Verdani Delegate of the Aurelin Herdlands to Verdance's Fourfold Accord; gave the Accord's position on the history of the Verdani Active

Ruvel Swardkin

verdani
verdance
calyx-system
aurelin-herdlands
migratory-councils
steppe
fourfold-accord
federation-of-sentient-beings
author
non-humanoid
histories-in-their-own-voices

Ruvel Swardkin is a Verdani of the Aurelin Herdlands, the country of Verdance's steppe, and the Herdlands' delegate to the Fourfold Accord, the standing council of one delegate from each of Verdance's four governments that speaks for the world to anyone outside it. The record holds one account of hers, Counted Twice, Answered Once: the Accord's position on the history of the Verdani, made in a sitting of its four seats at the Survey Archive's asking and given aloud by her to a Survey Corps reader at one of Verdance's orbital trade platforms. She is the first person of the steppe the record names, and the fifth Verdani, after Isren Farrowkin of the Canopy Concord, Meril Duskkin of the fenlands, Elsha Rootkin of the Survey Corps and Tavin Ledgekin of the high terraces. The Archive calls her the first of nothing else; the position was four seats' and the voice was hers because, she says, it was the Herdlands' turn.

She was bonded into the Swardkin lineage on the steppe, in a settlement the record does not name, in a year it does not hold. The people's page says what such a name is: not a birthplace but the thallenwort lineage a child was bonded into through direct kinbed-to-kinbed contact in infancy, which Verdani culture treats as the foundational kinship act and Verdani law as kinship in the fullest sense it recognises. Swardkin is not among the three kinstrain names the people's page lists as the ones an outside observer notices first, Farrowkin, Duskkin and Rootkin, and others; what it says in any Verdani channel the record does not state, and this page does not say the name means a sward. Her kinbeds run the reddish colour of a steppe strain, which the people's page gives to the accessory pigments steppe thallenwort produces against the biome's wide daily temperature swings, and gives as a reasonably reliable indicator of kinstrain and home biome and of nothing about her beyond that. Her own account says the same in her own words: it is red for that reason and for no other.

The name is given as the Federation record gives Verdani names: a personal name and a kinstrain name, in that order. What Ruvel means, and when a Verdani is given it, the record does not state. She is she in the record's translation register, on the same default that renders Isren Farrowkin and Elsha Rootkin she and Meril Duskkin and Tavin Ledgekin he; the people's page declares no pronoun system, and this page asserts no sex.

Known History

Bonded into the Swardkin lineage on the steppe of Verdance, in the Calyx system, in a settlement and a year the record does not hold. No Verdani age is given anywhere in the record, which holds no span for a Verdani life and no conversion of Verdance's local years to UCSD.
The Aurelin Herdlands' delegate to the Fourfold Accord in the record's present, 2826 UCSD. The planet's page gives the Herdlands' government as consensus among the Migratory Councils, elder bodies that follow the traditional herding routes, opposed by the newer Waystation Compact; how a delegate is chosen from that, and for how long, the record does not say, and her account gives the Councils' consent as given a season at a time without saying it is given to her.
Gave the Accord's position on the history of the Verdani, aloud, to a Survey Corps reader at one of Verdance's orbital trade platforms, the reader having been asked up and not down. The sitting that made the position she gives at most of a day on where to begin and a season or a season and a half on the ninth year's yes, in the two countries' counts; the sitting's year, and the position's, she declined to give in any reckoning the Archive can convert.
Not placed by the record in the Federation assembly's room, at any session, or anywhere off Verdance but the platform. Whether she has ever held Verdance's rotating assembly seat, which the record places with Isren Farrowkin in 2822 and 2826 UCSD, the record does not say.
The fifth Verdani individual the record names, and the first of the steppe.

The Work

The Fourfold Accord has no authority over internal law in any of Verdance's four countries and does not attempt to acquire any; its entire mandate, the planet's page says, is speaking for Verdance to the rest of the galaxy when the alternative is four contradictory answers to the same question. Her account gives the method from inside: four seats sit, each says what the answer must have in it and what it must not, and what is left when all four have finished is the position, which one of them gives. The Survey Archive's asking for the history of the Verdani was treated as an asking from outside, and so went to the Accord, and so came back as one position. Her part was to give it, and to mark, at each place where a seat had kept something out, that something had been kept out, which she says was the Herdlands' asking and the hardest one to get.

