Librvor
The Librvor are the masters, the largest caste the locked genome throws and the nearest thing the species has to a governing body. Twelve feet, white, with a wingspan that the old texts put at sixty feet and that nobody living has measured. They are the Eldest of the Eldest.
There are perhaps five left. They exist because the arithmetic of the Librar is merciless: one egg a century, a hundred years before a chick can leave the archive floor, four or five persons to a house, and a bad night that ends two thousand years of gathering with nobody alive who can say what was in it. The Librvor hold the archives of houses that no longer do.
Body
Twelve feet and white, with a wingspan the old texts put at sixty feet and nobody living has measured, and legs so weak they can barely stand at all. The reason is the same one that governs the whole species: the skull is the only heavy bone in a Librar, and this caste carries the same skull on a frame half again as long. The legs fail early, and a Librvor that comes down badly does not get up.
Everything else is the base animal drawn out. The cloak of wings that hangs to the floor and shines faintly. The three tusks that are props and not weapons, set into the hollows of a reading block so the head can be rested for eleven hours together. The tube eyes that cannot glance and must be swung with the whole head. The chest rumble below the floor of Nu'uman hearing that carries twenty miles through cold night air, which for a creature that lives on the wing is the only way it ever speaks to anyone.
Life
It lives in the air and comes down only to the roof of its own citadel, and it comes down seldom, because it does not sleep as the others do. It sleeps in the air, half a mind at a time, and it has been known to circle the world.
The arithmetic that made the caste necessary is the arithmetic that keeps it rare. A Librar pair lays one egg perhaps once in a century, broods it a year and a day in the dark, and raises the hatchling on the archive room floor for a hundred years before it can fly at all. Nothing about that changes for a body that will end up twelve feet across the shoulders and unable to stand on its own legs.
Faith
The oldest houses teach that the Oracle set them one question at the making, that every fact gathered since is a piece of the answer, and that the Oracle alone knows what the question was. Eldest have spent their lives trying to reconstruct it from the shape of what he wanted, and none has.
It is said that between them the Librvor hold enough of the Oracle's question to know that they will never answer it. Whether they have told any house this is not recorded anywhere a house would keep it.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where the five are, and whether any house knows how to call one down
- How much of the Oracle's question they actually hold between them
- What happens to the archive of a Librvor when it dies on the wing