Papilk

Body

The caved body is a pressure vessel that has lost its pressure. A Papillian is held rigid by the fluid inside a thin jointed cuticle, and a Papilk is not; it holds its shape by the Crimson in it and by nothing else, and cut open it does not deflate. The wings have gone the other way, malformed and massive against a body that has fallen in, and the eyes run a foul red where a Papillian's facets read movement and the hidden colour.

The wing-root gland still works and still draws on nerve. What comes off it is not healing dust. The powder taken from a Papilk is sold as Papilk Poison, "extracted from the disease riddled dust glands of a Crimson Papilk, this randomised poison can bring all assortments of diseases," and the randomness is the selling point.

Country

The northern snowlands. The exoskeleton of a Papillian adapts to any climate, thickening the fur and closing the plates in the cold, and the strain that took the snow was a strain like any other before the Crimson finished it. What it does with the country now is burrow into what the cold has kept: a Papilk gets inside a rotten corpse and controls it, and a hamlet that has had a Papilk through it has bodies upright in its doorways.

They make no groves. There is no pool to hold a mind down, no warden, no hanning held under a closed canopy, and nothing that another Papillian would recognise as a nest. Where one has made a pool, it dreams with something underneath it.

Faith

A Papilk carries the hive mind of the crimson god in it, as every Crimson thing does. That is the end of the Standing Dream for this strain, and the end of Irusha, and the end of the second self as the groves understand it, since what is in the second knot is no longer only the Other.

What a Papilk pool shows the ones who go under in it is not recorded by anyone who came back up. The groves hold the sale of the dust of a living kin and the waking of a dreamer by force as their two great taboos, and the Papilk break both as a matter of course.

The Crimson in them

The Papilk are the Papillian spoiled by the Crimson, and the Crimson is this world's magma: not molten rock but the mutation itself, poured out of Aezithis' pulled heart and running under everything.

What it does to a Papillian is caving and inversion. The bodies cave in on themselves, and the dust glands turn from healing to disease. The caving is skeletal: a light-boned people whose frame the blight strips for mineral as it builds its own structures, so that a Papilk collapses inward over months while remaining upright and mobile, which is the worst thing in this class to watch.

The glands are the second half of it and the crueller half. What was the Papillian's medicine is now the source of Papilk Poison, "extracted from the disease riddled dust glands of a Crimson Papilk," carrying "all assortments of diseases." The change is not the loss of the organ but the reversal of it: the people whose gift was the mending dust become the people whose dust is the illness, and the strain is then hunted for the thing that ruined it.

Everything else follows the class. The eye goes within a week of the blight reaching the face. The muscle is kept, and so is whatever the muscle knew how to do, so a caved Papilk goes on moving and goes on working long after there is nobody in it. And each strain degrades: a host driven for decades loses precision, and the fine trades go before the coarse ones.