Sagee

Body

"Countless tiny intricately self-carved pieces of bark, woven together to build a robe. Their skin is scaled by metal-strong leafs, and beneath is hollow; a chamber of aura and sap, held together by woven wooden tiny roots. Their head is a ball of hardened sap, with a crown/face mask, with a petrified piece of amber in its center, channeling all their energy. Their sap is variant based on their region, and their cape is made from leaves, all woven together." Six to seven feet, one hundred and fifty to two hundred and twenty pounds, five hundred to seven hundred years.

The hollow chamber is the whole animal. There is no gut, no heart and no head in the ordinary sense; there is a sealed volume of sap under the leaf-scales, the vaan suspended in the middle of it, and the amber at the crown acting as the single point through which everything the Sagee does passes. Crush the amber and the chamber loses pressure and the Sagee is a heap of scales in a minute, which is the entire reason the mage colleges know the weakness by heart. Every Sagee carves its own robe, one chip at a time, for its whole life, and every Sagee has one fatal weakness that the mage colleges know by heart: "You need to crush their soul sap stone to kill them."

Society

They are ruled as sap rules a tree: slowly, from the inside, and nowhere in particular. No Sagee commands another and no Sagee lives with another. Each sits alone beneath its own tree in the Carving Grove, within sight and out of earshot. When a matter must be decided, the Sagee who raised it carves the question into a chip of bark and sets it on the ground before the next tree, and that Sagee carves its answer into the same chip and passes it on, and the chip goes round the grove gathering carvings until it comes back so dense with cuts that it has to be read and no longer glanced at. Whatever the chip says when it returns is what the grove holds, and the chip is then woven into the robe of whoever asked. A full round of the Carving Grove takes between four and forty years. This is why the Sagee are never consulted in an emergency and are always right afterwards.

Life

They have no stomach. The hollow chamber under the leaf-scales draws in the ambient life of the grove, the aura, and converts it to sap, which is why nothing grows well within ten feet of a seated Sagee and why the ring of bare earth around each tree in the Carving Grove is exactly the same width. They take nothing by mouth and the mask has no mouth to take it with. Two Sagee seated too close both starve, which is the only Sagee quarrel on record and is settled by one of them walking a mile and sitting down again.

They die when the soul sap stone is crushed. Their second commonest death is gum-lock, the amber seal setting inside a sap channel rather than across it, which in a body that is one continuous chamber of sap is fatal.

Harvest

Taken from them: the soul sap stone, the amber core, enchantment-grade material of the highest order, which every astral mage in the world would carve runes into and destroy in a single casting; the leaf-scales, metal-strong and lighter than any mail; the carved chips of the robe, each one a piece of an answer, which the collectors of Brenmor buy without ever knowing what they are reading; and the hardened sap of the head, which sets clear and takes an edge. The colleges do not need to hunt Sagee. They need only wait for one to be somewhere alone, which is where all Sagee always are.