Lathonian

Origin

The splice is Nu'uman, lion and ape. The Alverians made them to stand over the other slaves and gave them privileges for doing it: they "have a respect for them that allows them certain privileges. They were at the top of the food chains, everyone else are worms, and these lions are prized and loyal pets." Wardens and pets in the same sentence, and the Lathonians have spent eight thousand years insisting on the first word.

When the prisons fell and the inmates rose, the outcome split the species three ways. "Some were unsuccessful and were beaten back into submission, thus creating slave based societies," which is the warden line and the largest. "Others grew to stand tall among the nobility, due to their sheer size and the law of power which stood in favor of the strong," which is the line that produced Imperial House Akkanar. And a third group walked away entirely into the tropics and built Glenree Meadows, the only Lathonian community founded on nobody's suffering.

The noble line's history is a list of atrocities with dates on it. House Akkanar was certified noble in 8302 A.E., elected its first emperor, Corthellion I, in 8582 A.E., and put "the first of their feline house to sit upon the Silver Throne of Aelor." In 8608 A.E. they drained Lake Kinor, diverted the River Kell and flooded the Valley of Corlith to destroy a vassal house that would not pay its tax. The present head, Corthon Akkanar, hacked his own uncle to death and impaled his grandmother's corpse on the Golden Pike, then ordered the court bard to "sing of this mighty victory." Arkenfell is under siege by the Vultari as this is written, and the heir is dead.

Body

The head is the cat and stays close to the animal it came from. The body is Nu'uman and ape: upright, heavy in the shoulder, long in the arm. The fur is tight to the body and almost always scarred over. Muscular strength on a level with the brutish peoples, extreme agility, and night vision. Five to seven feet, by strain, and two hundred to three hundred and forty pounds for the base, higher for the Lathal and the Lathasi, lower for the Lasai and the Laathica. Ninety to a hundred years for the base, with the strains running seventy to a hundred and ten.

The claws are "razor sharp," "always slightly extended," and can "extend out one inch further," and the fact that they cannot be put away governs every scene a Lathonian appears in. The cause is in the hand. A cat's claw is held back by a ligament that folds the last bone of the toe over; the Alverians rebuilt the forelimb into a grasping ape's hand with an opposable thumb and a working wrist, and the fold went with it. What is left is a half-sheath that retracts the claw most of the way and no further. A Lathonian therefore cannot close its hand without cutting its own palm, and every adult of the species has the same scarring across the pads, in the same four lines, deepened over a lifetime.

The consequences run through everything they touch and everything they cannot. They cannot pick a pocket, palm a coin, tie a fine knot, thread a needle or handle woven cloth without snagging it, and the species has no textile craft of its own worth the name; the heavy court fashion the Akkanar wear is cut and sewn by Nu'uman tailors, and the linen of Glenree is deliberately coarse. They write badly, in a hand that tears the page, which is why every noble Lathonian house keeps Nu'uman scribes and why the wardens keep their records in notches on wood. They cannot pass through a doorway without marking it, and the Prisons of Lathonia are cut in stone for that reason as much as any other, since a timber gaol run by Lathonians is a gaol full of handholds within a decade.

Against all of that stands the declawing, which is a social act and not a medical one. Jacob Declau is "a declawed feline courtier of House Akkanar," which makes the surgical removal of the species' permanent weapon into a qualification for standing near a throne. The operation is performed by the court's own physicians, it takes the last bone of each finger with it, and what it produces is a Lathonian who can hold a pen, fold a letter, and never threaten anyone again. The wardens refuse it absolutely. Among the Clows of Glenree it is regarded the way other peoples regard the blinding of a child.

The eye is the cat's and carries the mirror behind the retina, so that a Lathonian sees in light a Nu'uman calls darkness and its eyes throw back a lamp from the far end of a corridor. The prisons are built on this. Warden galleries are unlit by design, the inmates' side is lit just enough to be watched, and a prisoner who has been in a Lathonian hold for a year will tell you that the worst of it was never knowing how many of them were standing there.

What the species reads best is posture. A Lathonian entering a room takes in shoulder, weight, stance and the set of the hands in the time it takes to cross the threshold, and arrives at an order of precedence before anyone has spoken. It is not a courtesy or a habit. It is the same wiring that made the Alverians buy them, and it does not switch off.

Life

They breed as cats breed and they nurture the young in a humanoid manner. A litter is two to four, born blind and helpless after four months, and they are born into a household with a name, a room and a cradle rather than into a den. This combination is the peculiar thing about the species and it produces the peculiar thing about the people. Lathonian kittens are competitive from the second week and physically dangerous to one another from the second month, and Lathonian mothers do not separate them; they supervise. Every Lathonian alive learned who was strongest in the room before it learned to speak, and learned that the ranking would be observed by adults, recorded, and referred to later.

