Prismeri Glass-fuser of a lumenspire settlement on Prismere, First Wings; the Second Emergence has not come Active

Isserith

prismeri
prismere
iridess-system
federation-of-sentient-beings
first-wings
lumenspire
glasswork
civilian

Isserith is a Prismeri of Prismere, First Wings, and the glass-fuser of a lumenspire settlement the record does not name: one of the First Wings adults who, the people's page says, scout, apprentice and tend the settlements while the Full Wings minority crew the astrogation guilds. The record names no Prismeri before them. It has placed one other on a page, Prismere's delegate to the Federation assembly in the early summer of 2826 UCSD, Full Wings and on the floor for it, in Nobody Present, and did not name that one. Isserith is not the delegate and has never been off Prismere, and nothing on the people's page makes them unusual among the people. A settlement's glass is somebody's work, and the Archive calls Isserith the first of nothing.

The name is given as the Federation record gives it, and nothing more is known of it. What a Prismeri name is, whether it is kept across the Emergence or changes with the body, and what Isserith's would mean in a settlement whose kinship records were kept well enough to correct a survey, the record does not state. Whether Prismeri is the people's own word or the survey's, it does not state either. The record renders Isserith as they, the translation default and the people's page's own usage of a Prismeri whose Emergence may or may not come for them; no pronoun system is declared for the people, and none is proposed here.

Known History

Born on Prismere, in a lumenspire settlement the record does not name, in a year it does not hold. First Wings from birth, as every Prismeri is, and legally adult by the people's own reckoning well before any Emergence, which the people's page is careful to say is not a childhood: an early adulthood, not a waiting room.
Scouted and apprenticed as First Wings do, in the forest under the canopy where the glow is brightest and the rays do not hunt; at what, and for how long, the record does not say. The settlement's glass became theirs at some point the record does not fix.
Has lived in First Wings past the several decades the people's page gives as the first form's usual span. The Second Emergence has not come. Whether it will, no Prismeri chooses or predicts, and the record does not predict it either.
Present on Prismere in 2826 UCSD, hanging, working. Not a member of any astrogation guild, which a First Wings adult cannot be; not on any off-world posting, Ranger liaison or otherwise; never in a Federation hull or on a station deck. The record places them in the settlement and nowhere else.

The Work

Glass. Prismere is a silicate-carbon world on which glasswood does not burn and little else does, so the Prismeri came to high-energy work late and by a different road, the people's page says: the lens foliage that lights their forests taught them to concentrate light, and their glass is fused by focused sun rather than by flame. That is Isserith's trade, and it is done the way all fine Prismeri work is done, from the hang. The hind feet take the whole weight from a shaped ledge of the spire; one wing-hand holds a lens up to the brighter part of the sky; the other holds the piece at the lens's focus, where a point of white light sits on the glass and the glass goes soft under it. There is no furnace, no fire and no bellows, and nothing in the settlement that would know what to do with one. The work needs the sun, so it is day work, and it needs the hands, so it is done head-down, with the eyes beside the fingers where the hang keeps them.

What is made, the record does not itemise. The plates Halle Ostrander drew on the contact survey show a First Wings adult at a ledge with a small piece of shaped glass in its wing-hands, and the naturalist's note says only that hanging is how fine work is done. Beyond that the record holds no inventory of what a settlement's glass is for, and Isserith has not been asked in the Archive's hearing.

A Prismeri eats silicate as well as tissue, and the people's page says the Second Emergence is fed by it; current Federation xenobiology holds the trigger to be a combination of accumulated silicate intake and prolonged exposure to concentrated Lattice geometry. Isserith eats what every Prismeri eats and has spent a working life with fused silica in their hands, under the canopy, where First Wings fly and the Lattice is seen only by its refraction in the haze far overhead. The Emergence has not come. The record draws nothing from this. The guilds, whose institutional value rests on the Full Wings sense and who have been consistently and politely unhelpful to the research for decades, have not been asked about Isserith in particular, and Isserith has not offered.

What Isserith Cannot Do

Read the Lattice. The band of facets along the skull ridge forms no image and reads only change in the light overhead, and the tendrils that read corridor geometry directly grow at the Emergence and nowhere else, so what the sky over Prismere shows, Isserith sees as anyone without tendrils sees it, as lines and arcs in the haze, and cannot read as the guilds read it. Fly into the haze layer, where the Lattice is densest and only Full Wings go. Qualify for guild work, regardless of standing or ambition, which the people's page gives as a fact of biology and not a verdict on the person. Stand upright, which the body does not do and would gain nothing by, or sit at a table; be at ease in a room with nothing overhead to hang from. Be talked out of noticing a shape crossing the light above them. Choose the Emergence, hasten it, or decline it.

Character Notes

The record holds Isserith's manner from the people's page, since no chapter has met them, and the page is plain about what an outsider gets wrong: a Prismeri hanging above a conversation is not looming, and a Prismeri on the ground is not cowering. Isserith, addressed from below at the ledge, answers from above, head down, and means nothing by it; addressed on the ground they are at a disadvantage and know it, and are not on the ground often. The courtesy the Federation's contact teams learned first, to hold meetings somewhere with a beam, has never had to be learned in Isserith's settlement, which is nothing but beams.

Standing. The people's page says that Prismeri culture accords no lesser standing to those for whom the Emergence does not come, and that no one earns the transformation and no one is denied it by any authority, which is why guild status never hardened into the resented privilege it might have become elsewhere. Isserith's standing in the settlement is a First Wings glass-fuser's, and it is not less than anyone's. The page also says the two forms do different work and neither would trade, and Isserith has given the record no reason to doubt it: a Full Wings body is too heavy for the forest and the close spaces, and the lens needs the hands and the hang, not the tendrils. What the forest would lose if the Emergence came is on the page. What Isserith would, the record has not asked and Isserith has not said.

The dusk curfew is written into the body, and Isserith keeps it as every Prismeri does: the shadow of an umbral ray crossing the ridge-band is a sensation every Prismeri has had, the page says, and none has had twice from the same ray. Isserith is not a Lattice-reader, cannot escort anyone after dark, and does not need to be told so.

The record gives Isserith no age beyond the one measure the people's page allows, longer in First Wings than several decades; no kin by name, though the settlement's kinship records hold them; and no day. It places them at a ledge of a lumenspire on Prismere in 2826 UCSD, by daylight, with a lens in one hand and a point of light on the glass in the other, and nowhere else.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Isserith's age in years, and the natural span of a Prismeri life in either form, neither stated anywhere. The settlement's name, and where on Prismere it stands. Their kin, whom the people's kinship records hold and the Archive does not. The Prismeri language, which the record has not described in any channel, and the people's own names for themselves, their world and the glass. How a settlement decides anything, which the record has not established. Whether the Emergence will come. Whether Isserith has ever met a Ranger: Survey Corps fold-route work deals with the guilds, and the guilds are Full Wings, so nothing on record has brought the Corps to a First Wings glass-fuser's ledge. Whether a Prismeri on a Ranger liaison posting is a sworn Ranger or a seconded guild member, which the record has not established and this page does not touch; Isserith is on no posting. Any chapter. The body, beyond what the people's page gives every First Wings adult: slender and light-boned, a soft still-hardening exoskeleton in grey-violet tones, translucent gossamer membranes, two large forward eyes set low and a band of facets along the skull ridge, a short neck and no tail; nothing on record tells one First Wings Prismeri from another by sight, and the page does not try.