Torgaesh
Seven feet and five hundred pounds, mottled green-brown, granular-skinned, with hind legs that can put the whole of that through a palisade. The goliath frog is the largest frog living, and it moves stones heavier than itself to build spawning pools below cascades: a born dam-builder. The Torgaesh were bred as living bog-fortifications, static terrain, reshaping rivers and damming valleys by their mass.
The survivors are walking landmarks and the ancestral throne-mounts of the baronies, and Blackreed Hold is built on three of them. A Torgaesh speaks seldom, partly by temper and partly because the throat sac at that size takes a full breath to sound, and is owed a great deal.
Body
Mottled green-brown and granular, thick through everything, with hind legs built to move stone. The dry hide and the throat sac and the glued tongue are the people's own; what is different is the scale of them, and the cost. A sac that size takes a full breath to sound, so a Torgaesh answers slowly and is usually finished being spoken to before it starts.
Frailty
Seven feet and five hundred pounds is more than the frame and the single-circuit heart were built to hold upright, and a Torgaesh that lies down for long enough cannot get up, because the mass settles onto its own lungs. Blackreed Hold is built on three of them who lay down. The baronies call it a throne-mount and an honour, and the Torgaesh who has taken one has taken a life sentence with a hall on top of it. Both parties understand this, which is why a Torgaesh is owed a great deal and why no barony has ever recorded the terms.
The heat that kills any Torgai kills this one soonest, since a five-hundred-pound body sheds even less than a lean one, and the baronies lose barons to a dry summer every third year.
Life
A clutch laid in the cold rock pools under a cascade comes up Torgaesh. The baronies lay for them on purpose and guard those pools like treasuries, since the water decides the kin and the kin decides the garrison, and a hall cannot be built on anything else. The clan country is the Roaring Steps, the cascade land where the water makes them without being asked. They live about seventy years, which is the whole answer to how long a throne lasts.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- What a Torgaesh is actually owed for taking a throne-mount, since no barony writes it down
- Whether a Torgaesh has ever stood up again once a hall was on it
- How the Roaring Steps clans live, away from the baronies