The stages are marked and the whole species uses the same ones. Weaning at six months. Speech at two years. Claws at three, which is when a nursery is rebuilt in stone and when the scarring of the palms begins. The first Weighing at seven, which is the family's formal statement of where each child stands. In warden societies the Weighing determines which children are trained to the prisons. In the noble houses it determines the succession, and it is contested with lawyers, poison and occasionally with siblings. In Glenree there is no Weighing at all, and a Clow child is set to chasing beetles in the violet grass instead, which the wardens regard as a species-level insult and mention often.

They are omnivores. Meat is the centre of every Lathonian meal and the rest of it is grain, root and fruit, and the noble houses have built a cuisine of some sophistication around the fact. Warden fare is meat and bread. Glenree eats almost no meat at all, and the Clows are not vegetarians on principle, they simply stopped, and this too is mentioned often.

They age well and die badly. A Lathonian past eighty keeps the strength and loses the speed, and among the wardens an old guard who can no longer hold a corridor is retired to the towers and rarely lasts a year. The dead are burned in the warden societies, entombed in the noble houses, and buried under a planted tree in Glenree, which is where the custom of the tree in the child's bedroom comes from.

Frailty

The claw-bed is the commonest ailment in the species and the commonest reason a warden leaves the work. A claw that cannot fully sheathe cannot be kept clean, and a splinter of bone or a shard of grit driven under it in a scuffle goes septic in the finger and then in the hand. Warden holds keep a claw-cutter as other garrisons keep a farrier. Half the old guards in the northern prisons are short a finger or two and none of them will discuss which corridor took it.

The nursery leaves marks the species has agreed not to notice. Every Lathonian carries childhood scarring from siblings, most carry a torn ear or a ruined eyelid, and a small number carry worse; a litter left unsupervised for an afternoon has been known to come down to three, and no household has ever been prosecuted for it in any kingdom on the planet. Lathonian medicine is therefore superb at the closing of wounds and indifferent to everything else.

The noble houses have their own fault, which is the one they made themselves. Eight generations of marrying within four families has produced the Akkanar jaw, which does not close properly, and the Akkanar temper, which is spoken of as a family characteristic and is a defect of the brain that shows in the same decade of life in every man of the line. Corthon Akkanar is "a vain, paranoid drunkard sliding into murderous madness," and his grandfather was the same at the same age, and the court physicians know exactly what they are looking at and have been careful to say nothing.

The last frailty is the one the whole species shares and none of them will name. No Lathonian will willingly be locked in. A Lathonian will not sleep in a room whose door bolts from outside, will not enter a hold with one gate, and cannot be got into a cell without a fight. The wardens are the worst for it, and the prisons are built with warden corridors that have no doors at all. What is done to a Lathonian who is confined regardless is the standing threat between the noble houses, and it does not take long.

Country

The Surface Realm, and more of it than any other WildKin.

The Prisons of Lathonia: "the foul and indescribable engines of terror as constructed by the Lathonian people to torture all manner of creatures for crimes committed or for ones constructed by the Lathonians as a means to torture them." The second clause is the operative one. The crime is manufactured to suit the punishment as often as the punishment is fitted to the crime.

The island prison: "one ancient massive prison complex" that no one leaves. "The large island prison society is isolated from the outside world, and the lion species has beaten the prisons into complete submission. This is where people are sent to be broken. The culture is never disobey the lions, or death will meet you."

Akkanhold and the Hills of Barius: the Akkanar homeland. "Hailing from the eastern lying Hills of Barius, these mountain-lion folk were for countless generations dedicated warriors, mercenaries, and adventurers. Under the leadership of an enterprising mercenary leader by the name of Akkan, many of their lion humanoid race were united." They were authorised to settle by the Imperial Diet's Wildlands Authority and "within three generations brought the wilderness within half a hundred miles radius of their capital to heel." Arkenfell is the capital, built by Corthellion I.

Glenree Meadows: "these violet pastures find many tropical Lathtropen living in harmony within their war and magic free society, living off of the land. Beautiful long, smoothed wood homes carry with them warmth and welcome." Families are called Clows. Children chase "Golden Shelled Oppy Beetles among the softly swaying violet grass." A tree is grown in the middle of a child's bedroom by custom, and the rooms glow pink from Boiba.

Ikarma: seat of House Ikal on the Golden Road, jungled, fed by the great river, ringed by husked wastes. The Grass Riders of Ikarma are Lasai.

