Xacri'vak

Body

The muzzle is broad and boxed, the nasal chambers swollen into a bony hammer that turns the screech into a blow, and a Xacri'vak at eight and a half feet outweighs any other of its kind. Held at close quarters, the hammer-screech bursts the small vessels behind an enemy's eyes, which is why every people that has fought a Xacrie line has a word for a soldier who came home deaf and weeping blood.

Everything else is the base body carried at the top of its range: thin patchy fur running black through grey-brown, tumours showing bare and grey along the spine and shoulders, wings of sagging flesh with three clawed fingers to each, and beneath them the two jagged arms ending in long blades of hand. The blood turns the instant it meets air, so a Xacri'vak cut in a press takes the faces of the two nearest it, and armies that have fought a line of them twice come back with poles, nets, slings and fire.

Society

Among soldiers the size of the nose-box is rank, and it is read at a glance, which suits a people who settle everything by measurement and height. They hang on the soldiery's tier, below the elders and above the scouts, the miners and the creche, and they re-hang with everyone else on the night the dark moon is full, climbing by the deaths above them or by causing them.

They are the arm the nests lend out. A cult that wants a legion is sold Xacri'vak, and the Void Cultists who summon them speak of them as beasts and hungry ones while they do it. The kin has no separate custom: they wear cult-robing cut from the wings of their own dead, they eat hanging, they drink blood warm from skulls, and they mourn aloud like everybody else in the rock.

Regard

To the peoples of the deep the Xacri'vak is what the word Xacrie means. Every army that has come off a field against them carries the same two facts home: do not use a short blade, and the deaf ones weeping blood will not get better.