Satyr

Body

"Tall and muscular furry humanoid-goat forms; lean when young, then muscular, then fatter when old. Their hair and beards grow faster and longer, and they have four toed hoofed feet. Through their angular bone structure, their singing is that of a siren; beautiful and mesmeric in many ways. They have a snouth, with a humanoid mouth, beneath their yellow-orange eyes." Horn formations vary; the typical two curve and round to points, while "other chaotic and beautiful variations occur; these can become four feet wide." Six to seven feet, one to two hundred pounds, two to three hundred years.

The angular bone is the whole instrument: the skull is hollowed into chambers behind the snout, the horn bases open into them, and a Satyr singing is a body resonating from the hoof up, which is why the song carries across a valley and why a Satyr with a cracked horn sings flat for the rest of its life. Their eyes are set wide and read the whole slope at once, with a narrow band of blur straight ahead; a Satyr looks at you sidelong because that is the only way to look at you.

Society

They are "among Irus's most treasured children," which is a mixed blessing when your god hunts for sport. They are ruled as goats are led: by an old female who knows the terraces, with the horned males contesting beneath her each autumn. The Satyr call the contest the Horned Moot, and it is sung and never fought; two males stand horn to horn on the terrace edge and sing until one of them stops, and the one who stops steps down the slope. The old female does not sing. She decides where the herd winters, and the winner of the Moot leads the way there and takes the first spear if the Hunter comes.

Life

They eat leaf, bark, lichen scraped off the high rock, and the fermented fall-fruit of the terraces, which is why Satyr are drunk by the standards of every other kin. They keep goats besides, the only kin that keeps a herd it did not make, and the terraces are cut and walled for them.

Their diseases are of the mouth and the hoof: a Satyr that cannot chew starves in a season, since a Satyr's vaan runs hot and needs feeding daily, and hoof-split from the wet lowlands is the reason a Satyr in a Nu'uman town limps within a year.

Harvest

Taken from them: the horns, shed by the old and taken from the dead, prized for drinking-horns, for the siren-pipes the Nu'uman bards buy, and ground for a philtre that makes the voice carry; shed horn is clean, and there is a market for it at every forest's edge. Their singing is also taken, after a fashion: a Satyr who sings in a tavern is a harvest walking.