Beastmen
A pair of grouse flushed from the sweetgrass. Two swift cracks split the morning air. A lop-eared hound scrambled down the line of fire, reaching one bloodied gamebird before it met the earth. The other fluttered high into the budding treeline, feathers backlit by the rising sun.
“Good girl!” cried Amalan, breathing white in the spring air. She broke open her hunting lance and stooped to greet the returning hound. “Dead bird, well done Beesley. Well done girl.” Beesley relinquished her catch, panting joyously and squinting in canine satisfaction. Amalan patted her and hooked the crested grouse’s thorny feet into a hangar on her game belt.
Suddenly, Beesley was silent again. Focused. She pointed, tail stiff, muzzle and spotted withers aligned to indicate the treeline. Amalan crouched behind the fragrant grasses, scanning the shaded understory. The shrubs, trunks, and budding oak branches were indistinct with the morning sun so low behind the canopy. By touch, she loaded another pair of pneumatic broadcast shells and closed up the breech with a soft click.
Something moved. The dog twitched. “Go,” whispered Amalan.
Beesley jolted forward, tearing deep ahead into the grass. Amalan shouldered the heavy gun, dual barrels leading well ahead of the hound’s green wake of motion in the grass.
Something flew out of the woods, swift as an arrow. Amalan whipped a hasty shot at it, but only blew twigs off a distant thicket.
“Feck!” she cried, then quieted, listening. Her face contorted with worry. The dog was no longer running. The grass was still, and a heaving whimper cut through the air. A rapid whimper, pleading, and pitiful. It came from a crushed imprint in the grass not far off.
“Beesley!”
She waded through the dewy field, fixated on that spot. Something moved over the wheat-heads: A long wooden shaft, shuddering and vibrating with every canine cry.
When she reached it, Amalan gasped, then sobbed: The hound lay stricken, her nose and teeth foaming red, transfixed through the lungs by a javelin stained with ruddy handprints, its point buried deep, shaking with the dog’s fading breaths.
Amalan stooped, slack with horror, then startled upright at another sound: Snorting from the treeline. Guttural. A hearty, satisfied hnng, hnng, hnng with a sharp inhale between.
Under the dim woodland lee snorted the head of a hart stag. Antlers broad and branching; eyes wet and rolling with excitement; snout and wet velvet lips bared over human incisors in an insane grimace. It blew hot white breath into the cold spring air, and the heaving chest was a man’s, broad and muscled. The rest of it was, too: Nude, huge, and finger-daubed with swirls of painted gore. It stank of eager musk. It lazily drew up another javelin in a club-fingered hand and rocked it back over a round shoulder to cast at Amalan, whiskered chin uptipped contemptuously.
She shot it. The retort rippled through the chilly field. The deer-man lurched back as a hundred blots of red burst from its neck, pectoral, shoulder, and upper arm. Staggering, eyes bulging and rolling in rage, it launched the dart with effort, squirting red from many wounds as the shredded muscles flexed defiantly, but the throw flew wide. Amalan winced as the shaft whistled past her ear.
Baying defiantly, then crying out like a goat, the wildman slowly keeled onto the leaf mass with a thump and a final gurgle of lost breath.
Amalan stood, shuddering. Beesley was silent now. The rising sun shone sharp in her running eyes. She cracked the hunting lance and struggled to stuff two more shells in, then startled again and cast about for the new sound which rose all around her.
Guttural ululations. Dozens of voices not far within the shaded woods. The voices of stags lifted in a sound deer do not produce:
A warcry.
Two thousand years ago, the sorcerous Beauties of ancient Idra developed beastmen: Chimeras brewed from human and ungulate biologies. “Ekheinum” they called them, a word taken from the Formal Idran meaning “to hold,” for they were a barbaric means of holding land. Self-sustaining, fecund, and brutally territorial. They were, and remain, an exemplar of Idran aesthetics: Lusty, totemic, ignoble savages.
Ekheinum
The majority of inland forests have hosted ehkeinum flocks throughout history. Evidence supports this: Antler-skull ossuaries are invariably found in Northern forest caves. Originally thought to be paleolithic in origin, they are today understood to be a far more recent ekheinum burial practice. Some marchland forests host flocks even today: The Beautiful masters are long dead, but their flocks remain. *
Ekheinum were intentionally stocked, or “seeded,” in target regions. Usually, the heartlands of a Beauty’s demesne were seeded first, followed by new-conquered territories. Woodlands were stocked most often, followed by moorlands. Often, ekheinum were the only Idran influence present in a region, their ferocity more than sufficient to maintain it. Regions “held-down” solely by ekheinum were considered part of a Beauty’s demimonde, their “half world,” an Idran euphemism used to describe artfully neglected hunting grounds. **
“Seeds” were never taken from extant regions. Rather, they were batch-made in cauldrons, brewed from the selected flesh of the best existing stock and “born” in full maturity. † This process was necessary, for ekhein cognition disallows settlement without conquest, only permitting expansion from an “ancestral” home demesne into taken lands. This is an intentional psychic limitation; an anti-competitive measure programmed to prevent competing Beauties stealing beastmen for their own demesnes. Similarly, ekheinum can be “loyal” only to their own flock and one master—one Beauty. As such, before seeding, newborn beastmen were neurologically imprinted upon their homeland, its ruling Beauty, and all the lieutenant vaeli. ††
Once seeded, flocks required virtually zero maintenance. Strongly instinctual, the founding members would explore and occupy discovered geography with haste, automatically assuming regular sentinel practices, ever wary of intruders. Any remnant populations, human or otherwise, became their first meals, and the first fuel for the birthing mothers of their many descendants.
