Torkab
"Short board heads, with bony ridges behind their eyes," a green-olive complexion "with the occasional black/yellow speckling across their upper bodies," six feet tall, the smallest strain, "more common and less on the militaristic warring side," and "the working and peasantry class of their species."
They hold no special abilities at all, which is itself the characterisation. They are also nine-tenths of the population, which no Torkar has ever thought about carefully, and House Rendmaw is what happens when one of them does.
Body
Six feet and three hundred and forty pounds, and none of it wasted. Short broad head with bony ridges behind the eyes, green-olive, with occasional black and yellow speckling across the upper body.
Their bone is the densest thing there is to set against horse-iron, and the density is why a six-foot Torkab weighs what it does and sinks like a dropped anvil, which is a gift underwater and a life sentence on a bridge. For their size their bite is proportionally the hardest in the species, which is a fact the bite-log does not record, since the log measures depth and not proportion, and the Torkab have been pointing this out for eight hundred years.
Society
They are the reason the gifted settlements work: the quays, the reed beds, the fisheries, the levee work and the tanneries are Torkab and always have been, and the wet-ground engineering the species is famous for is theirs to do.
The gullet-man is always chosen young from among them and never permitted to breed, which puts a Torkab in charge of the nest temperature, the hatching, the bite-log and the butchery in every clan house on the water. They work half naked in the reeds and so do not get lord's rot, which the lords do. House Rendmaw is the one house founded by a Torkab, and it took its ground by killing every Torkar in a river province across one night, an act no clan has repeated.
Harvest
Torkab scaled bone is reckoned denser than horse-iron, and it is the measure everything else in the class is set against.
What comes off the strain otherwise is what comes off any Torkan: back plate, which is the most valuable armour material of the reptile class, priced above the hardest Iziaka hide and below Iziakinie; belly plate at a tenth of that; claws made into tools; jaw muscle dried and sold as a strengthening food by charlatans in four ports; and the face domes, cut out as a sheet for instrument makers.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Whether the Torkab hold anything of their own beyond the work
- How House Rendmaw is treated in the settlements a Torkab actually lives in
- What a Torkab may own, and what a clan takes back
- Where the largest Torkab populations sit on the map of Nu