Wolk'thar

Body

Light for its length and built like a drawn breath, with the brow swollen around a sonar bulb three times the size of any other build's. A Wolk'thar can hear a hull being caulked at two hundred miles. The ordinary Wolken sonar already returns an interior picture at three hundred miles in cold water, giving the number of people in a ship, which of them are pregnant and where the cargo is stowed, and this build does that work further out and finer.

The rest is common: the hollow with its glazed eye-sockets, the flattened organ deck beneath the floor, the divided brain that sleeps one half at a time and has not been wholly unconscious in six thousand years.

Society

The Choir has no leader and an order of speaking fixed by the order of freeing, and it is the Wolk'thar who carry it across the water. They are also the ones who can hear the nine unaccounted in their silt, and the reason the nine can be found at all is that a Wolk'thar has gone and listened, and come back, and reported, and that duty rotates because it cannot be borne twice in a century by the same singer.

Country

They keep to fixed depths in open water, which is what they were made to do, and the old relay line is still readable in where they choose to sit. A long build on station is the least visible Wolken there is: it surfaces to green itself and goes back down, and the sages' standing rule about surfacing is aimed hardest at this build, because a Wolk'thar that stays deep out of caution greens down to yellow, thins, slows and goes cold in the mind.