The Grennish
Waist-high, numerous, and the reason the ravine country has no shepherds. Each Grennish has two jaws, one above the other on the same face, and the lower sits half a hand to the left of the upper, so the creature cannot close its mouth, drools perpetually, and cannot eat anything it has not first torn to pieces.
They run in scores. They are stupid, fertile past reason, and they are the single most common Abomination in the world.
Body
Neither jaw will ever wear out, since they never meet. That is the single accident of construction that has made this the most successful lineage in the class. The teeth are the quiet killer everywhere else among the Abominations: a jaw that closes to one side wears out at twice the rate on the contacting side, and a worn jaw means starvation with food in front of it. A Grennish can eat with an old mouth, and so it does not die of the thing that kills most of its relatives once they are past their first decade.
Everything else about the arrangement is a cost. It cannot close its mouth, it loses water constantly through the drool, and it cannot take anything down whole, so a Grennish that has killed must tear before it can feed, which is why a Grennish kill is not a carcass but a scatter.
Country
They are what a hundred years of Abominations does to a country, in the plainest form. No shepherd works ravine country. The grazing is there and the walls are there and there is nothing standing in any of it, because scores of waist-high things will come across open ground in daylight, unhurried and spread wide, and take a flock apart in an afternoon.
They have gone further out than any other lineage, which is what numbers buy. Where the prey base collapsed after the Alverians culled the Vashek Drove, the Grennish took livestock off the surface instead, and they have kept doing it.
Regard
Most of what the settled peoples call goblin is a Grennish or a grandchild of one. This is the clearest case in the world of the general rule that most of the monsters of Nu descend from this class: a lineage came out of a ravine, bred past reason for an age, and softened over a hundred generations into the thing a border village complains about and has a name for.
Nobody looks at the jaws. A monster is a monster, and the one diagnostic that would settle it takes a season in the ravine country to learn.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How far out of the ravine country the Grennish have spread
- Where the line between a Grennish and a goblin is drawn, if it is drawn anywhere
- Whether a score has any order in it, or is only a number