Thojar

Origin

The Thojar are Aezithis' last attempt and his worst, made "half made and cold as stone" by a god who had "failed in learning the lessons of life," and set "To guard the Under Realms and Cliffs, ensuring none pass that Aezithis did not want to." They are of the clay, and they remould themselves at will. They never die unless their life essence is taken from them. They are "a kind people," "quiet, reserved and defensive," slow and sporadic in thought, and their father, having looked at what he made, went to the void to find something better. They are still standing where he left them.

Aezithis, the first born, was "birthed with far too much void within his heart," and he made in his own image: "half-born creatures like himself who were sterile and lacked beauty, inspiring pity instead. They offered worship; he did not want it from them." He shamed them, "turned to the void for power," pulled abominations out of it and cared "little for what happened to his children." They are Aezithis's shamed children, and the world says so to their faces.

"Their malformed births left them freaks of the ancient world, only few able to reproduce, and many being too simple to even know what that meant." It has not mattered as much as it should. They do not die of anything, so a people that can barely breed has still not run out, and the Thojar alive today include individuals who were made in the first age and have simply never stopped.

Their stock went into the Do'urssan: Alverian, Thojar and bear, mixed in an Alverian vat. The Do'urssan now hold the Under Realm the Thojar were made to guard, and the Do'urssan treat them as a plague. The Thojar were never conquered, because there was nothing organised to conquer. They were displaced hold by hold over an age by a people who dug faster, and most of them moved further down without regarding it as a war. Some of them are still moving.

Body

"Their skin is stone, whether jagged or smooth, with a fleshy-ash softer textured skin beneath. Their features can be rounded or highly angular, like that of a cave, and through their physical forms of stone/clay, their strength is unparalleled by most." "Their eyes vary, being different assortments of crystal clusters, in all shape, color and size." No two Thojar look at you the same way. They were built with their heads turned: "Their eyes would be ever-cast up to the mouth light of the caves, and down to the world below the steep stone cliffs." They "bleed luminescent crystallized blood," see in the dark, and "feel almost no pain."

Open a Thojar and there is no inside. This is the sentence every physician who has tried it has written down, and it is accurate. No skeleton, no organ, no cavity, no vessel that runs from one named place to another. Under the stone shell there is warm grey ash-flesh, wet and dense and entirely uniform, threaded through with fine channels of the crystallising fluid, and it goes all the way through. The ash-flesh is muscle, nerve and memory at once. It contracts against the inner face of the stone, which is the only hard thing in the body and is load-bearing the way a wall is load-bearing, and since there are no joints and no tendons, a Thojar bends wherever it has decided to bend that decade. A healer of any other people, opening one, finds one light somewhere in the mass that appears to move when looked for, and nothing else to report.

Height and build vary on every count, because a Thojar is not fixed. They are of the clay and remould themselves at will. The working range is four feet to fifteen, and the same Thojar may occupy most of it across a century. Reshaping is neither fast nor painless in the way flesh understands pain; it 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 it costs the Thojar nothing except that it must be thought about, which is the expensive part. A Thojar who has spent four hundred years as a crawler in flooded seams is a low, wide, flat thing with no neck. A Thojar who has spent four hundred years standing in one place holding a cliff road is a column with a face on it. Weight follows the shape and the stone it was made from, from three hundred pounds to four thousand.

The cost that is not obvious is memory, and it is the whole tragedy of the species. Thojar memory has nowhere to live except the ash-flesh, distributed through it as a pattern in the grain, and remoulding works the grain. Every reshaping takes something, at no fixed rate and with no way to choose what goes. A Thojar that has changed shape twice in a thousand years remembers its thousand years. A Thojar that has remoulded forty times to suit forty tasks remembers the last few and is vague about everything before. They are the only people on Nu who can be anything they like and who pay for it in what they were. Everything else about them follows from this. It is why "Holds the Mouth" has stood in one set for eleven hundred years, which is not stubbornness and is the only archive a Thojar has. It is why the grooves must be carried across a reshaping and why failing to do it is a serious lapse, because a groove is a physical index of a thought and it is the one part of the body that reshaping is not allowed to touch. It is why the War-Made, who remould over years into something built for reach and mass, are so terrible and so empty, and why Two Lights took three Do'urssan work camps apart "without ever explaining why" and almost certainly cannot.

