Baruunmor
The Baruunmor is the war of a Baruush house, and he is made rather than born. A kit chosen for the Baruunmor in its first winter is fed sapwood mash and marrow until it doubles its litter-mates, and it goes on being fed, and what comes out at the end is four to five feet and three to four hundred pounds of jaw and tail that moves like a door coming off its hinges.
They break rival houses' dams. They take the keeps at the far end of contested bridges. They go first through a town wall when the Turn has not been enough. A Baruunmor who has broken a dam wears its keystone on a chain and is not required to work again.
Body
Four to five feet and three to four hundred pounds, with a jaw that will take out a mooring post in three bites and a tail that can throw a grown Nu'uman off a gangway. The body is the base body fed past its design: barrel-built and low on short thick legs, the fat stored first and lost last in the flat shovel of the tail, the whole furnace of the gut running most of the body's length and never stopping, so that a Baruunmor is warm to the touch and eats from waking to sleeping.
The teeth are the tool and the threat. A Baruunmor's are worn on timber and left uncapped in most houses, since copper cannot wear and a Breaker who cannot gnaw is a Breaker killed by his own chisels inside the year.
Society
They are the war-arm of the noble line, and they sit in the house's order between the Sluice-Wardens and the Factors, under the Baron of the Beam. The house of Ovvenreck hires them out to other houses and is consequently welcome nowhere and paid everywhere. Karrow Palgrume, who let out Blackweir on his own cousins on hire, was made a baron for it by the house that hired him.
They carry no Crimson and never have, and the suffix that marks the Crimson strains across every other species was taken off their name for that reason.
Frailty
They are fed until they cannot swim well, which they resent, and which is intentional, since a Breaker who can outswim his own house is a problem for his own house. The Breakers understand the arrangement and accept it, and nobody has ever written down why.
Every Breaker drowns eventually. Before that the fat does the rest of the work: the joints go early and the heart fails at forty, in a people who are old at forty anyway, and the only Baruush who may not mention any of it out loud are the ones it is happening to.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- What a Breaker is paid, and whether a hired one can refuse a target
- How a house chooses which kit in a litter is fed up, and whether the kit is told
- Whether a Breaker has ever been made a Baron of the Beam in his own house rather than another's