Watchers

The Watchers have no bodies save those they build and wear as garments, or those lesser life forms give them as hosts. They are patterns in energy, not energy itself. They exist in a space deeper or higher than the narrow, rippling plane of ordinary reality -- a pelagic dark where time does not flow -- from which they can see the entire universe as a diver sees the sun shining through the surface from a thousand feet below. They are not omniscient but are limited by attention. From their vantage they can see all detail at once across space, which is how Dorayaica located Hadrian and seized him. Their eyes are xanthous and numberless as the stars. A weapon inducing extreme core-collapse in a star releases a hypernova wave powerful enough to disorder the energy patterns that comprise the Watchers; even at full strength they cannot escape an attack of that magnitude. They can see vessels traveling at warp only as a smudge, and Demiurge's geometry further confounds their sight. Hadrian's time-sight makes him move more like the Watchers, increasing his visibility to them when he leaves the ship.

The Watchers who abandoned their posts turned the Vaiartu and Cielcin to their worship and service. In Llesu they maintain armed servants: vast treaded war machines of red-black metal with asymmetrical, spined hulls and ribbed, fluted weapon-barrels with pulsating organic tubes between the ribs, moving in patrols through the city streets.

The Watchers were created by the Unmade (the Quiet) to serve specific functions: each was made with a purpose and role, assigned to tend and shepherd particular stars or aspects of creation. Some Watchers abandoned their posts, upsetting the balance of the cosmos, wounding the stars, and poisoning the foam of space. Ragama distinguishes himself from the Watchers by saying he is what they were meant to be before they betrayed their purpose. The Watchers are described as without number, as are their loyal counterparts. The Cielcin name for the Quiet, Utannash the Deceiver, reflects the Cielcin view that the Quiet is a wicked god and architect of a broken universe, though they worship him still as the devil of their black pantheon.