They need no air at all. They do not breathe, and water is therefore no trouble to a Thojar's lungs, because a Thojar has none. Water is a problem for some of them for another reason. Depending on what they are made of, a Thojar may slake and dissolve in it, and the ones who do can watch it happening to their own hands. Which lineages dissolve and which do not is the oldest practical knowledge the Thojar have, older than any of their cults, and it is the one thing a Thojar will always tell another Thojar unasked.

They keep no heat and generate none. A Thojar is exactly the temperature of the rock around it, which is why the deep ones are warm and the cliff ones are cold, and why the war-mongers of the deep west can be felt coming through a wall a minute before they arrive. They have no thirst, no breath, no pulse and nothing that could be called sleep; a Thojar at rest is a Thojar that has stopped, in a pose, with the drone running. Poison does nothing to them. Wounds do not heal and do not need to, since a hole in a Thojar is a shape problem and is worked shut with the thumbs over an evening.

What they see is mosaic. Each crystal cluster is many facets and no lens, so the world arrives as a field of bright and dark patches that resolves well for motion and badly for detail; a Thojar can tell that a thing moved and often not what it was. Colour comes through strangely and is agreed on differently by every Thojar, since no two have the same eyes. They see in the dark because they are reading heat and the faint glow of their own kind as much as light. Hearing is through stone rather than air: the drone is felt in the feet, a footfall three galleries away is plain, and a shout in open air is nearly nothing. A Thojar on the surface is close to deaf and close to blind, standing in a glare, listening to a ground that is telling it nothing, and the "rare freaks on the surface" that the Nu'uman report are Thojar doing the only sensible thing available, which is standing still.

The sense they actually live by has no counterpart above the rock. Through the whole body pressed against the stone they read the grain: the weight of the mountain, the run of its faults, where the water is, where the voids are, which way the load is travelling and what has changed since last year. A Thojar standing in a hold knows the shape of the hold and the shape of the rock behind the hold. It does not know there is a person in the room until the person moves, because living things are nothing to that sense; a Do'urssan standing still is a boulder. This is why the Thojar have never drawn a map, never named a place and never needed either, since a place to them is a pressure and not a word, and it is why every deep cut the Do'urssan have ever sunk profitably was sunk where a Thojar was standing. No hold admits this. Every hold does it.

They never die of anything except the taking of their life essence. The essence sits in the fleshy-ash beneath the stone, and it can be moved. A Thojar who has learned to remould with any skill learns first to shift its own essence out of the obvious place, which is why the Do'urssan butchers work through a Thojar methodically instead of going for the chest, and why a Thojar taken apart on a slab may still be alive in the third piece from the left. This is also the only thing the Thojar have ever done that could be called cunning, and they do it without being able to explain it.

Life

Few can reproduce and many do not know what it would mean. Where it happens, it is no birth. Two Thojar who have decided on it work a mass of their own substance out of themselves over a year, one adding to what the other has shaped, and at the end there is a small thing standing there that has the essence they gave it and none of their memories. It takes decades to be able to speak and it is never hurried. A Thojar child is raised by whoever is nearby, because the concept of a parent has no purchase in a people where nobody dies and nobody is scarce.

The stages have plain names, given in Common because the Thojar describe rather than christen. The Working is the year of shaping, two Thojar adding to one mass by turns. The Standing is the day the mass stands up on its own, which is the nearest thing to a birth and is attended by nobody in particular. The Silent Years run twenty to sixty, in which the child works, follows, copies and does not speak, and is not thought slow for it. The First Note is the day its stone has set hard enough to ring when struck, and since the strike-note is how a Thojar is known, this is the day the child becomes a particular person rather than a body somebody made. The First Groove follows whenever the child wears one, sometimes a century later, and is the day it is held to have begun thinking on its own account. The Hold is the long middle, which has no end. The Stopping is death.