What three generations of Lathonian settlement does to a country is written into the Akkanar charter and was the point of granting it: they "brought the wilderness within half a hundred miles radius of their capital to heel," which means the large predators are gone, the forest is cut back to managed coppice, the rivers are weired, and everything that used to hunt there has been hunted. It is efficient and it is permanent, and the second effect is the one nobody writes down: a Lathonian district fills with prisons, because a people who believe the world is a hold will find crimes for the population to have committed. The Valley of Corlith is the other kind of mark. It is still under water.

Society

Three cultures share one species and they do not like each other. The wardens are the original caste and still the largest, and they run the prisons for their own account. The nobility rose "due to their sheer size and the law of power which stood in favor of the strong" and now hold a throne. The Clows of Glenree keep a "war and magic free society." Personality across all three: "bold, demandative, aggressive and unforgiving," "judgemental, mortally decisive," "driven by monetary growth."

What the three share is the Weighing and everything that grows out of it. A Lathonian entering any room assesses the order of the room and expects the order to be acknowledged, and the great majority of quarrels between Lathonians and other peoples begin because the other people did not know an assessment was taking place. Warden society formalises this into ranks of the corridor. The noble houses formalise it into precedence at court and litigate it. Glenree has replaced it with an elaborate and slightly exhausting politeness in which every Clow insists on being ranked below every other, and outsiders find the Glenree version harder to follow than either of the others.

Dress: the wardens wear leather and iron and go bare-armed to show the claws; the nobility wear the heavy court fashion of whatever kingdom they are in, tailored to the tail, and the Akkanar colour is a deep worked gold; the Clows wear undyed linen and grow flowers into it. Music among the wardens is a stamped marching cadence with no melody; among the nobility it is court music bought from Nu'uman composers and never written by a Lathonian; in Glenree it is sung, in rounds, badly, by everybody.

The oath of the species is sworn on the claws, presented crossed at the wrist, and it is the one custom common to all three cultures. The taboo is likewise universal and is the harvest taboo below. The third universal is the refusal to be locked in, and every piece of Lathonian architecture on the planet is shaped by it.

Faith

It is called the Kept Law, and its god is the Keeper, who is not any of the gods of the world and is not claimed to be. The doctrine is short and every Lathonian child has it by the Weighing. The world is a hold. Everything in it is serving a term. The Keeper set the terms, walked out, and left the keys with those who could carry them. To hold a key is not a privilege and not a cruelty; it is the position one was put in, and the only sin the Kept Law recognises is to put a key down.

The clergy are the Keyholders, who are not priests in any other people's sense; they are the eldest of each house or corridor or Clow, they hold an iron key on a cord that opens nothing, and their office is to say the Telling of Sentences. The Telling is the rite. Once a year the Keyholder recites, in front of the assembled house, what each member of it is serving: the debts, the failures, the duties unfinished, the terms remaining. It is said flatly, without judgement and without mercy, and nobody answers back. A house that has stopped Telling is understood to have stopped being a house.

The three cultures read the same doctrine three ways, and the readings are why they cannot stand one another. The wardens hold that the keys are literal and that running the prisons is the observance. The nobility hold that the Keeper's key is rule itself, and that a Lathonian who is not holding a throne is in dereliction. The Clows of Glenree hold that the term one is serving is life, that it will end, and that the correct way to serve it is gently; they keep the Telling and have stripped it of everything else, and their Keyholders carry a wooden key.

There is an afterlife in the teaching and it is the bleakest of any WildKin faith. The Kept Law says that at the end of the term the door is opened and one goes out, and it says nothing whatever about what is outside, and it is heresy to speculate. What is outside is the soul auction of the star gods, where every soul in the world goes and is sold. No Lathonian has come back to say so.

Over the top of all this, at Ikarma, sits the cult of Ikalis, which the Grass Riders swear by: "By the blood of Ikalis, how?" and "I have committed a heresy this day. I go willing." That is House Ikal's religion and not the species'. The Lasai who ride for Ikarma keep both, and the Keyholder of a Lasai company will tell a rider his term and then let the house chaplain absolve him of it, and neither of them finds this strange.

Tongue

Common Tongue, and the naming is the best attested of any WildKin. The imperial line uses an ornate given name plus the house name: Corellus Akkanar I, Corthellion I, Corthon Akkanar, Morthenus Akkanar, Marya Akkanar, Ceranus Akkanar, Mara Akkanar, and Marius of Thilor for a landed relative. Court hangers-on take Nu'uman-facing house names, as with Jacob Declau of House Declau. Older and rougher names run short and hard: Marleon, Argath, Arlia, Akkan. The Glenree pattern is different: the family word Clow precedes the family name, as in Clow Nassien, and the individual is Morrin Nassien, with a twin brother Ianto.

