Yeb

Body

"Their tall humanoid forms are bulky, muscular and covered in thick Grey-pale blue fur. A snubbed face, with a long beard accentuates their flat snout and nu'umanoid qualities. With crystal blue eyes, their vision cuts across the blizzards, seeing through the thickest of snow drifts and storms. Their neck is large, expanding as they let out their snow call. Through their muscles, a sharp and jagged bone structure, and large rib cavity can be seen." Six large toes on each foot. Seven to eight feet, four hundred to a thousand pounds, four to seven hundred years.

The rib cavity is a resonator and the large neck is a sac that fills from it, and the Yeb is the only Irugaine whose sap does not fall with the cold, because the whole body is insulated by a fur that is grown rather than worn and a layer of gum laid down under the skin each autumn. This is why the Yeb alone among the sixteen is dangerous before dawn, and why the north was never taken. The crystal blue eyes filter glare and read shape through driven snow, which makes a Yeb nearly blind in a forest of ordinary light and perfectly at home in a whiteout. The snow call is the point of them: it "allows them to let out a raging roar, reaching their brothers and sisters within a thousand miles."

Society

They are ruled as the great cold beasts rule: by range, at a distance, without meeting. Each Yeb holds as much of the Snow Hold as it can cross in a day, and no Yeb enters another's range without calling first and being called back. The ranges are not inherited and not fought over; a Yeb that wants more walks further out, and there is always further out. The one office is the Farcaller, and it is measured and never chosen. On the first night of deep winter every Yeb in the north calls in turn, and every Yeb counts what it heard, and the one heard by the most holds the north until the next deep winter. The Farcaller's whole authority is that when the Farcaller calls, everyone comes, and the Farcaller therefore calls perhaps three times in a life. Hurroskal called for the ash winter and has not called since.

Life

They eat meat and fat: elk, seal at the ice edge, fish taken through holes cut with the hand, and the resin of the snow-pines eaten by the fistful. A Yeb eats a third of its own weight through the autumn and almost nothing between the solstice and the thaw.

A Yeb that misses its autumn does not lay down the gum, and a Yeb without the gum stiffens at the first hard frost and stands where it stiffened, and the north has a word for the standing dead of a bad autumn.

Harvest

Taken from them: the fur, the warmest material on Nu, which is the reason more Yeb are killed each year by other peoples than any other kin, and which is worked into the coats of Mekuhlian nobles who could not tell you what it came off; the neck-sac, which holds the call, and which dried and cured makes a horn that carries a hundred miles and is the only Irugaine harvest that a Nu'uman army has ever fielded openly; the crystal-blue eyes, which see through blizzard and hold that property for a year after death; and the great curved ribs, which are used as roof-beams in the Under Realm and as bows nobody can draw.