There is no ageing. A Thojar does not weaken, wear or slow with time; it only accumulates. What accumulates is habit. The oldest Thojar have worn grooves into their own bodies from a thousand years of the same gesture, and those grooves are read by other Thojar the way another people reads a face.

They eat, and what they eat is the ground. Grit, soft mineral, chalk, crystal shards, ash and the fine silt of underground rivers, taken by the handful and worked in the mouth. It nourishes nothing, because nothing in a Thojar needs nourishing. It is material. A Thojar eats to have something to be made of, and a Thojar who intends to grow large spends a season eating a cliff. The Do'urssan find this repulsive, and it is one of the two facts about the Thojar that every Do'urssan child is taught.

What is eaten becomes what the body is, and the consequences of that are the most cold-blooded thing in the Under Realm. A Thojar raised on chalk is soft, slow, easily worked and easily broken; a Thojar raised on granite grit is a wall that walks; a Thojar fed crystal shards is strong and brittle and will shatter at a blow that granite would shrug off; a Thojar fed salt-rock slakes in the first flood. The Do'urssan holds work this deliberately, and the feed is set by the overseer according to what the Thojar is for. A hold's road-holders get granite. A hold's pit stock gets chalk. There is no hold on Nu where a Thojar chooses what it eats, and the Thojar, who have known which lineages slake since before the Do'urssan existed, have never once made the connection out loud.

A Thojar killed by the taking of its essence does not rot and does not fall apart; it stops, in whatever shape it was, and stays. There are caves in the deep Under Realm with two hundred of them standing in the dark, and the Thojar do not consider these graves, exactly, because a Thojar has no clear doctrine on where the line is. They visit. They put a hand on them. They do not move them.

Frailty

A body that cannot die has a long list of things that can happen to it instead.

Slaking is first and is a matter of lineage. The water-soluble Thojar can watch their own hands go in a flooded seam, and the knowledge of who slakes and who does not is the one piece of information the whole species passes freely and immediately. The Slake Runs are named for it. So is the fact that a slaking lineage is worth less on a work ledger and is therefore put in the deep cuts where the air kills, on the grounds that it was going to be a short investment anyway.

The emptying is the fear that has no cure. A Thojar that has remoulded too often has worked the grain out of its ash-flesh, and what is left is a body that stands, works, answers, holds a groove it no longer understands and is nobody at all. They are docile, capable and cheap, and the Do'urssan holds pay a premium for them, which means there is a market that rewards making them, which means there are overseers who set a Thojar four different tasks in forty years on purpose. The Thojar have no word for this and do not appear to have noticed the pattern, and the Gidan, who have noticed, do not have the words either.

Glazing is the foundry death. Heat past a certain point vitrifies the stone skin into a glassy shell that cannot be reworked, and a glazed Thojar can never remould again, never wear a new groove and never be anything but the shape it was that day. It is still alive. The smelting holds use them as fixtures, as door frames and as stands, and a glazed Thojar with the drone still running under the floor of a foundry is one of the more commonly reported sounds in the Under Realm and one of the least commonly explained.

The crumble is the congenital fault. Some are made with stone that will not hold, and the shell flakes away faster than it can be eaten back, and the ash-flesh runs. A crumbling Thojar is carried about by others in sacking and is fed by hand, and it stays alive indefinitely, because nothing about the condition touches the essence. The Cut take a great many converts from among them and consider them fortunate.

The young are the only Thojar who can be killed carelessly. Before the First Note the stone has not set, and a blow that would bounce off an adult scatters a child's essence past recovering. Every Thojar who has ever lost one in a rockfall gives the same account of it, which is that they did not know it could happen.

