Crystal Singers

Overview

The Crystal Singers are the natives of the Crystal Spire, where sound does not fade but sets into crystal and stays. They call themselves Keepers of the Song and hold the spire to be a sacred archive. Their life's work is to curate it: to keep the sounds that matter, and to silence the dangerous ones before they can be released.

Appearance

A Crystal Singer has the shape of a slender person a head taller than most, but its skin is polished crystal, translucent and cut in facets like a gem, so that light runs over it and breaks into small rainbows when it moves. Most are amethyst or pale quartz in colour, some deep sapphire. Their eyes are deep and reflective and shift colour with mood, amber when calm, white when alarmed.

They have no voices. Their throats hold resonant chambers instead, and they speak by vibrating, a sound like a struck glass or a held chord, and several Singers together make harmonies that the spire takes up and keeps. They move with a rhythmic grace, as though to a beat no one else hears. Near them the air smells of crushed gemstone and struck bell.

Habitat and Range

They live within the spire, along its faceted galleries and among the singing stalagmites, closest to the crystals they tend. A spire holds a small community of them.

Behaviour and Temperament

They are deliberate and precise in everything. They find outsiders noisy and disruptive, every footstep a chord and every careless word a sound that will be kept for centuries, but they also find them interesting as sources of new songs. A visitor who moves quietly may be listened to with great attention.

They believe that to be silent is to cease to exist, and they mean it of themselves and of the spire: a crystal emptied of sound shatters. So their curating is careful and slow. A dangerous sound is not destroyed but led deeper, to the Lattice Guardians, who keep it from ever being let out.

Abilities

They draw sustenance from the ambient sound of the spire and are untouched by the shattering that loud noise brings on others. They can hear what a crystal holds by touching it, sing a sound into a crystal or draw it out, and quiet a crystal's sound without breaking it, which no visitor can.

Life Cycle

No one outside knows how Crystal Singers are born. They seem very long-lived. When one dies, it is said, its body joins the lattice with its last chord inside it.

Uses and Dangers

They are the teachers visitors come to the spire to learn from, and they can say which crystals hold what: lullabies, battle cries, old languages, the last moments of the dying. They trade such crystals sparingly. Their danger is to those who shout, carry glass, or try to silence a crystal, whom they will drive out with sound.

Lore and Belief

Scholars who have heard a Singer's chord claim it holds words in an ancient tongue; others say it holds no words at all and only feeling. Mountain folk near a spire say the Singers remember every voice ever heard there, and some go up to hear a dead parent again.

Where It Appears

• The Crystal Spire
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Resonant Zones and its glossary