Peoples

Shulker kin who stayed in the Hive when the Queen closed her shell and the combs stopped flying. Every family keeps its own comb, seals its wax, trades its amber and counts its wealth in sealed cells; their shells are cells themselves, and they slam the lids shut when frightened. They greet a guest by lifting the lid like a hat, and they call humans the lidless: a head always open to the sky looks terribly brave to them.

The small glass folk of the Facet, whose heads are hollow cut crystals with a light burning inside. The light shows every mood, so a Facetkin cannot lie without going green. They call their world the Gem, gather its light, split it into colors and keep each color in its own vessel, hoping to pour the white light back together one day. Humans, who have no facets and no light to show, they call the rough ones.

A stocky gray folk of the Ash with bone plates on their skulls and shoulders and blue fire in their eyes. They call the giants their Giants: the giants burned down, and the blue fire is what is left of their souls. The Giantkin keep that fire, roll warm felt from the down of ember mice, guard the bones from the gnawers and say that warmth is given, never taken.

Squat smiths of the Forge who are cast rather than born: living gold poured into a shell of slag, with a spark breathed into the mouth. They forge living gold while it still moves, on anvils of slag, and sleep behind walls thick enough to keep out the glow of the sea. A family wears its gold on its shoulders and keeps the rest on its roof, because that gold is its children to come; humans, to them, are "the unforged": soft, cold, and touchingly afraid of the sea.

The people of the Breath. They breathe the lilac vapor that kills every other living thing, keep it in the glass sac at their throats until it calms, and breathe out heat: with it they melt fulgurite and blow glass. Their houses are glass bells on the islands, every one with its own voice, and the lightning season is their working season. A guest in a suit they call a little bubble: air from somewhere else, kept in glass.

The Belt Riders are living balloons of Jupiter's cloud tops who have never touched anything solid. They once drifted along the wind belts, until the lightning that feeds them made them heavy; now their gondolas are moored to masts that drink the storm, and lightning is their food, their feast and their measure of age. A guest who cannot float at all seems to them impossibly heavy, and so impossibly old, and they greet such a guest with deep, humming respect.

Fibers of the iris that fell like lashes, took root in the white of the Eye and one day stood up to listen. Where a face should be, a Lashkin has a closed lid with a little iris of its own beneath; it opens a crack only to speak, and it speaks in a whisper, because the Eye belongs to a sleeping god, and a loud sound runs along the fibers to wake him. They call humans blinkers: a creature that closes its eyes twenty times a breath and the world still stands is, to them, either terribly brave or terribly lucky.

Tall, slow and quiet, the Lunarians lived on the Moon long before the first rocket. Earth never moves in their sky, so they call it the Still One and count their days by its phases. They grind selenite into lenses better than anyone, and greet whoever brings a telescope as a fellow watcher.

The people of the storms: tall, four-armed and plated in rust, with a sail along the back that feels the wind before it comes. They count time in dust storms, drink salt and iron out of stone, and hold water holy. They live in towers of red brick above the storms and call humans bareskins.

Short, stubborn diggers of the terminator, the line between the scorching day and the freezing night of Mercury. Their ancestors walked with that line around the whole world; now they live dug in behind walls of salt, which drinks the heat of the day and gives it back all night. Every family keeps a mirror on a pole, and humans are "softbacks" to them: no shell, no claws, and hopeless at digging.

The heavy, stooped people of the Lament, made of dark glass, with tears that glow on their cheeks and set into crystals. They mourn the world that broke into the shards they live among, and sing of it in the Sorrow Choir. They give their tears away as gifts and pay with them, because grief that is kept grows heavier and grief that is given away grows lighter. Strangers they call the dry-eyed, and are sorry for them.

Fruiting bodies of the one mycelium that is the whole world down here. Each walks on four roots for a few flushes and falls, and everything it saw sinks back into the threads, so they say "we" and mean all of it. They do not breathe, and their words come out with spores. They weave light from the glowing threads, beat old threads into felt, light the lantern mushrooms and keep the spores, and they meet every breather who comes down the vent as someone they will remember.

Tall, streamlined people of the fastest winds in the Solar System. Everything on Neptune that is neither tied down nor heavy is carried away, so the Windbearers are both: stone weights on their feet, a line at the belt, an anchor under every house, and the heavier one's weights, the more the village listens. To them the wind is the speech of the world, and a guest without weights is a "lightweight" — welcome, but in need of something to hold on to.

The Ring Keepers gather ice on the cloud tops beneath the rings of Saturn. The rings — the Crown, as they call them — shed ice without end, and the keepers catch it in nets before it sinks into the Undercloud, live on floes of it and dream of one day giving it back. Every keeper wears a little ring of ice around the head that widens with the years, and greets a bare-headed guest from Earth — the Blue Grain — like a child before its first catch.

Gentle giants of Uranus who walk on their knuckles and count their lives in days, each day forty-two years long: the planet lies on its side, and every place on it has a Long Day and then a Long Night. Through the Day they store warmth, carve ice and catch the diamond rain; through the Night they sleep together in halls dug into the ice. Diamonds are only weather to them, and warmth is wealth, so a guest with coal in their pack is welcome at every dome.

The Cloud Dwellers once drifted in the cool cloud deck of Venus under living bubbles, until the great storms tore them open. They came down to the plains but never made peace with the ground, where the acid settles: they walk on stilt legs, live on piles and walkways, and rank each other by how high they live. Water is the dearest thing they know, and they greet a guest from Earth — the Dewdrop, as their songs call it — with wonder.