Xacrithal

Body

The nose-leaf stands off the muzzle as a horseshoe of flesh, wide as a spread hand, and it shapes the screech that the whole kin is built around. That screech is thrown at a pitch no other Xacrie can hear, which means a working face full of Xacrithal is silent to everyone else in the nest, and it comes back carrying the inside of the stone.

Otherwise they are base Xacrie and they age like base Xacrie: thin stringy fur that goes patchier with the centuries, tumours standing bare and grey along the shoulders and the throat, blood that turns the moment it meets air. A Xacrithal cut at a working face burns its own gallery, and old galleries are scarred the way old nests are scarred, in a record of every wound taken in them.

Society

They dig the galleries of the nests and they find the ore the cults sell, and both trades are the nest's, not theirs. They hang low, with the scouts, below the soldiery. A Xacrithal working a face will sing for six hours without pause and come out able to describe a chamber nobody has entered.

Regard

The Do'urssan hate them above all other Xacrie, since a Xacrithal can hear a Do'urssan tunnel through forty feet of stone. The two peoples have been in the same rock since the Xacrie fell on the Do'urssan underground after the collapse of Alveria, and of all the Xacrie kin it is the miners, not the soldiers, that a Do'urssan hold posts a watch against.