Gorkva
The sloped-backed line, higher at the shoulder than at the hip, with a mane of bristle down the neck and a laugh that is the first thing anyone hears of them and usually the last. The Gorkva are the sickest of a sick people. They carry plague the way other creatures carry fleas, and it does not kill them; the rot that runs on their skin is theirs and they are at peace with it.
Warrens use them as the raiders who go first, because a bitten enemy is a dying one. They are the reason a Gorklin bite is feared more than a Gorklin blade.
Body
The slope is a hip with less bone in it than usual even by Gorklin standards, which in a species whose defining fact is bones that were never laid down is a considerable statement. The shoulders ride high, the hips ride low, the bristle mane stands along the neck, and the skin carries open rot over the black-purple splotching.
The laugh is a shriek pattern that maps a corridor at a run. A Gorklin reads the return of its own shrieking as a coarse picture of the space ahead, and the Gorkva do it at speed, which is why the laugh comes just before they arrive. It is not mockery, and every warren knows it is not, and every quarter above them has decided otherwise.
Society
They go first. A warren sends its Gorkva up the wall, into the grate and down the street ahead of everything else, and the tactic works because a Gorklin bite delivers its own gut into a wound and a Gorkva's gut is worse than most. What follows in a bitten Nu'uman is not a wound, it is a fever, and a raid that leaves survivors has still done its work.
They run in packs of ten to twenty under the loudest among them, which is the only rank the line observes, and they eat carrion by preference over anything fresh even when fresh is available.
Frailty
They carry more disease than they suffer, and they carry more of it than any other Gorklin. What gets into them is what gets into all of them: the carrion worm that lodges behind the eye and drives the host into a frenzy for a week before killing it, and a warren with frenzy in it is dangerous to itself and is usually burned out by the warren next door.
Thirty years is the span and a raider rarely sees it. The chest has no frame and collapses under a boot, the shallow hip fails outright at about twenty in half the population, and the line that is sent through the gap first is the line that meets the boot first.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Whether the rot a Gorkva carries is one sickness or many
- Whether a warren can field Gorkva without infecting itself
- Which of the four named warrens raise the most of them