Shifters
The Shifters are those in Eslura who can change either their physical shape or the sound of their voice. Whether that makes them a people or marks an ability held by individuals is not settled: Calamity speaks of "us Shifters" and of "my gift" in the same breath, and the books elsewhere call shifting a special skill rather than a lineage.[1] Eslura believed them extinct after the war, and Calamity, who serves Obellius Kalaar at Veskadoth, is the only one shown alive.[1]
Appearance
The books do not describe what a Shifter looks like when not shifted. Calamity presents as a woman with knee-length purple hair and purple eyes, and Lumikki Otsby rules her out as a Nelazgian on the grounds that she has none of their skeletal features.[1]
Shifting has two forms and each carries a tell. A Shifter who changes physical form casts a shadow that does not match the shape now standing there. A Shifter who changes voice has eyes that turn black while the borrowed voice is in use.[1] Most of Eslura knows both signs, but the Shifters had been gone so long that people stopped watching for them, which is how the tells get overlooked in practice.[1]
Calamity, in a serpentine body, grows a fresh tendril out of her midsection mid-fight. Nothing in the books sets a limit on what shape a Shifter may hold, or for how long.[2]
Society
Little is recorded. Nothing in the books says where the Shifters lived, how they were governed, or whether they were ever a community rather than scattered individuals. Lumikki knows them only from reading about them.[1]
What is recorded is why Obellius valued them. He loved Shifters for a number of reasons, chiefly that they were easy to use to manipulate others.[1]
History
The War of Shadows
Lumikki had read that the Shifters were all exterminated in the War of Shadows. Calamity, taunting her, puts it as a purge that came after the fighting and says that those who slipped through the cracks were made stronger by it.[1] The two accounts are the only ones the books give, and they are not reconciled.
Under Obellius
Calamity poisons Lumikki in the Ovallia marketplace while wearing the shape and voice of a male merchant, which sends the Sacred Guard hunting a man who does not exist.[1] She holds Lumikki and Remidigon Otsby prisoner beneath Veskadoth, works alongside the commander Ferra Ellisvat, and is present when the prisoners are found to have escaped.[3]
At the Veskadoth docks she takes a serpentine body with a human face, breaks Lumikki's arm, and is torn open through the midsection by a shot of water Lumikki fires while falling.[2]
Known members
Behind the scenes
The word shifter is used earlier and in a different sense. Book 1 calls Millennium Loftwind a dragon shifter, and she transforms between an old woman and a dragon.[4][5] Whether that is the same ability as the Shifters' is never addressed.