Xacrikar

Body

Patchy fur and rotted flesh, with wings covered in Crimson spreading pores that ooze down to the surface below. Their shriek carries a spray of crimson. They have grown fourteen eyes around the head and a second smaller head with just as many, allowing them to see in every direction at once and to be insane. The claws at the edge of the wings have grown double in size and are husked to sharp jagged edges. Twenty-eight eyes, two heads, six arms.

Everything the Xacrie already carried is still in them and is worse. The blood still turns the instant it meets air, so a cut Xacrie is dangerous to stand beside and a cut Xacrikar is dangerous to stand near; the scratch still carries whatever the body is carrying, and the body is now carrying the Crimson as well. Nothing about the growth has taken away the wings, the four original arms or the acid, and the two new arms are additions to a frame that was already built to cut with four blades at once.

Country

They roost alone above crimson fissures: splits in the rock of the deep Under Realm that glow dull red and run with ooze. There is no Xacrikar nest, because there is no Xacrikar society, and a hive built of dung and hung from a ceiling requires four hundred bodies working to one plan. What a Xacrikar has instead is a place above warmth, which is all a Xacrie ever needed of a roost, and the hive mind for company.

Regard

The Xacrie themselves have one policy and it does not vary: out, at the first sign, without discussion, the way the roost drops a wing-rotted Xacrie that cannot fly. The nests do not mourn them and the mourning screech is not sung for them, which for a people that mourns through forty feet of rock is the whole statement.

Everyone else treats them as the Crimson treats everything. They are screaming in a voice that is not theirs, and they will go where the fissures go.

The Crimson in them

Wings oozing Crimson, "fourteen eyes around their head and a second smaller head with just as many eyes," and a shriek that sprays blight across everything in front of it.

The second head is not a head in the useful sense. It is a spore organ that grew in the shape the body knew, and the fourteen eyes on each are blind and are there because the pattern was available. This is the clearest illustration in the class of how the blight builds: it has no interest in making new roads and every interest in the ones already there, so when it needed a bellows for spore it took the plan the body was carrying and made another head out of it.

The shriek is that organ working. Everywhere else in this class the lung is taken and rebuilt as a bellows for spore, and rounded bulbs let loose the airborne crimson quietly. A Xacrikar delivers the same thing as a weapon, at range, at whatever is in front of it.