Bogish

Origin

Nu'uman spliced with frog, the first of all the lesser species: "Bred as the first species; a lesser intelligent race that was meant to cull knowledge, yet they were deemed a failure due to how immeasurably smart they became." The first thing the Alverians ever made was also the first thing that got away from them. The Torgai were bred to catch them and the Eesha to hunt them, and neither has finished. Since the fall they have kept "secret swamp civilizations, keepers of old-world knowledge, sanctuaries for the good-hearted." Most of the world believes they were wiped out in the ancient times. The Bogish have decided not to correct it.

Body

Three to four feet, and fifty to eighty pounds. "Their head is that of a frog, with Nu'umanoid eyes and bodies; sleek and or athletic." Above the wide frog mouth and the great eyes the skull rises into a smooth high dome. No ears, no horns, no tail.

The dome is the failure the makers recorded. The brain went on growing after the design said stop, and the skull it grew into is a thin shell of bone stretched over it, no thicker at the crown than a fingernail and unfused along three lines. A Bogish skull breaks to one blow from anything. This is why the world's oldest and cleverest people is also the easiest of all the WildKin to kill, why the Boggy Brains trade is as cheap as it is, and why no armourer has ever made a helmet that will fit one; what they wear is bog-woven padding that spreads a blow and does not stop it.

The memory is not kept in the meat of the brain alone. A fluid made in the lining of the dome carries it, laid down chemically and read back the same way, which is what "the ability of infinite knowledge and can recount anything from any part of their history" actually rests on and what makes the brain edible in the way it is edible. It is also why a Bogish must drink constantly. Lose water and the fluid thickens, and the newest memories go first: a Bogish kept dry for a week comes back with the last month gone, and a Bogish kept dry for a season comes back with a hole in it that shows in the songs. The Torgai learned this early and hold their captives dry on purpose. Every BogTown has a rite for a returned one, the Refilling, in which the whole town sings back everything the captive lost, in order, over as many nights as it takes. It is the most attended ceremony they have and the only one nobody drinks at.

They breathe through the skin as much as through the lungs and the skin must stay wet, which is the reason the cities float, the reason the tunnels are wet, and the reason a Bogish cannot cross dry ground. A hunt drives them toward dry country, always, and the Torgai baronies drain land for that purpose as much as for peat.

Age is written on the skin. They begin soft green and end "pitch white and blue hair," because "they return to their original forms before their slave acclimatisation": an old Bogish is going back to the blue-white that every made thing began as. "Their eyes are big and glassy, yet as they age they become narrowed and slitted, as their filter towards the world refines, and their focus is sharp." The narrowing is physical and it costs them light. A young Bogish sees everything, in the dark, at the edges, all at once, and remembers all of it; an old one sees a narrow bright field and very little else, and judges what is in it. A town's knowledge therefore runs in one direction through the whole of a Bogish life, gathered by wide young eyes and handed up to narrow old ones, and that is the constitution of the place: the Bogenn go out and look, the Rememberers hold, and the Whitened decide.

They swim and breathe underwater and sing in falsettos, and they hear in the same register they sing in. The pitch of a BogTown at a party sits well above the Torgai ear, and a barony a mile away hears nothing, which is the single most important architectural fact about their civilisation and the reason a hunted people can hold a festival. The Torgai call the higher voices the whining tongues and cannot hear them, and the Bogish have known that for four thousand years and have never mentioned it.

The elders "can draw on an ancient star magic knowledge and cast visions within their pools, and place a shrouding ward over their ever-moving or stationary BogTowns," and can "Call spirits from the swamp." They live two hundred years and more, the elders have been counted at seven hundred, and none knows the ceiling.

Life

They reproduce very much as frogs do, within a breeding ritual, and some among them are tasked with building the burrows in the mud where the young will hatch. They are herbivores. The ritual is the Spawning Night, held in spring under the good moon full. For a month before it the burrow-builders, the Boghal and the elders who have gone white, dig the hatching burrows into the mud bank of the town's pool, one to a clutch, each lined and each filled from a different water, since among the Bogish the water makes the child. On the night, the whole town sings, and the pairing is made by song: a male's falsetto is answered or is not. The pairs go into the pool, the male clasps the female, and the eggs are laid and quickened in the water in long strings and carried by the builders to the burrows before dawn.