The thought-drift is the fault that is not an illness and is the one they all have. A Thojar's thought does not hold on its own; it wanders off mid-sentence, and without the techniques a Thojar is not stupid, only unreachable. A Thojar separated from its anchor, its stone, its second or its groove is a person locked out of its own mind, and the Do'urssan clerks who confiscate anchors as a disciplinary measure know exactly what they are doing.

What they fear happening to their bodies is glazing, emptying, and being taken apart while alive and remaining alive in a piece. All three happen. They are right to fear them, and they cannot hold the fear in mind for long, which is the only mercy in the arrangement.

Country

The Under Realm, the cliffs and the caves, "the ever expansive subterranean continents beneath the surface." Aezithis' Under Realm is their home and their exile at once; he left "his people to cower in the darkness of his UnderRealm."

No Thojar settlement has ever been named by anyone, including the Thojar, and the reason is not modesty. They do not name places, they occupy them, and the Common names in circulation are all descriptions given by other peoples who needed something to write on a map. The Mouth Lights, the cliff-brow caves where the surface light comes in and the Thojar sit facing it, sometimes for a century. The Long Sit, a gallery in the deep west where the oldest of them have stood so long that the ceiling has settled onto their shoulders and is now held up by them, which the Do'urssan surveyors know about and route around. The Slake Runs, flooded seams that only the water-safe lineages will enter, and which are consequently the safest places in the Under Realm for a Thojar who cannot be followed there. The Cut Grounds, where the cults do their work. The Standing Caves, the stopped dead.

They compete with nothing and prey on nothing and nothing preys on them, which is why they lost the Under Realm without a war. The deep dark does not eat Thojar because there is nothing in one to eat. They have domesticated no animal, kept no herd, grown no crop and bred nothing, and they are the only people on Nu of whom all four of those are true. The Do'urssan have domesticated them, thoroughly, over an age, and the Thojar do not have a word for what has been done and would not be able to hold the thought long enough to use it.

What a century of Thojar occupation does to a country is the thing the Do'urssan discover last and most expensively. A Thojar standing in a gallery is eating the gallery, and a hold with two hundred of them in it loses its soft seams over a century, the chalk goes, the water finds the new gaps and moves, and the springs a hold was founded on come out somewhere else. Set against that, Thojar hold the rock up. Where they stand they take load, deliberately and for centuries, and the Long Sit is a ceiling that no longer has any other support. Three Do'urssan holds in the eastern deep drove their Thojar out in a single generation for the cost of the pebbles, and all three have since come down, and the Do'urssan record all three as bad ground. The standing dead hold ceilings too. Nobody moves them, and the ones who have tried have learned why.

Society

"Quiet, reserved and defensive." "Many do not fight; those that do are terrifying." There is a favoured class: "His favorite of the Thojar are the war mongering ones that have grown to learn what their father wants."

The cognitive fact governs everything else: "They are a kind people, but lack many elements that make one sentient; they can be slow and often have sporadic thoughts, and need techniques in place to focus."

The techniques are the whole texture of Thojar life. A Thojar thought does not hold on its own; it wanders off mid-sentence, and the techniques are the things a Thojar does with its body to keep a thought in the room. Every Thojar has at least one and most have three. They are taught first, before speech, and a Thojar without them is not stupid, only unreachable.

The groove. A worn channel in the Thojar's own chest or forearm, and a thumb pressed into it and drawn along its length once for every step of a thought. The groove deepens over centuries and its depth is a rough measure of how much thinking that Thojar has done. Reshaping the body without carrying the groove across is considered a serious lapse.

The stone in the mouth. A crystal or pebble held against the roof of the mouth and rolled while listening. A Thojar that spits its stone out has lost the thread and everyone present stops and waits.

The drone. A low hum sustained on no breath, since there is no breath, produced by vibrating the stone of the chest. It runs continuously under a conversation and pitches down when the Thojar is losing the point. A cave with forty Thojar working in it is never silent, and the sound carries a mile.

