Tusivol
"The wildest and most deadly of all, existing within fouler reaches of the world." The cobra stock strain, and the one that changed how the whole species feeds. A Tusivol has no need to eat you to have your life. It puts you under, comes into the dream, walks through the house of your memory taking what it wants and leaving the doors open, and lets you wake.
They pay for it out of themselves. The Sleeping Word is made out of held memory, burned to fill the gland, which makes the Tusivol the only Tusiva who grow hollow rather than heavy, and which has put them at the bottom of a ranking they would otherwise sit near the top of.
Body
Within its rounded curved head the scales hold the same warped reflective quality as the Tusikai, and its use of it is interrogation: "Its mesmeric qualities allow it to extort information out from people, and be something you never want to run into." The rest is the species build, at species length, with the golden-white eyes and the silky hair down the back to a bushy tail end.
An old Tusivol is smaller than an old Tusikai of the same age, because the holdings that make a Tusiva large have been spent as venom, and a Tusivol is savage about the comparison being made in its hearing.
Country
The fouler reaches of the world: sour wet forest at the edge of settled country, standing water, dead trees and the ground a map leaves blank. They take sealed Alverian ruins in preference to anything they would have to dig, and the best of them have not been out of one in living memory.
Ssoriath of the Nine Hundred is a Tusivol in a sealed Alverian ruin. She has not eaten in sixty years and takes payment in conversation, and the conversation is the point: talk keeps the index exercised and postpones the emptying that starvation does to a body which stores memory as flesh.
Harvest
Their venom is the Sleeping Word. It puts the victim into a dream state that the serpent can enter, walk about in, and alter: it manipulates thought and idea from inside, and feeds on memory while it is there. Victims wake convinced of things they were not convinced of and missing years they do not miss.
It is made in the brain, in the same lobe that does the sending, and it is made out of memory: to fill the gland a Tusivol selects a held memory and dissolves it, and the memory does not come back. Every Tusivol therefore keeps what they call a purse, a stock of cheap lives eaten purely to be burned as venom, and a Tusivol will take a dull farmer for fuel and leave an interesting one alive on the road. The Sleeping Word is bought by nobody who will say why.
Society
The species habit of letting an interesting person live began with them, since an unusual life is worth more revisited than eaten once, and the settled kingdoms carry more Tusivol damage than they know: three treaties in the last two centuries were negotiated by men who had been dreamt in the week before.
Because they spend their holdings they rank low in a species that ranks by holding, and they know exactly why, and it has made them the least sociable and most dangerous of the four.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where the fouler reaches lie, and which ruins the oldest of them hold
- Whether the Sleeping Word can be worked at a distance or only on a body the serpent has reached
- Whether a dreamt person can ever be shown what was taken
- Which three treaties were negotiated by dreamt men, and who benefited