A clutch set in a leaf-cup above the pool comes up Bogenn. A clutch carried up to the water held in the canopy comes up Bogaisha. A clutch set in the deepest, coldest burrow comes up Boghal. And a mother chosen at the ritual 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 tadpoles are the Listening, a season in the burrows, sung to every night, and everything sung to them in that season is held; a Bogish adult can recite what was sung over its burrow before it had a mouth. When they come out the town holds the First Word: a child's first word is spoken before everyone and no one present ever forgets it. Then the Gathering, the decades of going out and looking, which is most of a young life. Then the Whitening, which is not one event but a slow paling, a century at a time, and a name gains a syllable at each of them.

Age whitens the skin. When a Bogish dies the body is laid in the pool and the dead one's memories are sung out over three nights, so that everything it knew is held by everyone left; then the water takes it. They eat bog fruit, reed hearts, water-lily root and the fungus of the tunnels, and no flesh.

Frailty

Total recall does not fade grief. A Bogish of two hundred years carries every loss it has had at the strength it had on the day, available whenever it looks, and it cannot choose not to look for long. The celebration the world finds so puzzling in a hunted people is the treatment. "They are celebratory, and constantly in joy and revelry over their amazing existence" is the practice of a species that must keep making new and better things to remember, at volume, or be crushed by the old ones. A BogTown that has not held a party in a month is a town in trouble, and the Rememberers watch the calendar for exactly that reason.

Too much at once breaks them the same way it breaks a thief who eats one. A young Bogish sung too much in a night falls into the seizure that the Boggy Brains buyers die of, and the Rememberers ration the songs by age: what a child may be given, what a Gatherer may be given, and what only the Whitened may hear. A Refilling for a long captivity is spread over weeks for this reason, and two are known to have killed the one they were held for.

Drying is the standing terror and the standing weapon used against them. Skull-thinness is the standing mortality; a fall in a collapsing tunnel kills where it would bruise anyone else, and the tunnels collapse by design. Boig Rot is the disease they have no answer to except the Bogaisha salve.

And the very old stop speaking. Whether that is the narrowing of the eyes, the weight of seven hundred years, or something seen in the pool, the towns do not ask, and Kip-Rae-Do-Vin of the Deep Song has not sung in a long time.

Country

Surface Realm wetlands. BogTown: "The secret, magically fortified floating bog cities of the Boggish." The Bogish Tunnels: "These tunnels are their way to secretly move among the bogs; since the wet foundation they are constantly collapsing, therefore they cannot be easily tracked." Three towns are named. The Deep Song is the oldest, has not moved in four hundred years, and its elders remember the vats. Underlantern is moored beneath a Papillian grove, where the pools are always dusted. The Nine Reeds moves every season and has never been found twice.

The towns move for two reasons and only one of them is the hunt. A floating city kills the water beneath it: no light reaches the bed, the mud goes sour within a season, and sour mud will not hatch a clutch. A town that wants children must move to living water, and the Nine Reeds moving every season is a breeding programme before it is a hiding strategy. This is the thing that is quietly wrong with the Deep Song. It has not moved in four hundred years. It has laid no clutch in four hundred years. It is a town entirely of the old, holding the oldest memory in the wetlands and no future at all, and the other towns send it their Gatherers and do not discuss why.

What the Bogish do to a marsh is invisible and enormous. They garden without appearing to: bog fruit moved from town to town, reed beds thinned and replanted, lily roots divided, the tunnel fungus seeded in every gallery they dig, and four thousand years of it. A marsh the Bogish have kept is measurably richer than one they have not, and the Torgai baronies that grew fat on the eel and the peat of that marsh grew fat on ground the people they were bred to exterminate had spent millennia improving. No barony has ever said so. Several of the older Whitened find it the funniest thing in the world.

Everything hunts them. The Eesham take them for the markets, the Torgai for the bounty, the Torkan and the Tusiva for the knowledge, and the Boigish for the sake of it. They compete with nothing, being small, herbivorous and few. When a BogTown leaves a stretch of marsh the fruit goes wild within a generation and the water thickens, and the Torgai tax collectors notice the yield and blame the weather.

Society

An archive that throws parties. "Severely intelligent and reclusive, this species is a myth to many as they guide lost travellers through the bogs, and are ever-escaping the other terrifying species that wish to hunt them." "They are celebratory, and constantly in joy and revelry over their amazing existence; their parties consist of the sharing of knowledge they have discovered and great songs of the lives of other races and their own." "Rambunctious and tauntingly celebratory." "Wise beyond measure." Outside the bog they take service work and pass unremarked; Gis is the Bogish chef of a Brotherhood caravan. Their reputation for drink is a proverb in other peoples' kitchens, where the advice is to keep a Bogish drunker than you would keep anyone, with a coarse word attached to the name that the saying has never lost.

