Vulkar

Origin

The origin is contact and not breeding. Molten crimson takes the creature into the hive mind of the great crimson god beneath the ground, and mutated ash and soil work the same change slowly, over generations, in tribes that camp too long in blighted country. The suffix marks the Crimson strain here as it does in every people that has one.

A Vultari tribe is nomadic by habit and holds ground only long enough to trust it, and the one thing that turns habit into doctrine is this. A camp left standing too long on the wrong ground stops producing Vultari and starts producing these.

Body

The flesh is "bubbled blood red." The eyes have hollowed out entirely, and the creature navigates "by the smell of blood, and the sound of a heart beat," the ears reduced to "exposed ear drums, protruding out from their skull."

Both of those senses were already the best things about a Vultari and the blight has stripped everything else away from them. The olfactory sheet in the scrolled bone of the skull, the organ behind the claim that a Vultari can smell blood a hundred miles off, is now the whole of the animal's picture of the world, and the bare drums do the rest. They rot and mutate from within for forty to fifty years and do not stop working while they do it.

Regard

A Vulkar is the one Vultari body the tribe will not eat and will not carve, and for a people whose entire material culture is made out of its own dead, that is the strongest statement available to it. It is burned where it falls, the ground is turned and salted, and the collectors who handled it are washed in black wine and watched for a season.

Until then it is used. Chained at a camp perimeter it is a sentry that cannot be crept past. Set loose on a field it goes for whatever is bleeding and whatever has a heartbeat, which is why it is loosed and not led. The Trikarian Company carries the rank of Crimson Knight, and the ordinary soldiery do not go near the stake.

The Crimson in them

Flesh "bubbled blood red," the eyes hollowed out entirely, navigating instead by the smell of blood and the sound of a heartbeat through "exposed ear drums, protruding out from their skull."

The eyes go in this strain as in every other. The eye is wet, rich, undefended and directly connected, and it is gone within a week of the blight reaching the face, which is why this whole class is described everywhere by the eyes. What is unusual in the Vulkar is what happened next: the blight rebuilt the hearing outward to compensate, putting the drums on the outside of the skull where they can take the air directly.

That is the only case anywhere of the Crimson improving a host at anything. It is worth being precise about why it bothered. The blight keeps muscle and keeps what the muscle knew how to do, and a hunter that cannot see is a hunter it cannot use. Everywhere else it accepts the loss. Here it paid for the repair, once.