Tusikai
The boa stock strain, and the one the districts notice. "Often found in clusters of at least five, these sentient snakes resemble the speaking of prophetic witches, foretelling dooms to come, and often bring with their comings and goings bad fortunes and ill tides." The cluster is no coven. It is five serpents queued around one very old one, all arguing for the same corpse, and the ill fortune that follows them is what happens to a district when five things that size are waiting in it for a decade.
What separates them from the other three is that their venom is bought in advance out of their own lives. They are the longest lived of the four and the most careful, and a Tusikai will watch a man for nine years and then decide he is not worth the cost and leave the district without a word to anybody.
Body
Massive and smooth scaled, highly reflective, and by their slightly curved and warped scales they "will reflect distorted images of those staring into them." Under that is the species build: fifteen to fifty feet measured in length rather than height, a snake's skull carried toward the Nu'umanoid, golden-white eyes filled with the mesmeric value of a million lives lived, and silky hair falling from the crown down the back to a bushy tail end.
Like every Tusiva they hold memory in the tissue rather than the skull, they grow physically larger by eating people, and they moult organs as well as skin, losing whatever was written in whatever they shed. They are the longest lived of the four, which is a consequence of the venom rather than of the stock.
Society
The thing they carry is the Doom Mark, a negative energy beacon, and it goes on when the serpent is certain. The certainty is financial. A Tusikai that marks a person is usually marking a meal it intends to age first, and the withering the villages blame on the curse is the venom doing its work in a body that has not been told.
The cluster of five is the other half of the reputation, and it is the Long Argument seen from outside: five serpents queued around one very old one, all petitioning for the same corpse, none of them able to lay a clutch into anything else. A district with a cluster in it is a district where five animals of that size are waiting, sometimes for a decade, and the bad fortune is real enough even where the prophecy is not.
Because every strike is bought with their own years, they are the most cautious animal in a cautious species, and they rank high in a people that ranks by holding, since they spend span rather than memory.
Harvest
Their venom is the Long Year. It ages the victim, year upon year in hours, and while it works the serpent feeds on the life essence coming off them and adds those years to its own span. It is made in a pair of sacs behind the skull that draw directly on the serpent's own remaining span to fill: a full dose costs a Tusikai between two and five years of its life, spent in advance, on credit against a kill it has not made yet. A Tusikai that fills the sacs and misses has thrown away a decade.
The Long Year is traded and illegal everywhere, and the difficulty of collection has always done more to the price than the law has. It is bought by the old and the dying, who have understood only half of what it does.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How far the Doom Mark carries, and whether a marked person can be unmarked
- How long the Long Year takes to finish a body, and whether anything slows it
- Which forests hold clusters, and which districts have been paying for one without knowing
- Whether a Tusikai has ever won a Long Argument against a cluster of its own kind, or only outlasted one