The account shows what a delegate of the Herdlands brings to a sitting: a count. The Herdlands' count has the Accord older than the Fenmarch Republic, and the Republic's count has it the other way, and she gives both and binds the position to neither. The Accord's own count begins at the Federation's survey's coming, because a count begins where counting becomes necessary, and she gives the position's intervals in it, the second year, the ninth year, and declines its present year, so that nobody can set the Accord's count beside the record's and divide. That refusal was the Stonewake seat's asking, and she carried it as her own.

What She Cannot Do

Hurry, as the people's page says of every Verdani: she cannot decide to have a harder afternoon than the light allows. Leave the steppe for the canopy, the fens or the terraces without her partner doing worse for it, permanently; a strain bred for a sky that is hot at noon and cold before dawn is bred for that sky. Eat in a room, or on a platform in orbit: a Verdani's vanes opening is a meal and not display, and her account ends on the platform's light being worth nothing to a kinbed. Stand upright, present a face, or look at one thing: the people's page gives no single face, sensory structures distributed along the leading margins where the vanes meet, and a body that orients continuously toward the light. Speak for the Herdlands on anything internal, since the Accord has no standing in it, or for the Councils against the Waystation Compact, which her account leaves out and says it leaves out. Give an answer that is hers alone when the asking was Verdance's: the voice was hers and the position was not, and she says so first and last.

Character Notes

The account shows a delegate who gives the method before the history and keeps the two apart as she goes, saying at each place which sentences are the four seats' and which are hers, and marking her own with as mine. What she adds as her own is specific and small: that the Herdlands' count and the Republic's disagree about the Accord's age and nobody who could use the answer has asked; that a line walked again each season, a little further each time, is a route being made and nobody who makes one expects to arrive on it; that the terraces' seat asked the Corps for what is under the ground and was told a lane does not read that, and said that it had asked. She adds nothing of her own to the item on the one Verdani in the Survey Corps, and says that the adding of nothing was a Councils' decision too.

She argues from specifics, which the record has already given as the habit of one other Verdani delegate and does not here give as the habit of the people. The ninth year's yes is given as four questions and four answers, each a cost or a return, light, law, what came back, whether a thing joined could be left, and the fit the record calls close to seamless is explained and not admired. Where the account turns a line of the record's it does so without correcting it: the survey's two peoples were the honest reading for a reader who did not yet know what a partner was; confirmed interfertility closed the question for you, and it had not been open for us; both are to be kept and neither written over the other. The one place she claims a thing is best is that one, and the asking was not hers.

The quiet joke the account keeps is the count's: the only number in the position is there by the Councils' consent and not their preference, and the present year is the one number she will not give. She ends on the platform's light and on going down, which is the one thing a Verdani may do above Verdance that the ring's two hundred and forty may not, and the account does not say so.

What the Record Does Not Carry

Her age, and the span of a Verdani life, neither stated anywhere; the record holds no conversion of Verdance's years. The settlement she was bonded in, and the route or waystation she lives by, since the planet's page names no place on the steppe. What Ruvel means, when a personal name is given, and whether a delegate is addressed by it or by the lineage. What Swardkin says in any Verdani channel. How the Herdlands choose a delegate to the Accord, whether the Councils or the Waystation Compact had a say in hers, and for how long a delegate serves. How the Accord chooses which seat gives a position, which her account calls a turn and the record has not established. Which delegate held the Canopy Concord's seat at the sitting, and whether it was Isren Farrowkin. The Accord's present year, and the year of the sitting, in any reckoning. What the Herdlands herd, and whether she has ever kept any animal, which the record does not establish for any Verdani. Whether she has met a Ranger, or any human, before the reader at the platform; whether she has ever held the assembly seat or been in its room. Her view of the Waystation Compact, which the account leaves out as internal. How Verdani speak, since the record has described no channel of their language, and the working rendering is all the reader took. Any chapter. The body, beyond what the people's page gives every Verdani and the steppe strain's colour: the portrait prompt is written and not generated, and the page carries no picture until the desktop step runs.