Xacri'mor

Body

The smallest and fastest, with a long narrow wing and a tail that hangs free of the membrane. Their blood is thinner and turns a little slower than the base, which is the only reason a courier can be patched in the field and sent on, and it is the nearest thing to medicine any Xacrie has, since the rest of the species cannot be stitched, cannot take a graft and has no surgeons of any kind.

They carry the same senses as the rest and the same limit. The screech paints the air out to sixty yards and past sixty yards the world stops, which for a people whose whole work is distance is the governing fact of the trade: a courier flies low, flies nervously over open country, and will not be caught above a plain in daylight.

Country

At dusk they leave the great nests in rivers of thousands that the surface peoples take for smoke, and the mistake is old enough that hill towns have names for the smoke and reasons for it that are not the real reason. The routes are not written anywhere, since the whole point of a courier is that the message is in the courier, and the roads they keep run nest to nest and nest to cult across the Under Realm and up into the belfry quarters of the cities that tolerate Xacrie at all.

Society

They are the messengers and night-scouts of the nests. Every nest keeps blood-scribes who set the cult's books down on cured wing in blood that is not their own, and the Xacri'mor carry what the blood-scribes write. They hang low, below the soldiery with the scouts, and they do not climb: a Xacri'mor is never Crown-Hung and never wishes to be, which in a people that ranks itself by height off the floor is a position taken rather than a position given.