Thylavane

Body

The translucence is a thinning of the mantle. That is what makes the trail clean and it is what makes the animal fragile, and the two cannot be separated: a Thylavane dries out in half the time a Thylmurk takes, and drying is the whole of what kills a Thylem. The mucus goes tacky, then the trail stops, then the eyestalks will not extend, then the foot cannot ripple and the creature is lying on a floor unable to move while entirely conscious.

Harvest

Thylem mucus, boiled and cut, is the finest adhesive known and the best size for parchment, and a scriptorium that can afford Thylem glue uses nothing else. The grade it buys is this one. Nobody upstairs enquires where it comes from and every Thylem knows that everybody knows, and the Thylavane know it best of all, since they are the ones selling.

Country

The Weeping Gallery is theirs: an old Alverian condensation works where the walls have run continuously for eleven thousand years and the Thylem there have never seen dry stone. It is the one place in the world where the Standing Water is not a rite but a condition of the building, and a cistern-night there needs no cistern.

It is also where Nemmish Cistern-Kept carried a hold's shell-plates out when it flooded past saving, and left the living behind to do it, and has never been forgiven or replaced.

Regard

The manner rests on a parasite. Standing water breeds the mantle-fluke and sump lines carry it almost to a body, and clean-water lines get it rarely, and the whole of the Thylavane's sense of superiority is built on that single accident of which water a line was bred to work. They know this and it has not slowed them down.