Torgais'shu
Four to five feet and lean for a Torgai, smooth leathery olive-grey, with white warts at the corners of the mouth, huge glands behind the eyes and golden eyes that do not seem to focus on the room. They do not focus on it. The trance-milk that soaks their own skin never entirely leaves their own blood, and a Torgais'shu lives at one remove from the world it is prophesying about.
They are the oracles of the Still Water, rare, born only in the pools of the Salt Bends, prophetic, and never touched. Their words come through silent attendants and are paid for.
Body
Smooth and leathery where the rest of the people is warty, olive-grey, white-warted at the mouth corners, with the great glands behind the eyes carrying the strongest dream-poison of any amphibian on Nu. The makers thickened the milk. To touch a Torgais'shu is to enter trance for a day; to lick one is to die. The desert river toad is the animal in them, and the trance is the whole of the theology, since a frog that killed without the dream would have no church in it.
Underneath the glands they are Torgai entire: the dry hide, the throat sac, the belly that ends an argument, the glued tongue that swears. Lean, they run about a hundred and fifty pounds, which is the light end of the people.
Faith
They are the mouths of the Still Water. An oracle croaks the old Alverian liturgies into still water and reads what the ripples do, and a baron does nothing large without a reading. Every word an oracle speaks is carried by attendants who have taken the bog-vow and will never speak again in their own voices, and those attendants are chosen as much for steadiness of hand as for the vow, since an unmilked Torgais'shu touched by accident puts a full-grown Torgai into a trance for a day.
Life
A clutch laid in the short-lived pools of a desert river comes up Torgais'shu, and only the Salt Bends make that water, which is why there are so few of them. They live about seventy years. Their skin-milk, the dream-milk, is forbidden by every clan and barony to be taken from a living oracle, and is sold anyway, in the same taverns, under the board. The baronies hang for it and tax everything else.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- What the ripples are actually read against, and who taught the first oracle to read them
- Whether an oracle can refuse a baron a reading
- Where the dream-milk sold under the board is coming from, if not from a living oracle