Deep-Witnesses

Overview

The deep-witnesses are the great whale-like beings of Thaluren ocean memory, said to live in the open water past the farthest runs. The Thaluren speak of them as an ocean people rather than as beasts, hold them sacred, and honour them without praying to them. Almost all that is known of them is memory: an Outer-Route run that glimpses one at a distance tells of it for generations, and no other people has a tale of them at all.

Appearance

The memory gives a shape seen from far off and never close. A deep-witness is long beyond any craft or settlement the Thaluren know, a dark, slow back rising out of grey water and sinking again for what seems the length of a tide. Tellers speak of a blunt, heavy head, a pale and much-scarred underside, and a flank marked like old stone with the growth of years. It moves without hurry and without wake, as if the sea carried it rather than the reverse.

Its voice is the part most remembered. Runs speak of a low sound felt through the water before it is heard, so deep that it seems to come from the sea floor, and of a long silence after it in which the whole run holds still.

Habitat and Range

Thaluren memory places the deep-witnesses in the Unrun Sea, beyond the Far Set and the outer routes of the Tidebound Reaches. They are not seen in the shoal worlds or the Kelpshade, and never in the estuaries. How many there are, how deep they go, and whether they keep to one water nobody can say: the glimpses are few, years apart, and each was seen by too few to be sworn to.

Behaviour and Temperament

Every glimpse in memory is the same in one respect: the deep-witness takes no notice. It does not come towards a run, does not flee it, and does not follow. The Thaluren read this as a kind of attention too large to turn aside, the patience of something that has watched the sea longer than any run-line has been counted. Whether it has a mind, a speech, or a purpose of its own is the heart of the question the Thaluren leave open.

Life Cycle

Nothing is known. Thaluren memory holds that a deep-witness never stops growing, so that the largest are the oldest, and no tale tells of a young one or of one dead. Some Outer-Route tellers say that when one dies it sinks so far that nothing of it ever rises.

Uses and Dangers

The deep-witnesses give the peoples nothing that can be taken, and no Thaluren would try. No harm by one is remembered. The danger lies in looking for them: the runs that pressed past the known roads came back late, scattered, or not at all, and the Thaluren count the deep-witnesses among the reasons few of them go to look.

Lore and Belief

Devotion in The Way of Return centres on the return-waters and on rightful spawning, and also on the deep-witnesses. They are honoured as witnesses of the deep in a faith that refuses to pray to anything, and the honour asks nothing of them. Thaluren read the larger sea through a pairing: the witnesses on one side, the devourers that break routes on the other.

A glimpse is told, not recorded. The telling passes down the run-line that saw it and is repeated at gatherings as part of the line's pride, though by Thaluren custom a tale no second run can swear to counts for nothing. Some Outer-Route lines hold that a run the deep-witnesses have seen was never truly alone; the Concord's elders will not hear it.

Where It Appears

• Thaluren
• The Unrun Sea
• The Tidebound Reaches