The War-Made

Body

The remoulding is the whole of what a War-Made is. Reshaping is slow, deliberate work done with the hands over days, pressing and drawing the stone-clay of one's own body into the shape the next task wants, and a Thojar building itself for war does it for years: out to fifteen feet, arms made long for reach, the weight carried up toward four thousand pounds, every rounded line worked off. A Thojar who intends to grow large spends a season eating a cliff first, and a War-Made is made of whatever it could find to eat, which in the deep west is seam-stone.

Everything the shared body does badly for peace it does well for this. There is no skeleton to break, no organ to reach, no cavity to open and no vessel to cut, only ash-flesh contracting against the inner face of the stone. Poison does nothing. Wounds do not heal and do not need to, because a hole in a Thojar is a shape problem and is worked shut with the thumbs over an evening. It does not breathe, so it cannot be drowned or smothered, and a flooded gallery stops only the lineages that slake. It keeps no heat and generates none, which is why a War-Made can be felt coming through a wall a minute before it arrives, as a cold or a warmth in the rock that was not there.

It can only be ended by the taking of the life essence, and a Thojar that has learned to remould with any skill has learned first to shift its essence out of the obvious place. This is why a butcher works through a Thojar methodically instead of going for the chest, and it is why a War-Made taken apart on a slab may still be alive in the third piece from the left.

The cost is the grain. Memory has nowhere to live in a Thojar but the ash-flesh, and years of remoulding work it out. A finished War-Made keeps the last few shapes it held and is vague about everything before, which is why Two Lights took three Do'urssan work camps apart "without ever explaining why" and almost certainly cannot.

Society

They are organised in the crudest possible way, by who has made itself biggest, and they hold no territory. There is no anchor passed round, no precedence at a task, no set to interrupt; the techniques that hold a Thojar thought in the room are the property of Thojar who still have thoughts worth holding, and a War-Made has traded most of them away for reach. What it has instead is size, and size settles everything among them without a conversation.

The Quiet do not oppose them. Where a War-Made is going, the Thojar who do not fight get out of its way and think about something else, which is the same thing they do about the Do'urssan and about everything else that has ever wanted where they were standing. A War-Made will take a Cut convert from nowhere and gives none of its own, and the cults rarely get one.

Faith

Aezithis shamed his children, refused the worship they offered him, and went to the void. The Cut answer that by offering him their bodies. The War-Made answer it by becoming the one thing in the world he has been recorded as favouring, and they are the only Thojar of whom he is said to approve.

This is not a doctrine and has no rite attached to it. A War-Made does not pray, does not gather, does not go to a Cut Ground and does not appear to expect anything back. What it has worked out about its father is that he respects the shape of a threat and nothing else, and the conclusion it has drawn is to become one. In an age of this, Aezithis has spoken to no Thojar that anyone can name.

Regard

A Do'urssan hold that has been abusing its Thojar for a century will occasionally simply stop existing, and this is the reason. Nothing else in the Under Realm does that. The deep dark does not eat Thojar, the Remoulded ignore them, the Gidan have never fought them, and the Do'urssan have spent an age treating them as stock on the grounds that a thing which cannot die can be used again.

The War-Made are what that arrangement produces at the far end. They are fifteen feet of remoulded seam-stone, they cannot be killed by anything a hold levy carries, and they have emptied themselves of whatever reason they once had for walking toward the lamps. The surveyors mark them. Nobody has counted them.