Gidanak
The war caste and the largest, past seven feet, deep-chested, with a heavy beard of coarse hair down the throat and chest and horns that come up in a tight corkscrew rather than out, so that a Gidanak looks less like a satyr than any of them and cannot pass at all.
They do not file, because there is no point, and they are consequently the only Gidan who never need a cutter and the only ones who are genuinely alone.
Body
Past seven feet and deep through the chest even by the standards of a people bred for altitude. A heavy beard of coarse hair runs down the throat and chest. The horns corkscrew tight and upward instead of curling out, which is the whole difference: the silhouette is wrong for a satyr from any distance and in any light, and no amount of filing would fix it.
Society
They hold the gates, they take the toll when the toll looks like being refused, and they go down off the mountain when a hold has to answer something. A hold with three Gidanak in it is not raided. In the old work they were the ones who came in after the infiltrator opened the door.
Because they never file, they never need a cutter, and the one permanent tie in Gidan life is the one thing the war caste does not have. The rest of the people notice this about them and do not say it to them.
Origin
The three forms are castes of the one genome and not new splices. They are recognised at birth by build and by horn, they breed together freely, and a hold will produce all three out of one family. The Gidanak is the markhor expression of it, which is to say the one the makers would have discarded, since a mountain trooper who cannot pass as a satyr was no use for the work the species was built for.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- What determines which caste a kid is born into, since the genome is one
- Whether a Gidanak ever cuts for somebody else, having no cutter of his own
- What a hold does when it has no Gidanak in it at all