Do'urusee

Body

"Abominable, rotten to their core and putrid with red, pustules scattered across there ever-mutating flesh." Their bodies are random, as with each comes a fouler and different mutation. The Do'urssan frame is still under it, broad and low and plated, and the red runs visibly through the flesh above the plate, at the throat first, where a hold's lamp inspection looks for a blush of red under the jaw in a body that still has a hold to be walked out of.

The mutation never settles. The same Seer that walked a gallery last year has a different number of limbs this year and must be refitted to its chain by the hold's harness-wright, who is paid well and drinks.

Country

They are kept in the wet: the pump galleries at the bottom of a hold, and the raw face of any shaft cut toward the blight. A Do'urusee on a chain is walked ahead of a pump crew down a new shaft, and where it screams the crew digs no further.

Society

They have been genetically altered with the foul mutative Crimson hive and enslaved as beasts to the greater variants of their species, and they too are controlled by machine at the hand of the Elder Knights. In a people whose whole law is the tar-roll and the order of ten brothers out of the pitch, the Seers are outside it altogether: not unrolled, not struck out, simply not counted. The Elder Knights who hold their chains took their own Crimson second-hand and slow, through ash and through the blood of Do'urusee, which is the part of the arrangement nobody in a hold says at a normal volume.

The Crimson in them

"Rotten, red pustules, ever-mutating flesh, enslaved." The Do'urusee are the largest strain in the world by numbers, because the Do'urssan have been closest to the blight the longest and were the ones ordered to hold it.

Ever-mutating is the distinguishing feature and it is a failure of settling. In this 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. Everywhere else the six stages run and finish; here the last of them never closes.

Their holds go over level by level and keep working while they do, and that is the whole reason the Do'urssan have never been able to seal a level and walk away. The infected of a hold are typed as technician, soldier, guard, berserker, civilian, pump technician, and abominable Crimson Do'urssan. A Crimson pump technician still knows how to run the pump. A Crimson smith still forges. The blight preserves function, which is what makes a blighted hold feel staffed rather than infested, and a sealed level does not go quiet: it goes on holding the last orders anybody gave it. Old Aekh is that in one creature, still running the water system of a hold two hundred years dead.

The strain is also the mechanism of the whole class. Each strain degrades, the fine trades go before the coarse ones, and the hive cannot repair that from inside; it can only take fresh codes. That is why it has always needed the Do'urssan, who were ordered to contain it and have instead fed it every genetic code in the world since the beginning. The Crimson's organ of variation is the people charged with stopping it.