The set. Standing in one exact pose for the duration of a thought and refusing to move any part of the body, on the reasoning that a thought is attached to the shape you had when you began it. Interrupting a set is the closest thing the Thojar have to an insult.

The tally. Cuts scored into the stone skin, one for each thing that must be remembered, smoothed away when the thing is done. A Thojar's forearms are a list of work outstanding and are read openly by others.

The anchor. An object, usually a lump of the Thojar's own substance broken off long ago, held in the hand throughout and passed to whoever is speaking. Only the holder speaks. This is the technique that has to be explained most often to outsiders, and it is why negotiations with Thojar take four times as long as anyone budgets for and why they are never misremembered afterwards.

The second. Another Thojar whose only task in a given hour is to repeat back the last thing said whenever the first one stops. Pairs who have done this for a thousand years finish as one voice and are dealt with as one person.

Every one of the seven is a way of putting a thought somewhere outside the ash-flesh, where remoulding cannot reach it. That is the Thojar answer to a body made of clay: if the mind is in the material and the material is negotiable, then the mind must be kept in objects, in gestures, in the shape you are standing in and in another person. Their memory is external by necessity and their whole culture is the filing system.

Law follows from the same fact, and it starts with the problem that a Thojar cannot be identified by looking at it. Appearance proves nothing about a people who change shape, and the Thojar have accordingly never developed a single legal idea that depends on recognition; there are no descriptions, no oaths of identity and no witness who says he saw a tall one. What there is is the strike-note. Every Thojar's stone rings at a pitch that nothing it does to its own shape will alter, and a Thojar is known by being struck. Among themselves a struck note is the beginning of any serious conversation. In the holds it has been taken over wholesale: every Do'urssan work ledger records a note against a by-name, and every Do'urssan clerk who administers Thojar carries a small hammer on a cord, which is the single most resented object in the Under Realm and one of the few things the Thojar will pointedly not discuss.

Art is the same problem answered differently. Nothing shaped can be precious to a people who reshape, so the Thojar make nothing that is meant to last as an object and everything that is meant to last as a wearing. Their arts are three. The drone, layered, which is performance and is gone. The groove, which is a lifetime's work worn into a body by the same gesture repeated, and which is read the way another people reads a portrait. And the set itself, a shape held for a century because it was the right shape for a thought, which other Thojar come to look at and put a hand on. A Thojar's body is the only artwork it will ever make and the only autobiography it will ever have, and the one fraud in their society is a forged groove, cut rather than worn, which is spotted by touch in a moment and is the nearest thing to a crime any Thojar has ever accused another of.

There is no Thojar government. There is precedence at a task: whoever has held a cliff longest decides matters about that cliff, and everyone defers, because arguing would require holding a position through a conversation, which is expensive. Where Thojar gather in numbers, an anchor-holder emerges by consent and holds it until the matter is finished, sometimes for years. The war-mongering ones are the exception and are organised in the crudest possible way, by who has made itself biggest, and the Thojar who do not fight get out of their way and think about something else.

They wear nothing, since dress would be an addition to a body they can simply change. They eat stone. They drink nothing. Their music is the drone, layered: a working cave in the deep has forty pitches going at once and the Thojar find it beautiful and cannot say why. Their oath is the anchor placed in the other's hand and not taken back, which is binding for as long as the object exists, and since nothing they make ever wears out, all Thojar oaths are permanent. Their one taboo is the interruption of a set.

Faith

Most Thojar are atheists, and they are the only people on Nu of whom this is true as a majority position. It is no philosophy. They know a god made them and they know he left; the conclusion they draw is that a thing which made you and went away is not owed anything and is not worth the effort of a thought that would have to be held for the length of a prayer. A Thojar asked about Aezithis will usually agree that he exists and then wait for the next question.

