Pooka

Golden-skinned and golden-voiced, the Pooka are the Kingdom's musicians, and music for them is not an art but a language. Virtually every Pooka is a prodigy; most prefer singing to speaking; and each one carries a heartsong, an innate melody unique to them that functions as name, signature, and self all at once. To learn someone's heartsong is a serious intimacy. To perform it without leave is an insult that has started feuds.

They are not a violent people, but Pooka on a battlefield are formidable: their music steadies allies, unknits enemy nerve, and carries further than any horn.

Appearance

Warm gold in every shade from pale honey to old bronze, with broad soft wings that produce a low hum in flight. A crowd of Pooka in the air is audible before it is visible, and each individual's pitch is as distinctive as a face.

Attuned Magic

Music. A nascent Pooka can steady a frightened animal or make a listener weep with three notes. A powerful one can enchant a room, compel a confession, hold a crowd motionless, or unmake a battle line. The magic requires sound, which makes silence the one reliable defense, and makes the Kingdom's occasional attempts at silencing Pooka more literal than they sound.

Society

Governance is conducted as performance in the amphitheater-city of the Round: proposals are sung, opposition is sung over the top, and consensus is literally harmony. Outsiders find this ridiculous until they attend a session. The First Voice presides without ruling.

Relations

Cordial with everyone, which is itself a strategy. The Round is the most politically dangerous place in the Kingdom and the court has never quite noticed: a Pooka ballad travels faster and further than any decree, cannot be confiscated, and cannot be prosecuted, because the Kingdom's censors have no vocabulary for charging a melody. Nearly every seditious idea in circulation has a tune, and a good many of them came home from the Hedges with a verse added.