Abominations of Chaos

Origin

The Abominations of Chaos spawned "out from the corruptible waters of chaos itself, funnelled through Aezithis's heart from Dre'mnar himself," and they are "the second age of Aezithis's children." He did not make them on purpose. He was the pipe. They "mutated out of nothing more than chaotic clusters of cells, slithering out from the expanding ravines cracking across the planet." The waters came through his heart-wound, and where they pooled something climbed out, and what climbed out was different every time.

They are pure mutation. No two are ever the same, and no two ever have been. There is no species in this class, only individuals and their descendants, and the descendants are not the same as the parents either.

They took every evolutionary road at once. "Ranging from different levels of intelligence, these species all have taken to different evolutionary paths, some evolving to their own versions of high societies, while others have chosen the foul breeding within the darkest reaches they can find."

Then the Alverians arrived and the class stopped growing. "By the time the chaotic rivers ceased flowing, and became rivers of Crimson Blight, the Abominations of Chaos had already grown immense in number, and with the lack of care from the superior race of Alverian's that had taken to the planet, they were able to breed in the darkened forests, at least until they were chopped down. Many species did not survive the Age Of Alveria, as many were identified as crucial in the Alverian Experiments, and were culled into extinction." Every Abomination alive today is the survivor of a cull, and somewhere in an Alverian record is a note of what was taken out of it and why.

Three of the peoples that did not survive are remembered here. The Uheska, culled for the lung: a long, pale, six-limbed people of the deep ravines who breathed the air of the first world, the air before Vaeyar took the element out of it, and went on breathing it after everything else had adapted. They had a second lung that drew the element out of stone. The Alverians wanted that lung, took it apart, failed to reproduce it, and killed the remaining population so that no rival could try. The irony is complete and nobody in the world holds both halves of it: the Alverian lords now sit in bunkers replicating an atmosphere that a people they exterminated could have made for them out of rock.

The Ondrelim, culled for the memory: small, symmetrical enough to pass, and the only Abomination of Chaos ever to build a city, which they did in a cut forest and lost with it. What the Alverians wanted was their inheritance, since an Ondrelim was born knowing what its parent had known, whole, without teaching, and the inheritance ran clean down the generations. The experiments went on for four hundred years. What came out of them went into the Giafe, whose perfect memory their own records call a mistake in the breeding and who now call it a curse, and into the Omari line of work that ended with the Whitestone seeds. The Ondrelim themselves were culled to the last, in one season, when the work was finished.

The Vashek Drove, culled for being useful to somebody else: a herd people, enormous, docile, asymmetric in the hindquarters and slow with it, who lived on the ravine plains in their millions and were the food of every other Abomination in the region. The Alverians took no material from them and ran no experiment on them. They culled the Drove to starve the ravines, and it worked, and the ravines emptied, and the forests were cut, and the Age of Alveria proceeded. It is the only entry on the list with no science behind it, and it killed more living things than the other two together.

Body

One rule identifies the class and it is the most useful diagnostic in the world. "To tell if you have found an abomination, often the largest tell is the lack of symmetry on their form, as their bone structure and muscle alignment have left them all as uncomfortable, in pain, and irritable species, unless intelligent enough to deal and mend the faults of their DNA."

Asymmetry, then; deformity, size and limb count decide nothing. A Crimson-mutated creature is corrupted, a Remoulded is partial, a Shattered is borrowed, and any of the three can look monstrous. An Abomination of Chaos is lopsided, in the bone and in the muscle, and it hurts.

It is worth setting down exactly how it hurts, because the temper of the whole class comes out of it and the world has never troubled to work it out. A skeleton that is not symmetrical is a skeleton in which every joint is loaded off its axis. The cartilage wears on one side and not the other, and it wears from the first year. The spine curves to compensate for a shoulder that sits high, and the compensation throws the hip, and the hip throws the knee, so that a single crooked bone at the top of an animal is a column of failing joints all the way to the ground. The nerve channels do not match the bones they pass through, since the two were laid down by different mistakes, and a nerve pinched at birth is pinched for the whole of a life. The muscle then makes it worse: the side that works harder grows, and what it grows does is pull the frame further out of true, so the deformity deepens every year that the creature lives. A young Abomination is nearly straight and moves well. An old one is bent double and can still kill anything in the ravine.

