Skiohra

The Skiohra are a matriarchal race that lives entirely on seven large ships (six, after the unfortunate events of book 3). They were the first race conquered by the Swarm (after the liquid Valarisi), and have been instrumental in the Swarm’s dominance of the galaxy and the development of their technology. The Swarm’s social structure was in part modeled after the Skiohra, though heavily corrupted.

Each female Skiohra carries tens of thousands of embryonic Skiohra within her. Each embryo is a fully developed intelligent individual, each with their own hopes, fears, talents, and interests. They live “the Interior Life”, as opposed to the small fraction of their siblings that are born to “the Exterior Life”. The mother is connected to each of her embryos through some sort of mental link, such that they form a sort of collective with the mother at the head, but who by no means dominates them all, since the majority of them are adults with fully developed senses of self. The mother can draw upon the wisdom and knowledge of them all, and delegate to them certain subjects, such that she can become an expert in just about any field, through her interior children.

Skiohra are incredibly strong. While not warlike, their bodies have nonetheless evolved a frightfully powerful musculature due to the mother’s evolutionary need to protect tens of thousands of her offspring within her body, though they appear lithe, short, and unassuming.

The Swarm modeled their meta-space link after the link between Skiohra mother and interior children, though “The Ligature”, as the meta-space link is called, now allows the Skiohra to communicate not only with their children, but with each other, and the other client races of the Swarm.

The Skiohra live entirely on 7 large ships, each nearly 100 kilometers long. They had a homeworld, once, but the Swarm conquered it over ten thousand years ago and it is lost. Each ship holds hundreds of thousands of Skiohra living the Exterior Life, and billions living the Interior Life. Most Skiohra living the Exterior Life are female, and

mothers. Males are rare, cloistered, and have thousands of sexual partners. They are slightly larger and stronger than females, and just as intelligent, though of course they lack the knowledge that comes with having tens of thousands of intelligent embryos inside their bodies, but their mental link with each other through the Swarm’s Ligature mitigates this somewhat.

Skiohra have their own hand and arm signals for greeting and expressing certain emotions, as detailed in book 3.

The Skiohra civilization is composed of seven houses, comprising the Bonded Council of Seven. The Swarm’s Concordat of Seven is a corrupted version of this.