Shieken

Body

"Husked, yet covered in putrid maggot mucus, often beneath robes made from dead leaves, the skins of dead animals and bones and bits collected from their corpses, they are terrifying to behold. Their faces are of a million teeth, shrouded to hide their terror from the kinder members of their families; they are not evil, they just have a job to do. Their cold white eyes sink into puffed sockets, further adding to their feeble form, leaning upon dead branch staffs. A hive of flesh eating beetles on their back." Eight feet, a hundred pounds, one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand years.

The husk is a shell of hardened sap with almost nothing inside it, and the hive on the back is grown into the body through a hundred small ports along the spine; the beetles and the Matron are one feeding system and neither survives the other by a season. The million teeth do not chew. They are a sieve and a rasp, worked against the husk's inner surface, and the face is a mouth in the way a root is a mouth. Their eyes see almost nothing and their sense of the dead is chemical and enormous: a Matron knows a death at eleven miles, knows the kin, and knows roughly how long ago, and this is why the Quiet Rows are laid out as they are and why nobody has ever had to summon one.

Society

They are ruled as a burying beetle rules its ground: by the body. The Quiet Rows are divided into rows, and each Matron holds one, and a Matron's authority begins and ends at the corpses in her row. She is not senior to another Matron and cannot be overruled by one. A death in a row is hers; a death between rows goes to whichever hive reached it first, and there is no appeal, because arguing over a corpse wastes the corpse. Above the rows there is one office, the First Matron, who holds no ground and keeps the ledger instead: the name, kin, grove and manner of every Irugaine death, recited aloud once a year to the beetles, who are the only listeners old enough to check her.

Life

They do not eat corpses. The hive eats, and the Matron takes what the hive takes, drawing it up through the husk, which is why a Matron who is given nothing to bury slowly hollows and why a battlefield will bring Matrons out of three forests. They also drink rot-water and eat the maggot mucus off themselves, which the other kin do not discuss.

They were made during the rise of the Alverians "so that the corpses of the Irugaine couldn't be stolen for scientific purposes," and they "nearly never die, and only do if they have had enough death for their lifetime." When a Matron finally has enough death, she walks out of her row and lies down in it, and the row's beetles take her, and her hive goes to whoever comes next, still carrying everything it has eaten. They also keep Kaarnesto, the cinders of the first Mothertree, and they tend Hollow Bone Forest as one tends a kennel. Where a strangler has taken an Irugaine, the Shieken burn rather than bury, which they do for nothing else.

Harvest

Nothing is taken from a Shieken except by another Shieken, and this is the whole point of the Shieken. What their bodies hold, for the record, is the mucus, which arrests rot in anything smeared with it and is the finest preserving agent in the world, and which the Under Realm's embalmers would ruin themselves for; the beetles, which will strip a corpse to clean bone in a minute and are worth a hold's ransom to anyone with a use for that; and the teeth, a million to a face, each one a needle.