Hollow Flocks

Overview

Hollow Flocks are birds that the Hollow Chorus has taken into its Resonance Field: starlings, finches, rooks, any bird that flies in numbers, singing together with one voice that belongs to none of them. The Chorus is a face of the Unformed, the absence of the singer; it wants nothing, and voices simply stop being anyone's where it lies. Birds carry the field farther than anything else it touches, because they fly.

Appearance

A Hollow Flock looks like any flock, a dark swirl over a field or a row along a roof-ridge, until it sings. Every bird opens its beak at once, and one sound comes out: a single chord, warm and full, that never resolves and never stops. The birds do not call to one another or squabble over food; they turn together, land together, and fall silent together. A bird of the flock looks at nothing in particular. The flock smells of feathers and nothing else.

Habitat and Range

They are found over and around the country the Chorus has passed through, and they wander farther than its field: a Hollow Flock may come down on a village a week's walk from where it was taken. They roost in towers, hedgerows, and reed beds like other birds.

Behaviour and Temperament

They feed, roost, and fly as birds do, but all as one. A Hollow Flock does not scatter at a shout, and a hawk among it takes a bird without the rest noticing. The birds hold no will of the Chorus; they are what is left of a flock when nothing in it is singing for itself.

Abilities

Their song carries the Resonance. Those who stand under a Hollow Flock and listen hear their own thoughts in the chord, then hear the chord in their own voice, and a village that hums along at dusk may find in the morning that its quarrels have stopped and no one in it can say "I." A voice that sings out of tune on purpose, a quarrel shouted aloud, an instrument only one person plays, holds it off.

Life Cycle

The birds were hatched as ordinary birds and taken grown. They do not breed while they sing; their nests stand empty. When the Resonance wears thin, far from the Chorus, a bird drops out of the chord, then another, and the flock breaks up into birds again, though some never come out of it and die in the air together.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing. The danger is the song, which reaches farther than the field: a lonely shepherd who listens for the warmth of it, or a choir that sings along, is the Resonance's next.

Lore and Belief

Some call a Hollow Flock a choir of the blessed and stand under it at dusk. The Chorus praises nothing, and the birds are not singing to anyone. Villagers who hear one chord from a flock beat pans and shout, each a different word, until the birds lift and go, and they do not let the children hum for days after.

Where It Appears

• The Hollow Chorus