A Seed-Host is a person drawn pale and thin, the cheeks hollow and the skin the white of a root that never saw the sun. The lips look sewn shut: a seam of dark puckers runs across the mouth like stitching, though whether there is thread in it no one has looked close enough to say. The eyes are wide open, wet, and terrified. They are the one thing in a host that seems still to belong to the person, and they plead.

Seed-Hosts make no sound of any kind. No footfall, no breath, no rustle of clothing; a host walking through dry leaves crushes them without a crackle. Around one the air shimmers faintly, like the air above a road in summer, where sound is bent and dies. Birdsong stops when they come near, and the first sign of them is often that one’s own footsteps have gone quiet. They have no smell, or none that anyone noticed before it was too late.

They would be found in and around the Quiet, the dark spreading carpet of silence that grows from a single seed, and would wander from it into the world. Because the Quiet passes from the silenced to those near them, a few carriers could open new silences far from the first: a hamlet gone mute, a monastery where the bells no longer ring.

A Seed-Host seeks out sound and smothers it. It goes toward voices, music, a crying child, a dog barking in the yard. Several crowd around anyone noisy, pressing close and silent, until that one too is silent. A host may press its sewn mouth to a traveller’s mouth and drink the words out of the throat.

The terror in their eyes is the only feeling they show. They do not hurry, threaten, or flee; they keep coming, softly, as if pulled.

A Seed-Host eats vibration. A shout dies a few strides from it, a drum gives no beat, a spell being spoken stops mid-word. Those near it go silent in stages: voice first, then footsteps, then heartbeat, then breath, until the victim is unmade into the Quiet. Written words fade near them too, and pages carried past a host come back blank.

They are broken by noise, the louder and messier the better. Bells, drums, whistles, a ragged chorus shouting nonsense: a careful silence fails against them, and a din can drive them off.

Seed-Hosts are made from those who fall into the Quiet and are not unmade by it, most of all from a Cult of the Final Quiet, whose members would sew their own mouths and break their instruments and in the end go on as carriers. A host does not eat or age. Driven out of hearing, it stands silent for a long time, and at last folds down into a small heap of pale stuff that drinks the light, which would be burnt to the sound of bells.

A Seed-Host takes speech, then life. Its danger is greatest to the quiet: the hermit, the sleeper, the lone watchman, the careful hunter who has learned to move without a sound. Villages that knew of them would keep a bell at every door and teach their children to scream.

Many would believe the stitching is real thread, sewn by the hosts themselves in penance; that would be true only of the cultists, whose habit the hosts seem to wear. Whether a Seed-Host is still crying for help behind its mouth, its terrified eyes the person inside, no one knows. Singing does protect the singer.