The Ossekar

Body

The two spines are the fault, and they are the most complete example of the class rule in a single animal. Fused at the hips and diverging at the ribs, they load every joint below them off its axis and leave the two shoulders four feet apart in height. The short column has been shortening the whole left side since the first year, and the cartilage on that side went long ago, so the Ossekar is bone on bone from the hip down and has been for most of its life.

It cannot turn at speed. A body with two spines fighting each other has no way to swing its own length around, and this single limitation governs everything the animal does and everything that is done about it.

Frailty

The spiral is the weakness and it is visible from a hundred yards. Its stride has two different lengths in it and the track shows both, which is why a trapper who has read one set of prints knows what is in the valley before he sees it, knows which shoulder is the high one, and knows which side it will be standing on in five years.

Beyond that it carries what the class carries: the joints going on a schedule set at birth, the inability to rest, and no medicine and no neighbours if it wakes one morning unable to get up.

Regard

Four days is the number the ravine country attaches to it, and the four days are the fault rather than the grudge. Unable to chase, the Ossekar walks, and it walks until the thing it is walking after has to sleep. The settled world reads this as a grudge held with terrible patience. It is a body that cannot run doing the only thing left to it.

Harvest

Its bone is the standard against which all other asymmetric bone is priced. The grade in this trade is set by how wrong the bone is, and the short spine of an Ossekar is as wrong as bone gets while still holding an animal up, so a rune sits crooked in it and holds harder than in anything else that can be carried out of a ravine. Everything else on the carcass is left where it falls.