Satye

Body

"Tall humanoid-horse forms, with slender/ muscular bodies, and coarse hairy skin. All their features are sharp, yet never symmetrical, with yellow-blue eyes. Out from their temple spawns a chaotic root-like antler weaving, reaching two feet high, and often has small plantlife and sometimes animals living on them. They have a raw, squishy gem in their forehead that illuminates with an emerald green aura at times." Wherever a Satye goes, "a small pack of small lesser animals follows." Seven to seven and a half feet, four hundred to eight hundred pounds, two to three hundred years.

The asymmetry is structural and not cosmetic: a Satye's sap runs harder up one side than the other, the antler weaving grows heavier on the strong side, and the body compensates by carrying itself at a slight angle, so that a Satye at rest looks as though it has just heard something. The forehead gem is a sap lens over a knot of nerve; it lights when the Satye is reading the ground hard, which makes them the only Irugaine whose attention is visible from a distance, and a plain of Satye all glowing at once is the last thing several Alverian survey parties saw.

Society

They are ruled as horses run: a First Mare who chooses the direction and the water, and a stallion who runs at the rear and turns to face whatever follows. The First Mare is the one the band has followed longest without coming to harm, and a band that comes to harm chooses another before the next moon. Young males leave the band at ten and run in bachelor strings until a band takes one as its rear-guard. The Running Ring of Tuulenkolo is where the bands meet each spring and the First Mares confer, standing in a ring with their antlers touching.

Life

They eat grass, grain-heads, the young leaf of the ring-trees, and salt where they can find it, and the salt is a genuine need and a genuine danger, since a Satye takes it in through the mouth and a salted skin would shut its pores as fast as any Irugaine's.

Their fault is the antler: the weaving snags, tears out the temple, and a torn Satye bleeds sap for two days and gums over into a lopsided ruin that cannot balance.

Harvest

Taken from them: the antler-root, shed and regrown every few years, which carries living moss and is set into druidic staves; the forehead gem, taken only from the dead and never shed, which glows for a decade and is the most sought lure-stone in the world; and the coarse hide, which is not taken, because the Satye's little pack of followers goes to the Shieken when the Satye dies and tells them who did it.