar read as a robed figure is reduced here to a short black mantle of stiff quills, and it does not hang and does not shine. The legs are long and heavy and the feet carry a single straight claw that can open a man.
The important difference is above the neck. In the base the skull is the only heavy bone in the animal, the neck is six fused vertebrae locked into the shoulders, and the head cannot be raised or lowered without moving the whole body, which is why a citadel is entered from the roof. The Libra'an skull is lighter and the neck will bend. The caste can look down at its own hands, sit at a desk, and climb a stair at speed, and it is the only part of a house that can. The feline arms are the base arms made stronger: still unable to lift a stone or swing an adze, but able to hold a pen for a day.
Life
A Libra'an is raised with the rest of the house and nothing is held back from it. It spends the hundred years of the Dark on the floor of the archive room in front of the wall of tusks and skulls, taught by recitation, first the archive of its own house and then the archives of the houses the house has stolen from, and it is not counted a Librar and not given its name until it can answer any question its elders put to it from memory alone. In its last decade of teaching it is given the old methods with everyone else.
What changes is the end of the Dark. There is no first flight from the eye of the dome for this caste. When it is grown it is set to the writing, and the middle of its life is spent at a block in the lower rooms while the Askers come and go overhead.
Society
They are the foot of the house, below the Eldest who holds the archive entire, below the Askers who go out into the world, and below the Keepers who order what is brought. Their office is the only one in the species that produces an object. Writing is done for trade only; a Librar's own knowledge is never set down, because a page can be stolen and a mind cannot, and everything a Libra'an writes is written to be sold. The hand it is written in is one no one else can read.
They keep the ground door, which in a citadel is the tradesmen's door and the only one at ground level, watched from outside by devices built to keep slaves in. A visitor who comes to a house on foot meets a Libra'an first, and rarely understands that the creature standing in the doorway on its heavy legs is the same animal as the robed shape that will be waiting upstairs.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Whether a Libra'an can ever rise past the writing, or whether the caste is the ceiling
- What the illegible hand is, and who outside the houses has ever learned to read it
- How a house decides which of its archives may be written down for trade