Boalkar

Body

The Boalden frame is still in it: the hump, the rigid shoulders, the hooked claws, the long shaggy hair around the snout. Over that, patchy fur and rotted flesh with blight plants growing out of the open cavities, and a rib cage that stands open and works like a bellows while Crimson insects pack the body behind it. The strength is tremendous and the spit mutates what it lands on.

Origin

The origin is exposure and not breeding. Molten crimson takes a creature straight into the hive mind of the great crimson god beneath the ground, and mutated ash and soil work the change slowly over generations in a village that stayed too long on infected ground. This is why the clans walk their ground so obsessively. A clan that finds Crimson Bloom on a line abandons the line, which is the one circumstance in which the great taboo on the unwatched set is put aside, and even then it is spoken of afterward as a shame.

Regard

The Boalden do not hunt their own Boalkar and will not. They send to the Gidan or to a Lathonian company and pay to have it done, and the payment is called the last set. Nothing else in the people is contracted out, and nobody in the Wilderlands has ever argued that it should be otherwise.

The Crimson in them

Patchy fur over rotted flesh, with "blight plants growing out of their exposed bodily cavities."

The cavities open because the blight keeps the ribs and discards the wall between them, and what grows out of the gap is fruiting body. This is the sixth stage arriving early and in the open: past a certain point a body stops being a body and begins to be structure, and in a Boalkar the structure is not a wall or a ceiling but a crop.

Infected Boalden country is where Crimson Bloom, "The Red Rot," is gathered, which means the harvest is cut off a living animal that has been converted into an orchard. Crimson Bloom is cut off a Boalkar that must be held down. The cutters work upwind, in the cold months, in the dry hours, because cold and dry and open air are the three things the blight cannot manage, and the ones who get careless about all three are the ones who cough sweet a fortnight later.