The Seyiki are the gnomes of the Chakatann pillars in the western Piktiniti, and the build that fits them to the stone was set in a single season: the one in which the Postronamas Empire fell and its gnomes ran. The refugees who reached the pillars went up them to get above what was hunting the ground, and on the bare rock they began to fall. A handmagic tattooist among them, Sekoryx, whose name the Seyiki still keep, wrote a working into the climbing children that was meant to do nothing grander than hold them to the stone until they were over the worst of it. Handmagic is supposed to fade. But a gnome is already an unclosed command reaching for an ending, and this working was laid onto flesh that had been written and never finished. Instead of fading it was taken up into the open command and made part of it. The children it was cut into bred true. The Seyiki are lean even by gnome measure, long in the arm, with gripping toes and strong hands and a flat lack of concern for heights that turns a lowlander's stomach, because one tattooist in the worst week of the flight asked the stone of their bodies to keep them from falling, and the asking never closed. A Seyiki reckons a place by elevation first. Ask where a cousin lives and the answer comes as a height before it comes as a direction, two hundred feet up the western face, near the breeding pools, rather than north or south.
Every Seyiki wears a robe that opens into a wingsuit when they fall, and they are never without it. A Seyiki stripped of the robe is exposed in a way that has nothing to do with skin. Children are taught to fall before they are taught to climb, dropped from low ledges into nets and then from higher ones without, until the body learns to spread the robe and catch the air on its own. By the time a Seyiki can walk a ledge they can survive coming off one. This is not bravado. On a pillar that rises hundreds of feet from a salt lake, a person who freezes at a drop does not live to pass on the habit.
The bond between a rider and a dragonfly is the center of a Seyiki life. It takes months of patient work to make and it lasts until one of the two dies, and the death of a mount is mourned the way other peoples mourn a sibling. A rider who has lost a dragonfly and not yet bonded another is treated gently and watched closely. The measure of a Seyiki, more than wealth or the height of their chamber, is how many Reapings they have ridden, the seven-year locust swarms they go up into rather than hide from. A gnome who has survived many of them carries it the way a soldier carries old campaigns.
They asked the old rider how she wanted to be buried. She said she did not. Take her up, she signed, to the height where the dragonflies breed, and let her go off the edge in her robe with the wind under it one last time. They did. — recorded among the Seyiki of the western pillars
Aspects
- Born to the vertical
- The robe is the body