Old Aekh

Body

He is the fifth stage arrested: the person is long gone and the trade is intact, and he is the clearest demonstration in the world of what the blight actually keeps. Muscle is not destroyed by the Crimson. It is kept, maintained, fed and driven, and so is whatever the muscle knew how to do. A smith loses his name, then his family, then his speech, then his fear, and is still forging. Old Aekh lost all of it except the water system.

The ever-mutating flesh is the Do'urssan pattern. In that strain alone the blight never stops reorganising the host, so a Do'urusee of ten years and a Do'urusee of forty are different animals, and two centuries of it have made him nine feet of something that is still, every day, being rearranged.

Society

He will not let anyone past the fourth gallery, because that is the standing order he was given and nobody has come to change it. He is courteous. He remembers his trade. The hold he is holding it for has had nothing alive in it for two hundred years, and the pumps turn on schedule anyway.

This is the exact reason the Do'urssan have never been able to seal a level and walk away. A lost level does not stop. It goes on working, in trades, under a foreman, and it keeps the orders it was given.

Regard

He is the only Crimson boss in this world that can be spoken with, and everybody who has spoken with him has come away with the same difficulty, which is that nothing in the conversation was wrong. The courtesy is real, the competence is real, the standing order is real, and there is nobody behind any of it.