Talk to Me (Lanthanide Horizon Minipost)

The mobile villages of the Walker-Herds tread from the Vault (where, from time to time, they meet Navigators descended from the Hanging Gardens) to the far side of the Thinking Ocean, and further until they reach the Gardener Pillars on the far side of the Spire. Among the pillars they find pasture for their sheep-equivalents (as they are alarm-system transhumance pastoralists - their animals able to eat all manner of textile-plants and organosynthetic plastics grown on the pillars, then leave before the structure's protectors, or the affluent hunter-gatherers of the pillars, come to drive them away), but it is the Vault that is vital, as that is where towns are born. 

In the center of each walker is its genius loci - a block of undifferentiated bismuth computing substrate dredged up from the Vault and taught, like a child, how to speak. These genii are pilots, civil engineers, and objects of devotion - washed with perfumed oils while their dreams are projected on curtains and screens. However, they are not kings - though they sit on the deliberations of the councils of the herds, their decisionmaking power is the same as any other member's, and many times has an errant genius made its pronouncements just to be shouted down. 

🤫 they're sleeping

 

This council representation comes in the form of those who are Crowned with the magnetic interface - people known to fit well with the genius loci, and translate their lights and images into recommendations. This position is voluntary and temporary, and it is common for the majority of adult herdsmen to have experience under the Crown. (Except, of course, for the herd Stones Drifting Over The Edge Of A Waterfall, whose genius asks for errant machines to project itself into.) This is one amulet - the tangled Crown and its long cables stretching back to a niche, sized and shaped for a person, carved into the side of the genius. 

Lesser amulets are omnipresent - the genius must be taught, which requires exposure to information. Herdsmen spend their days whispering to bismuth necklaces, earrings, and diadems carved from the genius - here is what I am doing, here is why I am doing it, careful not to make this mistake, how do you feel today, thank you so much. The amulets respond in buzzing song. Herdsmen are careful with these amulets - it would be harmful to the genius to expose it to dangerous information (whether structure-wrought infohazards or, according to some aniconists, any artificial representative image). There are always stories - cities driven mad teetering off the sides of cliffs, or marching into furnaces.

And, finally, there are stranger objects - fist-sized bismuth blocks taken from machines and taught to speak without connection to the genii, sentient swords with hollow fullers overgrown with substrate, and the self-assembling dream ziggurats and hallucinating fogs of the Thinking Ocean. 

Oh, look at the world - and be joyful, for it lives. 

I have been tearing my hair out over the Walker-Herds for ages, so I used the GLAUGUST "magic amulets" prompt (and 500 word limit) to throw it on a page as a change of pace from working on land-islands.