The pain is a matter of leverage, it is constant, and it is worst after stillness. An Abomination that has lain down for four hours gets up over several minutes, in stages, and is at its most dangerous during them. The class does not sleep in any full sense; it dozes in short spells at all hours and is never properly rested, and ravine country therefore has no safe hour of the day or night, which is the practical fact every trapper learns first and the reason the ravine trade pays what it pays. The temper of the class is not malice. It is thirty generations of nobody having slept.

The asymmetry runs inside as well, and it is where most of them die. Organs come doubled on one side and absent on the other. A healer opening one finds two hearts on the left and nothing on the right, or a gut that loops back into itself, or a lung with no partner and a ribcage built for two. Most such arrangements fail within a few years, which is why the class produces enormous numbers of young and so few adults, and why the adults that exist are the ones whose internal lottery came out workable. The Sump Mother is the extreme case, with her entire left side doubled and her right side absent, and she is a curiosity rather than an exception; she simply drew a doubling that happened to work.

The senses are lopsided too, and this is the layer that makes them so strange to fight and so pitiable to watch. The eyes sit at different heights or face at different angles, so depth is a guess; an Abomination misjudges distance and overcommits, and the ravine hunters' oldest trick is to stand a pace outside where the thing is going to strike. The ears are offset, so sound arrives with a false bearing and the creature turns the wrong way first, every time, by the same margin. Anyone who has watched one hunt has seen it lunge past its prey and then correct. The world reads this as stupidity. It is a body reporting the wrong coordinates to a mind that has no way of knowing they are wrong, and no other creature has ever had a chance to tell it.

The second half of the rule is the better half. The irritability is the pain, and the pain is structural. An Abomination clever enough to correct the faults in its own making stops being irritable. A civil Abomination is by definition an intelligent one, and the calm of such a creature is the calm of somebody who has spent four hundred years fixing their own skeleton one bone at a time.

The asymmetry is visible to anyone who knows to look for it and invisible to almost everyone, because a monster is a monster. What to look for: a shoulder set higher than the load it carries, a jaw that closes to one side, a stride with two different lengths in it, an eye that tracks and an eye that follows late. Trappers who work the ravine country learn it in a season and are worth their fee for that alone.

Height runs to every variation. Nobody has ever watched an Abomination from its beginning to its end, so the length of one of their lives is a thing the world has never learned.

Life

They are "extremely fertile, and highly incestuous in their breeding patterns, and chaotic in both their biological makeup, appearance and personalities." They breed, and this is the fact that shapes the whole natural world of Nu. Most of the monsters of this world descend from them. A beast in a forest that is no Crimson mutant, no Shattered and nobody's escaped experiment is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a distant grandchild of something that came out of a ravine, softened by a hundred generations into something that can be hunted for meat.

There is no shared way of breeding, which is itself the point. Some lay, some bear live, some bud from the flank, some release free-swimming young into water and never see them again. What is constant is the number, which is always high, and the outcome, which is that no two of the young resemble each other or either parent.

Inheritance in this class does not work the way it works elsewhere. An Abomination's young are neither copies nor blends; each one is another throw. A pair may produce a litter in which one is nearly symmetrical and lives comfortably, one cannot stand, and one is something neither parent has a name for. There is no line. There is a family, and the family is a crowd of strangers.

The pain shapes the rearing. A brood raised by a parent in constant structural agony is raised badly and knows it, and the temper of the class is not malice; it is thirty generations of nobody having slept properly. Where an intelligent Abomination has mended itself, the young are raised patiently, and those broods are the ones that build.

Frailty

This is a class defined by its faults and the faults are worth naming, because every one of them is also a way to kill one.

The joints go first, and they go on a schedule set at birth. Whichever side carries the extra load wears through in the first third of a life, and the creature is then working on bone against bone, which it survives and which reduces it to a limp and a temper. A trapper who can see which side a thing favours knows which side it will be standing on in five years.

The teeth are the quiet killer. A jaw that closes to one side wears its teeth out at twice the rate on the contacting side and never touches on the other, and an Abomination with a worn jaw cannot process what it catches. Starvation with food in front of it is the commonest death in this class among creatures that have got past their first decade, and it is why so many ravine carcasses are found whole, uneaten, beside something that was clearly trying.

