Mekuhl
The more feral of the Mekuhlian, and chaotic in physical variance. Skin void black by nature, and they alter texture as well as colour, able to alter their skin texture to nearly perfectly blend in. The desert did that, since a country of sand and rock is read by a skin that can raise itself into grain as well as take a shade, and the Mekuhl reading cells sit deeper and control a layer of fine muscle the Mekuhlia do not have. Their lips are torn and the front of the head is patterned pitch white.
They carry no new graft. Nothing was added to them but the desert and the years. The Dead Continent calls them the Fallen and does not admit them to the houses, and the Mekuhl call the Dead Continent a place that stopped listening.
Body
Void black rather than grey, and the black is not a pigment failure but the desert's answer to a skin that reads what is behind it. The reading cells lie deeper than the Mekuhlia's and are wired to a layer of fine muscle as well as to the colour cells, so a Mekuhl standing against a rock face takes the rock's grain as well as its shade, and there is no seam at the edge of it. The lips are torn back off the teeth and the front of the head is patterned pitch white, which no other strain carries.
Everything else is the species' own machinery, working as built. The body makes no heat, the vault sits behind the palate and runs hot for three days after a reading, the long bones are thin-walled and hollow-cored, and a Mekuhl who is caught is finished in the same way and for the same reasons as any other Mekuhlian.
Life
They kept the old practice: "This race still follows the roots of its ancestors: consuming the brains of children, and hold their thoughts till the return of Alveria." Children are eaten because a child's vault is empty and a child's memories are thin, and a thin memory fills less room; the Fallen worked out centuries ago that a full vault could be fed longest on the smallest lives.
It has not saved them. They have gone insane with the volume of it and can often be discovered having conversations with themselves. They speak to the dead within their heads after having consumed their memories, and none can say whether that is a true power or the madness talking; the Fallen do not draw the distinction. They live ninety to one hundred years, which is the shortest in the species, and the cracked vault is why.
Country
Desert country, hot and dry, where the strain changed itself apart from the rest of the people over a length of time nobody has set down. Beyond it they are the wild Mekuhlian, the ones who live within foul empires and are hired by them, and they go naked because they are always working.
The memory houses of Kehlmareth and Duhlvane are closed to them. A Mekuhl does not carry a stem, is not given an Inheritance, and cannot present a bill to whoever ate a debtor, which is to say the whole legal machinery of the Dead Continent simply does not apply to him.
Regard
Every kingdom that has learned what they eat hunts them, and the eating of children is the exact line the Dead Continent draws between the people and the Fallen. To the Mekuhlia they are the argument against the eating, held up whenever a young reader asks why the Refusal is worth its price. To the Mekuhl the Mekuhlia are couriers still waiting at a door nobody is ever going to open.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where the desert country sits on the map of Nu, and how long the change took
- Whether the voices are the carried dead or the damage
- Whether any Mekuhl has ever been taken back into a memory house
- Which of the foul empires employ them, and on what terms