Thennokvaer
The eldest line and the smallest, barely two and a half feet, with eyes so large the skull is built around them and a head that turns most of the way round. They hold the listening posts, they keep the compact book and the sky record, and the Wick of a lodge is always one of them.
They speak to outsiders perhaps twice in a lifetime, and both occasions are remembered by the outsider for the rest of theirs.
Body
Barely two and a half feet, with eyes so large the skull is built around them and a head that turns most of the way round. The coin-bright reflective layer is the same as the rest of the people's and the eye behind it is further along the same road.
They cannot bear daylight at all and have never been seen in it: a Thennokvaer taken outside at noon is blind and in pain within a minute, and that is the literal and sufficient reason no daylight account of one exists. Where an ordinary Thennok held in the sun for an hour is blind for a week, the vaer line goes in a minute and does not recover fully.
Society
They hold the listening posts and they keep the books, and the Wick of a lodge, the eldest of them, rules it. Under the Wick the offices are simple: the lamp-tenders who do the work, the watchers who hold the routes and the posts, and the one or two of the sai line who exist for the second clause.
The lodge is required by the compact to keep its own copy of the compact, so children are taught reading young, and the vaer line are the ones who read it aloud in the wall-crèche every year on the anniversary of its making. Between lodges there is a thin formal traffic carried by walkers who cross country at night carrying nothing, and it is the vaer who receive it.
Faith
The sky record is theirs. The rite is the Reckoning of the sill, the watcher's account of what was overhead given to the lodge before sleep in a fixed form, and it is written into the same book as the compact.
Some lodges have unbroken sky records four hundred years long. Nen of Hollowgate keeps one four hundred and eleven years unbroken, and there are astronomers in three peoples who would commit crimes for it and who do not know it exists.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How the Wick of a lodge is chosen
- What is in the oldest sky records, and who has ever been shown one
- Whether the compact books of different lodges agree word for word
- How a Thennokvaer crosses country when a lodge has to walk out