Papill
The Papill are the strain in which the other half won. "Of darker pigmented skin hues, and sharper features, these Papillian variants devolved to their fouler side, separating the good memories from their consciousness. Their dust glands have dried up, so they serve no other purpose than to cause mischief and turmoil." They settled under the desert sun, and the climate labelled them and did not make them.
They left the pools, which is the whole of it. A people whose law is a shared dream and whose only relief from perfect memory is the Dark Pool has, in the Papill, the version of itself that walked away from both. A Papill in a shared dream is a knife in a bed, and the groves treat one as exactly that.
Body
The same five to six inches, the same boneless pressure vessel, the same glow that cannot be put out and the same memory that prunes nothing. The exoskeleton adapts to any climate, and in dry country it thins and pales; the desert did the colouring and nothing else. What is different is the wing-root gland, which has dried. The dust does not come, the healing does not come, and the pool a Papill might have made cannot be made.
A dried gland is also a frailty of any Papillian, and the world knows it as a mark of this strain. The groves have seen the drying and the turning arrive together too often in their records to call it chance, which is why a Papilio nest that sees a gland thin in one of its own watches that one for the rest of its life.
Frailty
The separation is real work and it costs. A Papill has walled off its good memories and can feel the wall. The desert lines go mad in a particular way in old age, when the wall thins, and a people that forgets nothing has no way to lose what comes back through it. They live forty to fifty years, which is ten short of their kin, and the short end of it is that old age.
Everything else that ruins a Papillian ruins a Papill faster, because there is no grove behind it. Nobody carries a grounded Papill, nobody puts a Two Awake into a pool, and the Long Sleep that holds a failing mind down is a grove custom and the Papill left the groves.
Society
They live among other peoples, in courts and counting-houses, where a small thing that never forgets and no longer heals can do a great deal. They are hired as memory and kept as leverage, and the houses that keep them do not advertise it. A Papillian who tells you its second name has told you which half is winning; a Papill will tell you, and mean it as a threat.
In faith they kept the Other and have forgotten the Gentle Face. They have no pool, no warden, no Waking Question at dawn and no grove property, and what a grove would call theft, the speaking of a withheld thing, is the whole of their trade. Anrisk Second-Named spoke her pool name aloud in a Nu'uman court and sold that court's secrets to its enemies for the pleasure of it.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where the Papill first settled, and under whose sun
- Whether a Papill can be brought into a pool again, and what the pool would do with one
- How the courts that keep them explain it to their neighbours
- Whether the Papill gather anywhere at all, or only ever singly