Do'uskar
The Do'uskar are the generation that did not shrink. When the Lessening began to take the line, the eldest of the holds refused it, took the Crimson into themselves to hold their size and their years, and took the machine into themselves to hold the Crimson. They stand nine to twelve feet, the height of the progenitors, and nothing of the progenitor is visible.
They are the Elder Knights, named beside "Mountain Eaters" as an epithet of the whole people, and they are the party that holds both the Do'urvun and the Do'urusee on the machine leash. Fewer than three hundred remain. They are the only Do'urssan the Crimson has not managed to eat, because they ate it first.
Origin
The Do'uskar are Crimson-infected Do'urssan, altered and built upon by machine into horror abominations: industrial killing and drilling machines. Every one of them was a Do'urssan of the elder generations who watched the Tally of Heights walk down the wall beside his own gate and would not take his place on it.
Body
The head is a sealed helm of blackened greystone and brass with one round port of thick glass, lit from within by a red that pulses when the Crimson in the blood is awake. The chest is a furnace casing that hisses when they breathe. Copper tubing runs from the neck-holes down the spine and into the arms, carrying a dull red fluid under pressure. Where the Orla was, the bone has been grown through machine into a boring spear as long as a Nu'uman is tall, and it turns. The other hand ends in a drill-fist or a hammer-head, fitted to the shaft the knight is posted to. They walk in lurches, and each step rings.
Sealed as they are, they have lost the neck-pits and the palms, which is to say they have lost smell and the grain of stone together, and an Elder Knight navigates a hold by the port and by the reports of the Seers on his leash; a people who read the world by scent and pressure have made their rulers the only blind men among them.
Frailty
The machine keeps the hive out. Molten Crimson binds a creature to the mind of the great crimson god beneath the ground, and the Do'uskar took theirs second-hand and slow, through ash and through the blood of Do'urusee, and the lightning of Vaeyar run through their tubing holds the hive's voice at the edge of hearing. When a Do'uskar's furnace fails, the voice comes in, and the hold puts him on a chain beside the Seers within a day.
Society
This is why the Elder Knights answer to no Underking; every Underking is a child to them, and every Underking knows what they will become. They answer to the Prokelen alone, who is one of them and the eldest. Fewer than three hundred remain. They hold the leashes of the Do'urvun and the Do'urusee because they hold their own.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How a Do'urssan is chosen to become an Elder Knight, and whether he may refuse
- Who builds the furnaces and the tubing, and in which hold
- What becomes of a knight's plate, spear and post once he is chained beside the Seers
- How close the count is to falling below the number the holds need