The Iliko are a people of the pixie, not a separate bloodline — jungle truth-seers of southern Ve whose native attunement to meaning is a defining way of being, not a heritable departure from pixie stock.
The Iliko are the pixies of the southern Ve jungles, the people of the city outsiders call Locquine. Every pixie is condensed Faesong, the world's feeling gathered thick enough to make a self, and so reads the emotional weather of everything around it. The Iliko read something else. They condense where the feeling-current runs hard against its twin — the thought-face of the same Ezz, the Psywinds — and from that confluence they take a sense no other pixie has: the currents of meaning and intention they call truth-lines, threads that run through the world the way rivers run through the jungle. Where another pixie feels what a thing feels, an Iliko reads what a thing means. Their children are raised inside the lines from the first breath, taught to read them as plainly as another people teaches a child to read a face, and for a grown Iliko the reading is constant and effortless and shapes everything they do, from how they raise a wall of woven vine to how they meet a predator in the dark. It cannot be handed to an outsider come late; the reading takes a whole Iliko childhood, and there is no shortcut into it. Their wings are the pale translucent green of new leaves, and the light moves across them in slow bands, as though something were always passing.
To anyone who cannot see the lines, an Iliko looks deranged. They answer questions before those questions are asked, break off mid-sentence to watch a patch of empty air, and strike at threats that have not yet arrived. None of it is madness to them. They are acting on information the world around them simply lacks, and they regard other races with the mild pity owed to the half-blind. Outsiders argue over whether the Iliko are prophets or lunatics. The Iliko find the question itself confused, and will not settle it for you.
What the Iliko make, they make from the lines. Their weavers tie a knot of vine and dyed thread that holds a glimpse of a thing that has not happened yet, and their gardeners distill an elixir that buys an outsider a few hours of truth-sight along with the few hours of madness that come bundled with it. They draw maps of places that do not exist yet. These goods are the only reason anyone braves the jungle to deal with them, and any dealing runs through the handful of Iliko called the Five Who Speak, who alone will turn their perception into words an outsider can carry away. The surest way to be received kindly is to arrive with a song, a sad one. The Iliko gather to hear sorrowful music, swaying in time, and for a while afterward they are gentler than at any other hour.
The river never asks the sea for directions. You are upstream of your own question, and it is already wet. Wait. It will reach you, or it will not. — Thornlace, one of the Five Who Speak
Aspects
- Sees the lines others cannot
- Pities the half-blind world