The pinched nerve is the fault they fear, in the ones that can fear. A nerve caught in a channel that does not match its bone will, sooner or later, stop serving the limb, and a limb that stops answering is a limb that is dragged, then damaged, then lost to rot. Every intelligent Abomination that has taken up the knife started because of a nerve.

Their parasites specialise in the folds. A body that does not close cleanly has pockets, and the ravine country produces a flat white fly whose young live in exactly such a pocket and in nothing else. The unintelligent are riddled with them. Part of what a mender does for the malformed that are brought to it is turn out the folds.

Starvation in a body assembled wrong has one distinctive feature: the two sides fail at different rates. The heavy side consumes itself first and fastest, so a starving Abomination becomes, over two months, temporarily more symmetrical and temporarily less painful, and several observers have recorded that a starving one of the intelligent kind becomes noticeably calmer and more talkative before it dies. Nobody has decided what to make of that.

What they fear is straightforward and they are right to fear it. They fear waking up unable to get up, which happens, and which in a class with no medicine and no neighbours is a death of several weeks.

Country

The Under Realm and the pits; the darkened forests, or what is left of them after the Alverians cut them; and "the expanding ravines cracking across the planet." The ravines are the class's country and they are still opening.

A ravine is a wound in the crust rather than a valley, and it goes down further than any hold has ever measured, and the chaotic waters have stopped flowing while the sides have not stopped producing. Things still come up. Fewer than in the first age, and no longer out of clusters of cells but out of the breeding populations that live in the walls, and the settled world cannot tell the difference and has no need to.

What the ravines eat is the part of this that nobody joins up, and the answer is that they used to eat the Vashek Drove. Millions of slow docile asymmetric herd animals on the ravine plains fed every predatory lineage in the region for an age, and the Alverians culled the Drove deliberately in order to starve the country. It worked. What it left behind is a class of extremely fertile predators with no prey base, and every consequence in the ravines today runs from that single decision. They eat each other, constantly, which is why a lineage's deadliest enemy is the lineage in the next ravine. They take livestock off the surface, which is why bands like Krath's exist at all and why the ravine edges are raided in a pattern that the border lords describe as savagery and which is in fact foraging. And they have collapsed to a fraction of their first-age numbers without any further culling, which is the outcome the Alverians wanted and did not stay to observe.

They have domesticated nothing, and nothing has domesticated them except the Shrakur, who chain them in Bahr-Gar, and the void mage remembered as Aeshker, who bred one line and whose hounds are still sold. What a hundred years of them does to a country is simple and total: the country is not farmed. No shepherd works ravine country, no road crosses it, no village stands within a day of an active lip. Where a lineage has been cleared out, and two have, the grazing comes back within a decade and the settlements follow, and in both cases the new settlements were inside a generation complaining about something else that had moved into the gap.

Society

Some have built "their own versions of high societies," and others have chosen "the foul breeding within the darkest reaches they can find." Both are common.

There are societies within the class and no society of it: each one belongs to a single lineage, none of them in contact with another, most under a hundred strong, and several older and more literate than the kingdoms above them. The recurring shape is the workshop. 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. 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.

What the work actually involves deserves the room, because it is the one thing this class does that nothing else in the world does. A mending begins with measurement, over months, of a body that has never been measured. Then the breaking: the long bone of the overloaded side is cut through and reset shorter, or the short side is lengthened by wedging in bone taken from something else, usually from another of their own kind, usually dead and sometimes not. Then bracing, for a year or two, against a frame. Then the slow business of learning to walk on a skeleton that has changed shape, which has to be done again after every operation and which takes longer each time. A doubled organ may be cut out if it can be reached. A pinched nerve may be freed, and where it cannot be freed it is cut, and the limb is given up on purpose, which is a decision that takes most of them a decade to make.

There is no anaesthesia anywhere in the class. 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. Hausk the Mender has been at this for four hundred years and walks without pain, and the floor of its workshop is a record of the ones who were brought to it too late, in braces that were removed from bodies rather than from patients.

An "ancient Aezithian horde" lies beneath Jon-Lithul, in the mines the Jondaran descendants hold. The Legions of Aezithis are of this stock: "abominations of terrifying creation. In the hundreds of thousands, they pour out of the fog, fang and claw, each of them a match for a dozen knights of later ages."

Faith

Most have none and lack the mind for one. Where faith exists in this class it is directed at Aezithis and it is grievance rather than worship. The intelligent lineages know what they came through and whose heart it came through, and the rite, where there is one, consists of setting out the bones that were wrong and naming the fault aloud. Nothing is asked for.

