Muffle-Wings
Muffle-Wings are moths of the Silence, found at its edges, where the plane’s loss of meaning shows first as a loss of sound. They live on sound. Wherever something makes a noise they gather on it and drink it, and a traveller wrapped in a swarm of them can shout and not be heard.
Appearance
A Muffle-Wing is the size of a child’s palm, with broad, rounded wings so thickly furred that they look like scraps of felt. It has no colour of its own: pale grey in the plane’s dim, directionless light, its wings faintly showing what lies behind them. Its body is short and soft, its antennae long and fine as hairs, and it has no mouth that anyone has found. It flies in a slow, wavering drift and lands softly. It makes no sound, and nor does anything near it.
Habitat and Range
They live along the edges of the plane where sound still carries a little, near the Quiet Gates and the places where travellers first come in, and they are absent from its deep, utterly silent plains, where there is nothing for them to eat. They rest on the smooth stone in pale patches that look like lichen.
Behaviour and Temperament
A Muffle-Wing drifts towards sound and settles on whatever makes it: a bell, a drum, a mouth, a boot. The sound fades under it, and more come to the same place, until a swarm covers its source. Travellers who carry bells or drums against the quiet, as many do, draw them first. The moths are not hunters and mean no harm; they feed and drift on when the sound is gone.
Abilities
Their wings drink sound. A bell under a Muffle-Wing rings dull, then not at all; a voice under a swarm reaches no one, not even the speaker’s own ears. A traveller wrapped in them hears nothing and cannot be heard, and on a plane where a voice repeating one’s name is often the last hold on the self, that quiet is dangerous.
Life Cycle
They breed on the stone in the patches where they rest, and the young are blind, furred grubs that feed on the faint scrape of the travellers who pass. How long they live no one knows. Dead, they crumble into a soft grey down.
Uses and Dangers
They give nothing anyone has found a use for. Their danger is the quiet they make: a traveller who loses the sound of the name repeated to keep the self whole may begin to fade, as the plane’s Hollows have. Travellers learn to keep repeating their purpose under their breath, where the moths find little to drink, and to brush the moths from their companions' mouths.
Lore and Belief
Some on the Material Plane believe the moths come through the Quiet Gates and settle in libraries and empty halls, and that the hush of a room where no one reads is their doing; scholars dismiss this, and no moth has been found there. Travellers tell of a companion lost in a cloud of them who was later found standing in the plain, mouth moving, calling, unheard, and no longer remembering why.