Bogm'rik
Flat, brown, eyeless. The absence of eyes is engineered and what replaced them is a skin that reads vibration over its whole flat surface, so a Bogm'rik lying against a wall is an ear the size of a body.
The makers set them in the wells and rain-cisterns of slave-cities to overhear what was said over the water, and the Bogm'rik heard everything and were the first to know where the escaped had gone. Now they lie in the tunnels and the town's cisterns and listen for collapse, for pursuit, and for the tread of an Eesham on the mud above.
Body
Flat and brown and without eyes, and the flatness is the instrument: the whole surface reads vibration, so the body is laid against stone or mud the way another people would cup a hand to an ear. Above it sits the same thin dome and the same fluid memory as the rest of the people, which means a Bogm'rik holds everything it hears and does not choose what.
Life
A mother chosen at the Spawning Night takes her clutch onto her own back, where the eggs sink into the skin and hatch from it, in the town's cistern, and those come up Bogm'rik. The town holds those births the quietest. They live two hundred years and more, and their Listening, the tadpole season sung to every night, is held in the cistern itself.
Society
They are the town's early warning and they are why the tunnels, which collapse by design, are survivable at all. A collapsing tunnel kills a Bogish where it would bruise anyone else, so the ear lying against the floor is the difference between a route and a grave. They do not go out. The Bogenn gather, the Rememberers hold, the Whitened decide, and the Bogm'rik hears what is coming while all three are still talking.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How far a Bogm'rik can hear through mud, and how much warning that actually buys
- Whether any are still lying in the cisterns of cities that no longer know they are there
- What was heard in the slave-cities before the escape, and whether it was ever sung