Many others worship their turned-away father, believing themselves unworthy of his love, and their whole religious system is built on crude acts of sacrifice and mutilation. The cults call themselves nothing that translates; the Common name for them is the Cut, and the Do'urssan call them the Unmade, which the cults have adopted. Their doctrine is simple and closed: the father found his children ugly, therefore what he finds ugly is in the body, therefore the body is the offering. A rite consists of a Thojar breaking off, grinding away or cutting out some part of itself at the Cut Grounds and leaving it on the stone. The parts stay where they are put, which means every Cut Ground is a growing heap of hands, faces, jaws and columns of chest going back to the first age.

The rites escalate, and this is the thing to understand about them. A Thojar feels almost no pain, cannot die of injury, and can remould whatever it removed. An offering therefore costs nothing but material and time, so the cults have spent an age inflating the price: first a finger, then a hand, then the face, then the whole of the front of the body, then the requirement that it not be regrown, then the requirement that it not be regrown and that the offerer continue to work the seams in whatever state that leaves it. The senior figures of the Cut are ruined objects that crawl and speak, and are regarded within the cult as devout and, by other Thojar, as having found something to hold a thought with. In an age of this, Aezithis has never once answered. The Cut regard that as correct, and as the point.

What the cult does not say, and what the Quiet say to each other in the plainest terms they have, is that the offering is never only material. Every piece worked off a body takes the grain with it, so a Thojar far along the Cut has emptied itself as thoroughly as any hold ever emptied one, and remembers nothing of the life it is offering up. The cult treats the blankness as the goal reached and calls it purity. The Quiet call it the same thing that happens in the pits, arrived at from the other direction, and this is the one subject on which a kind, slow, sporadic people will speak with real anger.

There is no afterlife on offer, and the worldly gods keep no realms in any case. Whatever soul a Thojar has goes to the auction of the star gods with every other soul on Nu. The atheist majority would find the auction less surprising than the Cut would.

Tongue

The Thojar tongue is crude and stone-sounding, and nobody outside the Under Realm has ever written a word of it down. What other peoples have are renderings. It is spoken into rock as much as into air, and half of what is said in a Thojar conversation is carried by the drone and by contact rather than by the words, which is why a rendering into Common loses more than it keeps and why a Do'urssan who has learned the vocabulary still cannot follow two Thojar working.

A Thojar is not given a name and does not choose one. A Thojar accretes one, the way it accretes grooves. What a Thojar is called is the shortest true description of what it has most often been: the shape it holds, the seam it works, the technique it uses, the place it has stood, or the sound its own stone makes when struck, which is different for every Thojar and is the closest thing to a birth name any of them has. Names therefore change across a long life and a Thojar may be called four things in four centuries and answer to all of them without noticing. They do not consider this a problem, and the Do'urssan clerks who administer them do.

Eight by-names, as other peoples render them in Common. These are what a Thojar is called on a Do'urssan work ledger, and never what a Thojar calls itself: Knuckle-in-the-Wall; Two Lights; Grinds; Cold Sit; Ninth Ash; Blue Bleeder; Stands Wrong; Holds the Mouth.

Regard

"Foul underfolk of the fallen god." "Forgotten to recent memory." "Rare freaks on the surface." Nobody talks about them, and so nobody has bothered to invent a slur.

The Do'urssan are the exception and are the whole of the Thojar's experience of other peoples. To the Do'urssan the Thojar are a plague. Some Do'urssan societies tolerate them and a few welcome them, and those Thojar work seams no Do'urssan can work, hold roads, carry, and are fed pebbles at the end of a shift as though that were wages. Most Do'urssan treat them as meat bags to abuse, sacrifice and tear apart, and the phrase in use is that the Thojar are the abominations. The two facts every Do'urssan child is taught are that the Thojar eat rock and that they cannot die properly, and the second is the load-bearing one. A thing that does not die can be used again. Thojar are worked in the deep cuts where the air kills, fed to the pits alive for the entertainment value of how long it takes, and taken apart piece by piece on the block by butchers looking for the essence, and in a hold with a bad governor the same Thojar may be all three across a decade. None of this is illegal anywhere. A Thojar is not a person in the law of any hold on Nu.

