world building - wind speaker

i've started sharing pieces on the setting of the game i'm making to give people a better sense of what it's like as a world. today i'm writing about one of the technological species in the world: wind speakers. i'm excited about them. i have a lot of favorites, but they're my favorite.

wind speakers have an oblate body which rests atop four long limbs. they have a fourfold, radial body plan and "face the winds" instead of having an inbuilt notion of front or facing the way humans and other bilaterally symmetrical beings do. four large, expressive eyes are placed around the circumference of their bodies. these are supplemented by a number of ocelli. on the underside is a single food-mouth which opens into a gastrovascular cavity. they have four wind-mouths, through which they speak and breath.

each of their long limbs bears a large hand-foot with four long fingers, each a little thinner than a human wrist. these can be used either for fine manipulation or weight bearing.

they are vertebrate analogs, but they share only the most ancient of ancestors with birds, fish, mammals etc..

wind speakers evolved in marshy regions with seasonal floods. they are somewhat convergent, evolutionarily, with wading birds: the long legs, the hardiness in cool air and cool water, the variable gait and splayed digits, good for walking over firm and infirm ground. like horses and some birds, they can rest standing via a locking mechanism. another evolutionary shaping force is an ability to rear up on two or three legs, and reach fruit or foliage high up in trees. as with humans, interaction with trees likely facilitated bridging to tool use.

wind speakers are generalists- evolutionarily, they evolved to scavenge, fish, eat fruit and foliage over a variety of marsh, flood plain, and riparian environments. to cope with marshy terrain, they can splay their fingers. on firmer ground they gather them into a hooflike cluster.

having four limbs is the most common configuration, but adjacent species default to 5 or 6. and within wind speakers, variation occurs often. three, five, and sixfold individuals are not uncommon at all. with most individuals bearing four limbs and four digits on each hand-foot, wind speakers have tended to develop base 16 number systems: though as with any species, significant variation occurs.

as with any species, many systems of beliefs exist. but without essentializing, the number four and hand imagery do tend to crop up significantly in philosophy, religion, etc. because there's such a strong parallel between cardinal directions, the body, the hand etc.. in a coincidence which may be strange to Christians, cross symbols are very prevalent but they have very different connotations.

wind speaker language is noteworthy, but for context one must first briefly ground this in some of the ways this body plan affects one's interaction with others. imagine being in a group of people. how is your body oriented? to whom you are speaking or listening? if you have an outward facing ring of eyes, ears, and mouths, you have position, proximity, and attention. you have social conventions for engaging and disengaging in conversation. but you don't turn to face (or disengage) from people. instead, there are other cues such as eye contact, body language.

wind-mouths are constructed somewhat like insect tracheae, or a whale's blowhole. there's a tube which draws air inward during breathing. this has an opening, which can be constricted or closed to keep out water or to shape sound. and there's an internal structure like a larynx or syrinx.

as an adaptation which probably originated for swimming or walking through deep water, each wind-mouth can inhale or expel air partially independently. as a result, wind speakers can simultaneously make multiple sounds or sing in harmony.

many languages make use of this, using overlapping sounds, or multiple instances of the same sound with varying timing or pitch. the permutational space here is quite large- n (usually 2-3) voices, each with timing, phoneme, and pitch variation. because of this, wind speaker words in the more layered languages can often very highly specific with only one or two syllables. but there is no free energy in information theory, so this comes at a cost (always, at cost), and syllables need to be drawn out more to make them clear.

wind feeders are naturally monoecious, which means individuals have "the organs or flowers of both sexes". "monoecious" is more often a botanical than a zoological term. but i like it because "hermaphrodidic" is a term with some stigma when applied to people. due to the prevalence of certain pernicious notions about gender, this is a concept i want everyone to learn! this happens /a lot/ in nature. many kinds of plants, large parts of your front lawn, slugs and snails, earthworms, etc. don't have two biological sexes.

wind speakers, like any species, have a layer of gender expression atop their biology. various shades of nonbinary are the most common, but because they are in community with other species, male and female identities are common as well. wind speaker men and women are trans.

two things are not quite settled yet about wind speakers: (1) how do their lungs work; and (2) how do they reproduce?

(1)

i'm incredibly infatuated with dinosaur respiration right now, and it might make sense to saddle them with a unidirectional system, possibly with a ringlike structure with permanent one way valves or sphincters between lobes. they don't have ribcages, so perhaps it would be powered by specialized pumps, mobile sections of the body. or, as happens in birds, limb movement during high activity could power breathing. they could have a supplementary insectlike passive or semipassive mode which uses diffusion + small motions.

(2)

i might go with numerous, soft-shelled eggs, and an aquatic larval phase (much smaller than adults). a lot of swamp creatures have aquatic broods.

they are NOT related to starfish (they have bones!) but there is a body plan parallel. i really like how starfish (and other echinoderms) have bilaterally symmetrical larvae which then go through metamorphosis and become five (or six or n) -fold. if i go this route, perhaps the babies are bilateral.

i hope this found its way into the hands of a few fellow fantasy and biology enthusiasts! i will post another of these at some point. i'm considering putting these all in one place such as patreon or a substack for ease of browsing. will post here if i end up doing so. wishing everyone the best!