Wolkenmor
The Wolkenmor is the war build: a hundred to a hundred and twenty feet, blunt, dense and forward-weighted, the heaviest of the three at two hundred to two hundred and sixty tons, with a ram of oil and bone in the brow and a throat that can take a longboat entire. It carried the assault parties down into the realm of Orton and it did the ramming itself.
It is the build that remembers the most and says the least. Most of the known killers are Wolkenmor, which the sages point out is not a fact about the build but a fact about the work it was given.
Body
Most of the mass is forward. Behind the ram the hollow is smaller than the other builds', ribbed for troops rather than cargo, and the Alverian fittings still bolted into that cartilage are all restraints. Several of them have left those fittings in place for six thousand years and will not say why.
Everything else is the common body and its common price. The organ deck is pressed flat beneath the hollow floor and has ached since the day it was decanted. The eye-windows are glazed sockets with nothing behind them, so the only thing that can see out of a Wolkenmor's face is a passenger. The brain sleeps one half at a time and has never once been wholly unconscious. Wounds close for centuries and never finish, and nothing kills it.
Society
They sing in the Choir in the order they were freed, like everyone else, and the order cannot change. Where the split falls is the whole difficulty of the build: three loose ones are known well enough to be named on the charts of every deep-water people, and the Choir sings their positions once a month to everyone including the whalers. The killers call that a betrayal, the sages call it the least they can do, and it is the only quarrel the species has ever had.
The Wolkenmor sages are the quietest of the sages and they carry the same work as the rest: pilgrims, sunken cargo, plague refugees, envoys and the drowned, for no payment.
Regard
Among the surface powers that know the truth, a Wolkenmor is the prize. It is the build the three courts want in irons, because a seized war build is a weapon that steers itself, and the standing orders that exist concern lime, panel-irons and how to force a throat.
To the deep-water peoples it is the shape that came down into Orton's realm with Alverians inside it, and the Omari have not forgotten which build did the ramming.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Why several Wolkenmor have kept the restraint fittings in their hollows
- Which of the six Bitted are war builds
- How many Wolkenmor were made of the six hundred and eleven