The Bogish are, as a people, neutral and good: they take no side in the wars of others and take in anyone the wars have hurt. A town is led by the Whitened, its eldest, sitting in council at the pool, and by the Rememberers, who keep the town's knowledge in order and decide what is sung at the party. The Rememberers are the more powerful office day to day, since in a people that forgets nothing the only real authority is over what gets said aloud.

They dress in "clothing and armour fashioned from the bog, or elements from dead travellers that were found amid the bog." They drink a bog-wine of fermented reed heart that other peoples underestimate. They hold still when hunted, and the Stillness is taught before swimming, since a Torgai eye cannot hold a thing that does not move and a child who runs is a child who is seen. The oath is "on all I remember," which for a Bogish is everything.

Taboo: to forget on purpose; to turn away the good-hearted; to eat flesh; to sing the hunter's name.

Faith

The Bogish worship the Constellation Court, with the good moon as their chief deity. They are allied with the Papillian and use Papillian dream dust in their pools for visions of the future, and their astral magic lets them see beyond what the dust alone would show. Zuella they name Ollua, the Green Moon, the Garden Above, the mother who watched the first-made and did not tell the makers where they had gone. The Court are her family and the elders read them. The clergy are the Whitened, who cast the pool; the great rite is the Pool-Reading at the good moon full, when dust bought from the groves is cast on the water and the town looks forward together. What it sees is not always sung.

Irus they fear in both faces. The first-made were the first thing his wild ever hunted, and it has not stopped; they name him only the Listener in the Reeds and do not sing it. They believe the dead go up to Ollua and are set among the Court as a memory, which is a kind way of saying what is so: the soul does go to the star gods, and is auctioned there. More than one Whitened has looked far enough forward in the pool to see the auction, and has kept it out of the songs.

Tongue

Common Tongue and a native tongue of their own, heard by outsiders when Gis exclaims "Orarg Ga!!" over his cooking. The tongue is the Reedtongue, sung more than spoken, with a rising croak for emphasis, and "Orarg Ga" is what a Bogish says when something is exactly as good as it should be. It is pitched where their own ears sit, which is above the hearing of the peoples that hunt them.

Names accumulate. A Bogish takes one short hard syllable at the First Word and adds one for each century lived, joined, so that a name is an age, and a Bogish of three syllables is addressed with care. Gis is young.

The names run: Gis, Orru, Nib, Sosk, Tam-Vel, Ael-Um, Lomm-Sa-Ree, Kip-Rae-Do-Vin.

Regard

"The ever-hopping myth." "If I catch one, they'll have to tell me where they keep their hidden treasure." "If they were genocided in the ancient times, do they still exist?"

"The darkened and foul intelligent species that primarily reside within the bogs. The Eesham hunt them to sell at the market, the Torkan and the Tusiva hunt them for their knowledge and to bring about their extinction." The Torgai were bred to catch them and are now the landlords of the swamp they hide in. BogTowns are "sanctuaries for the good-hearted," the one open door in the tier. The Papillian are allies. The Aiekah who reach a BogTown stay, and sing.

Harvest

Boggy Brains: "Rich in knowledge, the consumption of one tiny brain will flush one's mind with memories of 300 years and the knowledge of what they retained. Many people, if not careful with how they ingest this, can die of a seizure due to the immeasurable amount of information rushing into their system." The three hundred years are the memory fluid of the dome lining and it must be taken within the hour, from a head that was not crushed, which is a difficulty for a trade whose usual method is one blow to a skull the thickness of a fingernail; the intact heads fetch four times the price.

Boig Rot: "Refined from the poisonous glands of a Boigish, this venom is flesh eating, and mutative. Once applied or ingested, one's features will become unrecognisable, as their body eats away at itself."

The brains are sold under the board everywhere and openly in the baronies, and the Torgai tax them. The Bogish do not speak of it and do not forget a buyer.

Remembered

Gis, Bogish chef travelling with a Brotherhood caravan, who cooks the camp stew and swears in his own tongue.

Kip-Rae-Do-Vin of the Deep Song, the Whitened who is said to remember the vats, and who has never sung what he saw at the last Pool-Reading.

Tam-Vel of Underlantern, who guided a Nu'uman prince across a marsh for eleven days and was paid with a promise the prince's house has kept for three generations without knowing why.

Kin each has a page of its own

The Bogish code is locked. The four kin are castes of the one genome, made by the water of the hatching burrow, never by a second splice. After them stands the Boigish, which is no Bogish at all: a counter-species the Alverians built to mimic one and to kill the people it copies. It is filed here because it was aimed here.