Fauna & Flora · Common Sapient Species

Kin

Origin

An ordinary animal that ate a quickenbloom

Population

Roughly 14 million on Aropria — about one for every eight humans

Most Common

Mammals, about seven in ten; birds most of the rest

Forms

A first form, which is the animal they were, and a woken form

Height

Four feet at the smallest, seven or eight at the largest

Lifespan

From about 80 years to 300 or more, following the animal

Fertility

None. Every kin alive ate a quickenbloom

Homeland

None, and there has never been one

A kin begins as an animal. At some point in an ordinary animal's life it is called, goes to find a quickenbloom, and eats it — and over the two months that follow it becomes a person.

They are the second most numerous people on Aropria, about one for every eight humans, and almost nobody thinks of them as one people, because they do not look like one. A kin is a fox, or a heron, or a cart horse. Two kin standing together may have less in common with each other than either has with the human between them, and that is the most important thing to know about them.

The quickenbloom

A quickenbloom is a low wild bulb with purple-veined leaves, and it grows nowhere on purpose. It calls some animals, mostly, people notice, the clever and the curious, and an animal that eats one wakes into a person. To anyone who can already think, it is a bitter weed.

Waking

The change takes about two months, and it is slow and obvious the whole way through. The animal's body reshapes into a standing, human-shaped version of itself, and for most of that time it is caught between the two and can do neither well. It cannot hunt. It often cannot feed itself. This is the most dangerous stretch of a kin's life, and it is why the Kindlers exist.

Instinct and the senses come through the change. The life does not. A woken kin remembers nothing of being an animal — at most a leftover liking for high places, or an uneasiness near deep water — and it has no language at all. Not a forgotten one. None. It has never had a word for anything, and the first months after the change are spent learning what everyone else learns as a child.

The two forms

A kin's first form is the animal it was. Its woken form is the standing shape it became. Changing between the two is not something a kin can do at first — the knack arrives later, sometimes years later, and until it does, a kin simply cannot go back.

The woken form always shows the animal underneath. Ears, tails, a muzzle, horns, wings folded down the back, a hide of fur, feathers or scales from head to foot: nobody mistakes a kin for a human. Colouring carries over every time, so a black cat wakes black and a grey-and-white horse wakes grey and white, and it is the easiest way to tell two kin of the same kind apart.

Size follows the animal, but not all the way. A mouse does not wake mouse-sized — the smallest kin stand about four feet. The largest animals give kin of seven or eight feet and no more. Most end up somewhere in between.

Mammals are about seven in ten. Birds are most of the rest. Reptiles and amphibians are much rarer, and everything else rarer still. Kin woken from fish are the strangest case of all: their first form is one they can only really return to in water, so going back is a journey rather than a decision.

The Kindlers

The Kindlers are the guild that finds newly woken kin, and they are the only organisation on the continent that exists for kin in particular. They keep a house in most towns of any size and an arrangement with most places too small for one, and their members are mostly kin without being only kin.

A house takes in whoever is brought to it and feeds them until the change is finished. Then the long work starts: language first, and after that everything else a person needs to know — money, law, why a shut door is shut, and that other people have thoughts of their own.

They run the houses. They do not speak for the kin. A kin owes the Kindlers nothing after leaving a house, and the guild takes no position on behalf of kin anywhere. It is the most-criticised thing about them, and it is a refusal rather than an oversight.

No nation, and no lineage

There are no kin towns. There is no kin country and there never has been one. The history of the kin is the history of everywhere else, because everywhere else is where they have always lived.

A kin feels no particular pull toward other kin. Two who woke from the same kind of animal often understand each other quickly, and shared instincts are a real thing — but that is recognition, not loyalty. A kin is no more likely to trust another kin than to trust anybody else, and where a kin settles is a question of which town suits them, answered one kin at a time.

So almost everywhere takes them in. A people with no land to claim, no homeland to be loyal to and nobody standing behind them is an easy people to admit, and kin turn up in guild halls, city offices and noble houses all over the continent — adopted into the last of those outright when one turns out to be very good at something.

Families

Kin cannot have children. Every kin alive ate a quickenbloom, and not one has ever conceived.

They want families all the same, and they build them. They take in orphans constantly — other kin most of all, and the newly woken especially, but children of every species besides — and a kin who has raised four children of three species is not an unusual kin. The result is that a great many families on Aropria have a kin somewhere on the family tree. It is a quieter kind of belonging than the noble adoptions, and a far more common one.

The spark

Once a new kin has language, a Kindler house walks them through work: crafts, trades, sciences, fighting, whatever the town does. The point is to find the one that catches.

It usually catches hard. Kin are a driven people, and one who has found their subject tends to spend the next century and a half on it. Elder kin are very often the best in their town at whatever they picked — not because they have more talent for it, but because almost nobody else brings two hundred unbroken years to a single question.

Long lives, unevenly given

A kin lives far longer than its animal ever would have, and the animal still sets the scale. Kin from short-lived animals reach about eighty. Kin from long-lived ones reach three hundred, and sometimes more.

That is not shared out evenly, and everyone involved knows it. A mouse-kin and a tortoise-kin woken in the same season and raised in the same house are looking at very different amounts of time, and they work that out early.

Where a kin is not safe

Rowlem is the exception to the general welcome, and there it is a matter of belief rather than money. The Faith teaches that non-humans who are taken and put to work instead of killed have proved their own inferiority by surviving it, and kin fall inside that teaching like anyone else. A kin in Rowlem is very probably a slave.

Money is a separate problem. The Slaver's Syndicate deals in kin wherever it deals in anyone: openly in Curath, Garshalla and Vas'tek, and in Nashriam, where it is allowed to trade in non-humans only — which is no comfort at all to a kin.

Karg takes kin the way it takes everyone, and says so in writing.

Mistaken for other peoples

At a distance, a kin woken from a wolf or a dog looks exactly like an Arak — and arak raid the farmland along the eastern border. Canine kin learn early to be seen coming, to come in daylight, and to speak first, because the alternative is being shot at by people with good reason to fear the thing they think they are looking at. Arak are badly hurt by congruence and a kin is made by it, but that is a distinction for scholars, not for anyone standing at a gate.

Being taken for a Kitteri is gentler and happens more often. Kitteri are furred, animal-featured and roughly human-shaped, so at a glance a kitteri and the right sort of kin look like the same thing. They are not. A kitteri is born a kitteri, to kitteri parents, in kitteri country, and has every one of the things a kin does not.

Kin and animals

A kin does not think of animals as family. The horse in the yard is a horse, and a kin is no softer about it than anyone else. What a kin used to be is not what a kin is, and the point gets made often and with some impatience.

There is one exception and it comes up regularly. A kin who decides that a particular animal would be better off somewhere else will sometimes simply see to it, and a cat-kin letting out somebody's cat is a small recurring nuisance rather than a stand on principle.