Wolkenae

Body

Wide through the body, with a hollow up to ninety feet long, ribbed and dry and lit greenly through two panes of warm flexing tissue where the eyes were taken out. The moss deck is broad and greens fast, which is why a Wolkenae surfaces more often than the others, and why the weed, the shellfish and, on the old ones, the small trees stand thickest on this build. Fishermen have moored to them, camped on them and been carried out to sea on them.

Underneath the hollow floor lies the same flattened organ deck as every other Wolken, warm and slowly moving, and above the deck at the aft end is the throat-room, out of which the whole chamber speaks at once.

Society

A Wolkenae sage will carry pilgrims, sunken cargo, plague refugees, envoys and the drowned, and will not take payment, since the point of the carrying is the payment. It asks its questions first, and the questions are the only interview in the world conducted by a room. The courtesies of the Carrying are simple and they are absolute: do not cut the fittings out, do not foul the floor, do not touch the panel, and answer when the room speaks to you.

The panel is the whole reason for that last rule. A pilot who reaches it takes the nervous system and leaves the mind awake behind the eye-windows with no voice, and a Wolken who lets one in has committed the betrayal on itself, and the Choir sings over it as though it had gone silent.

Country

They surface more than the others and they are therefore the ones the surface world nearly believes in: the island in the bay that was not there last year, the green shoal that takes nets and gives them back. They keep to the four gathering waters when they are not working, deep, cold and quiet, where the acoustics carry, and those are not places on a chart so much as places in the sound.