Papilio
The Papilio are the strain in which the good half won, and the makers' record gives them one line and no more: "The main good ones." They are the counsel-givers, the healers and the keepers of the groves, and every pool-warden is one. When another people says Papillian and means something it would let into a house, it means a Papilio.
A Papilio still carries the Other and knows it. The difference is that it has not woken in generations of that line, and the family watches each emergence in case it does. The watching is not a formality. Every Papillian is two, and the nest that sits up all night over a newly emerged one is counting which half is winning in a strain that has been lucky for four thousand years.
Body
Five to six inches, weighing less than a copper coin, boneless, glowing from under translucent skin, with the same chain of nerve knots down the body and the same perfect memory as any of their kin. What marks a Papilio is the wing-root gland. It runs heavy all its life, and the healing work is done with its own body, drop by drop, so that the eldest are threadbare at the wing root and are carried everywhere.
A Papillian cannot heal itself with its own dust; the gland pours outward only. A Papilio therefore spends sixty years giving away the one thing that would close its own wounds, in a body that empties through a pinprick and does not clot at speed. When the gland thins in one of them, which the world knows as a mark of the Papill, the nest watches that one for the rest of its life.
Society
The pool-wardens are the eldest Papilio of a grove, and they are the nearest thing the people has to clergy or to government. They hold the dream steady while the others are in it, they hold a dream around the hanging chrysalides through the forty days of the hanning, and they keep the nests warm with rotting leaf-mould banked under the hanging places against the dawn torpor. The pool is the whole of the law, and the wardens are the ones who keep it open.
Counsel is the Papilio craft. It is not charged in coin, which they cannot carry, or in food, which they can get. It is charged in memory: the asker tells the grove something true that it did not know, and the grove keeps it forever, exactly. Noble houses that have consulted a grove for three generations have handed over their whole history without noticing.
Faith
The Papilio keep the Standing Dream, which is the grove itself, and Irusha, the Gentle Face of Irus, who walks the wild counting what lives in it and lets the counted live. The hunter face they call only the Other, and will not name, as they will not name their own other half aloud outside the pool. The Papill made the opposite choice and kept the Other; the Papilio are what the grove looks like when it does not.
Their great rite is the Dark Pool, on the night both moons are gone, when the whole grove goes under together and dreams the world before the fall and comes up at dawn with the memory a little worn. The wearing is the point. A Papilio kept from the pool for years is being slowly crushed by its own recall, and the wardens know exactly what that produces, because it is walking around in other peoples' courts.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where the Hung Grove stands, and which groves the wardens still answer to
- How a warden is chosen, and what a grove does when the eldest refuses
- What becomes of a grove whose warden dies with the grove still under
- Whether a Papilio has ever turned, and what the pool did about it