Do'urvun
The Do'urvun are the voiceless ones, and they were all hatched Do'urssan. They come out of a separate pool at Cilinuel where the Mothers add mole to the vat, and what comes up has no mouth. They are the engineering slaves of their own species, sealed into mining suits they are never permitted out of, controlled by machine at the hand of the Elder Knights, and sent down past the crystal fields and the pump galleries into caves where the only light is the lamp on a Do'urvun's own shoulder. They live three thousand years, which is a tenth of what the people they were hatched from live.
They are also the best shaft-readers in the Under Realm. A Do'urssan reads stone through his palms and his soles; a Do'urvun reads it through the frame of a suit grown into his skin, in void darkness, and knows a bad roof before it moves. The holds put them where the roof is worst, and every hold knows exactly what that decision means for a worker who cannot shout.
Body
No mouth at all, black massive pupil eyes, and technology woven directly into the skin. Their forms are muscular and their bone structure severely angular beneath the engineering and mining suits that they are never permitted out from, suits of the darkest and most jagged of metals, with mining, defence and building work covering the whole form. They see in void darkness, where the crystal fields and the lamps of the upper hold never reach.
The mouthless face is the whole of their condition. The mole graft closes the jaw in the vat and the neck-pits are turned inward, so a Do'urvun smells the rock in its own throat and cannot speak, cannot eat, cannot shout a warning and cannot be argued with. They are fed through the suit, a grey paste piped to the skin of the belly. The Do'urssan sense of smell, which in a hold is a whole language of direction and depth, is in a Do'urvun turned back on itself and reports only where he already is.
Country
They descend to the deepest caves, below the pump galleries and below the pits, into workings that have no crystal light in them at all. They read a shaft better than any rolled Do'urssan alive, by grain and by pressure through the suit's own frame, and the holds set them where the roof is worst because a Do'urvun who feels a collapse coming has no way to tell anyone but the machine.
Society
They are the engineering slaves of their own species, controlled by machine at the hand of the Elder Knights, and there is no rank above them they can rise into and no rank below them at all. A Do'urvun is named by its vat like any other Do'urssan, ten together on one first consonant, written into a tar-roll in the order the ten came out of the pitch, and never hears the name spoken aloud by anyone who loves it.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How a vat is chosen for the mole pool, and whether anything chooses
- Whether a suit has ever been taken off a living Do'urvun
- What the machine that holds them can actually order, and what it cannot
- Whether a Do'urvun has any way to answer an Elder Knight, or to refuse one