Hausk the Mender

Society

The workshop is the recurring shape in this class and Hausk's is the one the rest are measured against. An intelligent Abomination that has mended itself becomes obsessed with the mending, gathers its descendants, and builds a place where the work can be done, and what such a place contains is bone saws, braces, drawings, and four centuries of notes in a language invented by one creature for its own use. Hausk invented one, and the notes are in it.

It charges for the work: a year of labour, or a body, or the answer to a question. The bodies are not sentiment. A short side is lengthened by wedging in bone taken from something else, usually from another of their own kind, usually dead and sometimes not, and a workshop that mends needs a supply.

Frailty

Rather more than half of what Hausk has done to itself has failed and had to be undone, and it keeps the failures on a shelf, labelled, in the private language it invented for the purpose. That shelf is the honest account of the work and there is nothing else like it anywhere in the class.

There is no anaesthesia. The work is done awake, by the creature on itself, because there is nobody else who can be trusted with a saw and because the only one who knows where it hurts is the one it is happening to. The floor of the workshop is a record of the ones brought in too late, in braces that were removed from bodies rather than from patients.

Harvest

Nothing on Hausk is worth taking, and that is the point of it. Bone from a mended creature is worth almost nothing, since a bone that has been cut straight takes a rune like any other, so the hunters will not touch the mended ones. Hausk is among the only Abominations in the world that is safe from anybody, and it achieved that by ending its own pain.

Remembered

The Alverian record for its valley survives in the workshop, and Hausk can read it. It is one of very few creatures of this class that knows in detail what was done to its country and why, and it has never been recorded saying anything about it.