Mekulak

Body

Ninety parts in a hundred of the hair are gone and what remains is far too long. The muscles are inflated. The eyes are a sickly yellow-orange, glowing at night, illuminating their jagged curved teeth. The body beneath all of it is a living corpse carrying tumours and boils, and the colours that run across it collide because nothing is reading the world to tell them what to answer.

They run hot, since the hive keeps the vault open and burning, and a Mekulak is the one Mekuhlian a heat-hunter can find in the dark. That single fact undoes the entire design of the species: the strain that cannot be seen has produced a strain that cannot help being seen. They feel little pain save from fire, and they are practically immortal, living ten thousand years and more.

Life

They form predatory colonies and hunt children's brains, and the memories they take go to the crimson hive rather than into any vault of their own. There is no Inheritance among them, no carried stem, no house and no bequest. What a Mekulak eats is not kept by a Mekulak.

Because they do not age out and are not killed by the eating, a colony only grows, and the ground it works only worsens. What holds them in check is fire and the Dead Continent's willingness to use it.

Country

The Mekulak Pits are "the rotted and Crimson Blight infested pits dug by the mutated and abominable variations of the species. Slave camps, terrifying torture devices, and more can be found within the pits where the Mekulak rests their heads." Beyond the Pits they hold whatever ground a colony has taken and worked into the same condition.

Regard

The Mekulak are the reason no settled kingdom houses the Mekuhlian willingly, and the reason children of every people are taught to fear the grey man in the corner long after the teaching stopped being accurate about anyone else. The Dead Continent burns them, brain and all, and it is the one case in which burning a brain is not taboo, because what is in a Mekulak's head belongs to the hive already.

The Crimson in them

The colour-change is lost, replaced by "a collection of desaturated and alarmingly bright colours, all colliding atop a tumour and boil infested living corpse."

The lost colour-change is the sign of what has happened underneath. The Mekuhlian organ of display is taken early and driven at random, which is why the colours collide: it is not that the people have gone grey, it is that the instrument is still being played and there is nobody at it.

They raid in colonies for brains "to fill their failing minds," which is the only strain that hunts a specific organ and knows why, and the reason is exact. Everywhere else the Crimson takes the person and keeps the worker, taking the trade last of all. In this people the blight takes the brain before the trades, and is left with hosts it cannot operate. The raiding is the hive's correction for a strain it broke in the wrong order, and it does not work.