The Thojar response is to move further down. They have been doing it for an age and they do not appear to resent it, which the Do'urssan read as confirmation of everything they think.

Their maker, Aezithis, shamed them, refused their worship, abandoned them, and favours only the warlike ones. Their genetic descendants are the Do'urssan, "created from a mix of Alverian, Stoneman, and Bear," who hold the Under Realm the Thojar were made to guard and who do not mention the connection. Neighbours of a sort are the Gidan, who believe in the rock and the way of the earth and soil and worship Aezithis without knowing his name; the Gidan and the Thojar get on, in the sense that neither has ever attacked the other, which in the Under Realm is a close friendship. Indifferent to them are the Remoulded and everything else in the deep dark, which does not eat Thojar because there is nothing in one to eat. Unnoticed by them are the Alverians, who never made use of Thojar stock directly and took it through the Do'urssan formula instead, and whose bunkers sit in rock that Thojar have walked over for an age.

Harvest

No ledger above the rock carries a Thojar entry. What is written anywhere is that they "bleed luminescent crystallized blood" and that their eyes are "different assortments of crystal clusters." They are the most harvested people in the Under Realm and the least recorded, because the trade is conducted at the bottom of holds by people who do not keep books.

Crystal blood. Luminescent, crystallising as it leaves the body, and the only light source in the deep that needs no fuel, no air and no upkeep. Ground fine it is the pigment in every glowing sign in a Do'urssan hold. A Thojar bled steadily produces it for as long as it is fed rock, which is the single ugliest standing arrangement in the Under Realm and is not hidden.

Eye clusters. Crystal, no two alike, cut and set as gems, and worth more when the Thojar is taken alive because the cluster clouds within a day of the essence going. The Nu'uman jewellers who buy them call them cave-stars and are not lying to anyone in particular.

Stone skin. Plates struck off a living Thojar, which the Thojar regrows. Tough, light for what it is, and cheap, which makes it the armour of the poorest infantry in the deep. A Do'urssan levy in Thojar plate is a Do'urssan levy nobody expects to see again.

The ash-flesh. The soft grey layer beneath the stone, which will not rot, will not dry out and will not burn, and which is worked into gaskets, seals and the linings of the deep-cut breathing masks. A hold's whole air system may be built out of one Thojar. Whatever pattern was in the grain goes into the gasket with it and does nothing there, which is a fact the Thojar know and have no ceremony for.

The life essence. What is actually being looked for on the block. It cannot be stored, sold or used by anyone who has ever tried, and the only thing taking it reliably does is end the Thojar, which is sometimes the point. The Alverians would have known what to do with it. There are no Alverians in the deep cuts.

None of this is regulated anywhere, and among the takers there is no taboo attached to any of it. Among the Thojar, the taking of essence is the only act they have a word for that other peoples would translate as evil, and they use the same word for the Cut.

Remembered

No Thojar name has ever been written down outside the Under Realm.

Holds the Mouth, the Thojar of the Long Sit whose shoulders the ceiling settled onto, who has been in one set for eleven hundred years, and whom the Do'urssan surveyors mark on their charts as a load-bearing feature.

Two Lights, a war-monger of the deep west, fifteen feet of remoulded seam-stone, who is said to be one of the favourites and who has taken three Do'urssan work camps apart without ever explaining why.

Grinds, first of the Cut still able to speak, a torso and one arm on the stone of a Cut Ground, who has offered every part of itself that can be offered twice and has begun on the third round.

Blue Bleeder, a Thojar kept alive in a lamp-house under a hold for nine hundred years and recovered, still alive, when the hold fell in, and who walked out and went down.

Kin each has a page of its own

No variants. No strain, caste or regional type has ever been named among them, and the one division that holds is temperament and never blood. Since they remould themselves at will, no physical variant could hold in any case; a Thojar is whatever it last decided to be. Three standings divide them, and a Thojar may pass from one to another in a century.