Sael'mundvar
Four feet, pink-white, with the feathered outer gills of the larva worn like a crown for life. The Sael'mundvar were engineered never to finish growing up, and they never do; where the rest of the kin go through the Turning into the land form, the Sael'mundvar do not turn and are not meant to.
They are the scribe-class. They write every accord and remember every draft of it, and one at a treaty hall looks like a child who has wandered in, which is why the kingdoms of the Lesser Four underestimate her when terms are being set. That underestimation was engineered too.
Body
Four feet and pink-white, gilled for life, with the feathered outer gills standing around the head. The unturned body regrows faster and further than any of the kin, which is the real reason the makers kept them larval, and a Sael'mundvar will regrow a whole arm in a season and think nothing of it.
Everything else is the people's: the smooth moist skin that must stay wet, the slow eye that takes a fast movement as a smear, the absence of hearing in air, and the listening done by laying a hand or the underside of the jaw flat on stone. The made absence where allegiance sits is theirs as much as any Sael'mund's, and so is the wound that will not close.
Society
The five kin are the professions of a house and this is the one that writes. Every accord a house holds passed through a Sael'mundvar's hands, and so did every draft that was not agreed, which is a quieter kind of power than a sword and outlasts it.
At the Reading, once a year, every accord the house holds is read aloud in full with every party's hands flat on the stone. What is read is what the Sael'mundvar set down. Three of the Surface Realm's more famous treaty scandals are arguments about whose hand came up and when, and the record of each of them is hers.
Regard
A small pink figure with a feathered crown, sitting at the end of a table where kingdoms are setting terms, does not look like a party to anything. That is the design, and four thousand years of delegations have failed to correct for it.
The Librar and the Sael'mund lend to each other and to no one else, which is a librarian's arrangement and is conducted, on this side, by the Sael'mundvar.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How long a Sael'mundvar lives
- Whether one has ever turned, or been made to
- What is in the unagreed drafts the libraries keep
- Who taught them the hands of other peoples' treaties