The bones set out are their own, kept from their own mendings, which is why a grievance rite is a thing only a mended creature can perform and why Ilvoreth, who has never mended anything, performs it with the bones of others.

Nothing would be given. Aezithis is a god in stone and holds no realm, and the souls of Abominations go to the auction of the star gods along with everyone else's, which no Abomination has ever been told.

Tongue

No shared tongue and no shared naming. The unintelligent have neither. The intelligent invent, individually, and what they invent is usually private: a language with one fluent speaker, taught to a brood that half learns it. A few have learned Common from captives and speak it precisely and slowly, having had nobody to be casual with.

Two features recur in the invented languages, and both come out of the body. They are heavy in words for position, angle and load, since a creature whose first subject is its own skeleton needs to be able to say which way a thing leans. And they are almost all written as much as spoken, in scratch on stone, because a mouth that closes to one side cannot reliably reproduce its own sounds and their inventors know it.

The names the world uses for them are the settled world's own coinages. Where a creature has a name for itself, that is noted; in eight of the ten set down below it does not. The Ossekar; Hausk the Mender; the Grennish; Ilvoreth; the Sump Mother; Krath-of-the-Third-Arm; the Whistling Bank; Meshellun; the Butcher of Jon-Lithul; Aeshker's Hound.

Regard

The word abomination does three jobs in this world: it names this class, it names any Crimson-mutated creature, and it serves as an insult, as when Aezithis is called Father of Abominations and Arthur curses "the abomination that is Lancelot." Capitalised, an Abomination of Chaos means Class Four and nothing else, and Crimson-mutated is the correct term for Class Five. Abomination itself means unnatural, pulled from horror and doom, and is used correctly of the Thojar by the Do'urssan, of the Wolken by Orton, and of Zhurx by everyone.

The Shrakur hold enslaved Abominations of Chaos in the deep ravine of Bahr-Gar and throw their own children against them. The Do'urssan feed their dead to the abominations in the pits. The Alverians culled them by the species. The Great Shattered sometimes rule them and sometimes eat them. They fight each other constantly, because a lineage's nearest competitor is the lineage in the next ravine.

Harvest

Asymmetric bone. Nothing else on an Abomination is worth carrying out, and the bone is worth a great deal, because enchantment in this world requires living or once-living material and asymmetric bone takes an astral rune in a way that ordinary bone does not: the rune sits crooked and holds harder. Wands, braces and reliquary frames are cut from it. It is legal, because no polity has ever thought to forbid it, and it is expensive, because the creature has to be killed first and the creature is in pain and irritable.

The grade is set by how wrong the bone is, which is why the Ossekar's short spine is the standard the trade prices against. Bone from a mended creature is worth almost nothing, since a bone that has been cut straight takes a rune like any other, and this has produced the one piece of genuine comedy in the ravine trade: the hunters will not touch the mended ones, and the mended ones are therefore the only Abominations in the world that are safe from anybody, and they achieved it by ending their own pain.

The Shrakur take a second thing and it is no material. They take the living animal, chain it in Bahr-Gar, and use it to raise their young. Nobody else in the world has found a use for a live one.

Remembered

The Legions of Aezithis. In the hundreds of thousands, pouring out of the fog, fang and claw, each of them a match for a dozen knights of later ages.

The ancient Aezithian horde beneath Jon-Lithul. Lying in the deep workings under the mines the Jondaran descendants hold, and the reason the adjacency of that place to the Butcher is no coincidence.

The Sewn Abomination in Strogo's laboratory. Surgery rather than spawn, and of no class set down here.

Hausk the Mender, Ilvoreth the Leaning Priest and Krath-of-the-Third-Arm. Set down below, and the three that other creatures know by name.

Kin each has a page of its own

This class has no kin, no lineages and no breeds, because every individual is a species of one and its own children are strangers to it. What stands in place of kin is a list, the largest in this world, and it does not close. Ten are set down here as the first ten. They share nothing, by definition, and they are not related, by definition, and no reader should draw a pattern from them, because a pattern is the one thing this class cannot have. The list continues without end; the class produces new individuals faster than anyone can take them down. Anything met in the ravine country, in the pits or in the cut forests belongs here on the evidence of a single test: look at the bone, and see whether it leans.