A Woven is not an individual but a colony of thousands of small organisms cooperating to form a single coherent entity that walks, speaks, and by every observable measure, thinks. The component organisms are individually non-sapient, roughly analogous to insects in scale and complexity but diverse in their individual appearance. Sapience appears to emerge from their collective interaction, the same way a thought emerges from neurons that cannot individually think.
The result is a being that can choose to looks humanoid or anything else its mass can form. These replica shapes seem relatively normal from a distance and deeply wrong from close up; Woven skin with a segmented texture, eyes composed of living things, movements that carry a quality of distributed coordination, as though the body is being piloted by committee, which it is. They speak by vibrating component organisms in their throat structure, producing a voice that sounds almost natural but with a harmonic undertone that unsettles.
Woven cognition is genuinely alien. Decisions are made by consensus of components, which means Woven think differently depending on the current state and composition of their colony. A Woven that has recently lost components and "regrown" them may have subtly different opinions, memories, or personality traits than it did before.
They are relatively rare in Nod and tend toward solitary or small-community living. Their origin Domain is unknown to outsiders, though the Woven themselves occasionally reference a place in terms that do not translate well into languages designed for singular minds.
Woven culture, to the extent the term applies, is built on concepts that do not translate well.
- Ownership is collective by default: a Woven does not possess a tool so much as the colony agrees to prioritize its use.
- Authorship is meaningless: a Woven who creates something did so as a consensus act, and the composition of the colony may have changed between the work's beginning and its end.
- Names are convenience: a Woven's name is a shorthand agreed upon for the convenience of other species, not an identifier the colony uses internally. Among themselves, recognition is chemical and vibrational.
- Patterns as persistence: Woven do maintain a tradition of pattern-making with surprising consistency. These are geometric arrangements of found materials that other Woven can read as compressed records of experience. These patterns serve as the closest thing the species has to written history, though "read" is generous; interpretation requires a colony whose composition overlaps enough with the maker's to parse the chemical and structural cues embedded in the work.
Transformation: Nod can either strengthen or disrupt the consensus that holds Woven together. If strengthened one or more Woven can merge and grow, becoming vast swarms with incredible capabilities. If, however, Nod weakens the consensus, a Woven's components begin acting on individual impulse rather than collective agreement. The colony loses coherence. This happens first in small ways (a hand acting independently, words emerging that the Woven did not intend) and eventually catastrophically. A fully degraded Woven is a swarm, thousands of small organisms operating without coordination, congealing into shapes that parody their former forms before dissolving again. Mad swarms are one of Nod's more disturbing ambient hazards.