A farwing has the longest wings of any bird on the coast, narrow and stiff, spanning more than two tall men from tip to tip, on a body no bigger than a goose’s. It is white on the head, neck, and underparts, with dark grey-brown upper wings and back, a short tail, and a long, heavy, hooked bill, pale pink with tube-like nostrils along its sides. It glides low over the waves for hours on stiff, unmoving wings, tilting to rise and fall with the wind over the swell. On land it is awkward, running and flapping to take off from a cliff edge. At the nest pairs greet each other with bill-clapping, bowing, and loud braying calls; at sea it is silent.

Farwings live over the open sea and come to land only to breed, on a few steep, windswept outer isles of the Tidelace where they can launch into the wind. Out at sea they range beyond the last beacon, the Far Set, and anywhere pilots or runs have gone, and they are seen by Outer-Route Thaluren runs far out along the current roads.

They feed on squid, fish, and offal taken from the surface, mostly at night, and follow boats and runs for scraps. They are fearless with people at the nest, which they have no reason to fear, and indifferent at sea.

Farwings mate for life. A pair returns to the same nest, a mound of mud and grass on a cliff top, every second year and raises one chick, which takes most of a year to fledge. A young farwing leaves the isle and does not return for years. They live as long as a Human.

They harm no one, and they are not taken: the isles where they nest are hard to reach and the Lastlight families leave them be. Pilots read them as weather: farwings coming in to the isles out of season mean a storm off the open sea.

Gnome pilots say the farwings know a shore beyond the Unrun Sea and fly to it between nestings, and that one day a pilot who follows them will find it; none has, and the sounding houses do not enter the tale in their ledgers. Lastlight’s families say each farwing that leaves the isle carries the name of someone lost at sea and calls it over the water. The Thaluren Outer-Route lines say only that farwings are seen where no run has been.

Lastlight still tells of the pilot who followed the farwings west past the last isle in a summer of calms and was never seen again, and of the farwing that came back to Lastlight the next spring with a ring of strange red metal on its leg.