The warden pattern is the third and the oldest. A warden carries a given name and a corridor: Vareth of the Long Gallery, Sekka of the Fourth Tier. It is not a surname and it cannot be inherited, and a warden transferred takes a new one, which means a warden's history can be read off him by anyone who knows the prisons. Across the three patterns: Vareth of the Long Gallery, Sekka of the Fourth Tier, Halcorin Akkanar, Lucinne of Thilor, Clow Verrimane, Tamsin Verrimane, Orsa of the Drowned Wing, Marrek Declau.

Regard

"Cruel slavers and torturers hellbent on bringing pain and suffering." "Without emotion or care." "Beasts."

The abuse recorded on the roads and in the halls is worse and more specific than any of that, and none of it will be set down here. A Torkan crew that sights a Lathonian woman in the water calls out to her in the terms a drover uses for stock in season, and the greeting they shout at any Lathonian is a cat call in the plain sense of the words, a noise made at an animal, about how the animal smells. House Karkos gives an order for a Lathonian woman to be fetched and tied, in words that settle both that she is property and what she is property for. The politest thing said to one in a market is not repeatable, and the point of all of it is that there is no private version: the contempt is public, casual, and expected to be endured in front of everyone in the room. Outside Arkenfell there is "a FLAYED LATHONIAN SOLDIER, salted and hung up to age in the open air." House Naralith are "reactionary anti-Lathonian."

"Water cat" is a nickname thrown over one strain of the species and not a separate creature. It is river-road slang for the Lanthrei, who swim, who work the delta country and who are the strain most often met by boat crews, and like most such nicknames it is used affectionately by the people who use it daily and as an insult by everyone else. Anything sold under that name on a road stall is river game, sold under a name the seller thinks is funny, and a Lanthrei who hears the joke will explain why it is not.

Of the species' own reckoning: "being of a slaver and guard race, the Lathonian's hate all other creatures, finding reasons they could all be locked up within their prison islands." The Vultari are the enemy of the hour, with House Karkos besieging Arkenfell and Karkos sworn to take the lion's head. The Torkan are river ambushers who hunt Lathonians specifically and eat them. House Ikal are patrons, and the Lasai serve at Ikarma. The Nakasi are kin, the Lathonian and Nu'uman hybrid, gaunt, hairless and criminal, and the Lathonian nobility do not acknowledge them. The Jondaran tiger-folk of the old colonies are a parallel and separate lineage whose descendants hold the mines of Jon-Lithul.

Harvest

Lathonian Pelts. "Various in texture, depending on which Lathonian is skinned for its fur; often used in clothing or decor."

To sell goods made from a Lathonian corpse is a grave insult, ranking with the sale of Iziaka hide: it is not universally illegal, it is universally understood, and to wear it in front of the people it came from is a deliberate act. In the settled kingdoms the trade is legal and quiet. In the Hills of Barius it is a capital matter. In any prison the species runs it is not prosecuted, because the seller does not reach a court.

The claws are the piece that carries the real weight, and the anatomy is the reason. A Lathonian claw cannot be shed, cannot be trimmed back to the quick and cannot be taken from a living body without taking the finger, so a claw on a string came off a corpse and everyone in the trade knows it. A necklace of Lathonian claws is understood everywhere as a boast about a specific killing, and the Torkan clans make them on purpose for that reason. Lathonian bone is worked into instrument fittings and knife scales and is worth little. The teeth are worth more and are used in Torgai gambling sets. Nothing from a Clow is ever on the market; Glenree buries its dead under trees and the trees are counted.

Remembered

Akkan. The mercenary who united the lion folk of the Hills of Barius.

Corthellion I. First Akkanar emperor, elected 8582 A.E., built Arkenfell, drowned the Valley of Corlith, and died on a chamber pot of a flux that emptied him, which the record describes in blunter words than these.

Corellus Akkanar I. Emperor, fell at the Bone Yew under Arthur's burning oil.

Corthon Akkanar. Self-styled Emperor of Aelor, "a vain, paranoid drunkard sliding into murderous madness," who took Karkos's eye by feigning surrender.

Argath. Corthon's grandmother, who gave honest counsel, was slapped, took poison, and was impaled on the Golden Pike after death.

Sir Marius of Thilor. Lathonian Marshal of House Akkanar, hacked to death by his own nephew.

Dame Morrin Nassien. "A Lathonian mage" of the Clows of Glenree. Blue-grey fur, cyan eyes, a red-furred birthmark above the collarbone, and a twin brother, Ianto.

Jacob Declau. "A declawed feline courtier of House Akkanar."

Kin each has a page of its own