A Voice-Catcher is a slight, quick shape in the wind, a flutter of dust and air no taller than a child, with long fine threads trailing from it like the strings of a kite. Caught voices hang on the threads as tiny shimmers, and near one a visitor can hear them murmuring, each clear and separate where the rest of the wind is a chorus. It darts and hovers, and makes a soft whistling.

They move through the valley on the wind, and are more often heard than seen.

They are acquisitive and curious. They seek out voices that interest them, old, strange, or strong, and catch them; some are caught from the wind’s archive, and some fresh from a visitor’s mouth. What they do with them is uncertain. Some are said to play them back to listeners who do not know they are being worked on; others seem only to keep them.

They catch and hold a voice out of the wind, keep it from scattering, and give it back, whole or in part, where they choose.

A visitor who wants one particular voice may get it from a Voice-Catcher, for a price or a trick. A visitor who talks too freely in the valley may hear their own words later, from the wind, to someone else.

People who live below such valleys say that a word spoken against the wind will be caught and repeated where it does the most harm, and keep their quarrels indoors.