Ekheinum are omnivorous. They eat nearly anything in their range—though never to depletion. The brutes are instinctually of aware and conscientious of their resources. They do not overhunt, and they do not overgather. The idyll nature of their landscape is maintained, save the gore contributed to it. When confronted with scarcity, ekheinum are inclined to expand into—or raid—surrounding lands, owned or otherwise. Infamous among the foods they tolerate are human and ekhein flesh. Human meat is a delicacy to them; they dismember and eat humans forthwith, an automatism ingrained to prevent emergence of plague. Ekhein meat is the exception to their resource sensibility: They eat rival flocks greedily, with exterminating intent, down to the last fawn.
As a “true” chimera pattern, ekheinum are capable of sexual reproduction. They are fecund and lusty, building and maintaining substantial flocks in haste.
Ekheinum stags exist in a self-perpetuating state of rut triggered by contact with their brethren. ‡ They live semi-cooperatively, joining in patrol, war, and the hunt but breaking often for bouts of vicious fraternal competition over dominance and ownership of does. They are sensitive to their territorial borders and eagerly join up to mete violence upon intruders, be they rival ekheinum or otherwise. They mellow only in winter—during the antlers shed—or when the number of stags in a flock falls dangerously low.
Ekheinum does are no less intense. Somewhat gracile compared to stags, and lacking antlers, they are swifter and more nimble. They hunt alongside the stags, running down and harrying prey on heaving, leaping thews. Does are goaded by the abandon of stags. They revel in the odors of them—anointed with gore, musk, and urine as they are—and are persuaded to mate by the outrageousness of their exploits. Post-hunt, does are responsible for the infamous signature of ekheinum terrain: They erect effigies using the bones or body parts of slain foes and prey. These totems litter their territorial boundaries; a warning and a pronouncement of lust and loyalty to stag and Beauty.
Ekheinum do not possess spoken language. They vocalize complexly but cannot form works. Whether or not they are capable of comprehending modern language is debated and untestable.
Complex technologies are largely unrepresented in ekheinum. They do not make fire—for they see in moonlight and tolerate cold—and they do not bend bows. Manual scraping and cutting tools, usually of bone, are common, as are all manner of hand weapons, usually spears and edged clubs. Notably, beastmen make their own camouflaged shelters, crude as they may be, and ignore ruins and abandoned structures almost as if blind to them.
Beastman populations have remained largely stable throughout the last millennium. In fact, flocks are expanding in some regions, namely east of Draum and upon the Moors So Sere, Firlund’s vast northern marchland. In the former location, they are thought to be expanding into climes vacated by fairies killed or displaced by the venture rush—älves and other otherworld life are usually hostile to beastmen, precluding them from otherworld-saturated lands. In the far North, the Moors abound with beastmen of a polar opposite variety: They are numerous, decorated, armored, and cunning, and said to be soldiers of the “Snow Queen,” a folkloric figure of dubious veracity first concocted by the Ward Rangers, who use her to ascribe meaning to the anomalies they see in the monsters of that vast march. They claim the Snow Queen is a älfenqueen in the fairytale mold, one who has uniquely attained command of both fairy life and human sorcery.
Beastman-populated woods lie in the way of eastward expansion, putting them at odds with the missionary heart of Imperative Destiny, the expansionist philosophy stating that Civilization must charge Eastward to reclaim land lost to the Otherworld and prevent its continued assumption of more of the Coast. Strategists believe that beastmen can be extirpated from the Coast once and for all with concerned multinational effort, finally putting an end to one of Idra’s last vestiges. However, aartimetric ecologists warn of the dangers of such an extermination: They pose that the Coast’s many beastman-stocked forbidden forests serve as a buffer against the Other; a self-sustaining buffer created long ago by Idrans—who were not ignorant of the Other and the eco-existential threat it poses—to maintain and protect the idyll of the natural world. To destroy the buffer would be to unleash the Other, and the Coast does not command the resources to wage war on a world-wide eastern front twice in succession.
For now, the beastmen persist. They hold down the land.
other Beastman facts
- Beastmen are a fixture of Coastal ballet and morality plays, often interpreted as fauns or satyrs. They are fetishized icons of sexuality and primal violence. Many a classic ballet features a lone ballerino pursued by leaping, gracile fauns suggestively dressed in fur leggings—if dressed much at all—and countless more have choreographed “wild hunt” sequences set to stirring rhythmic scores over the thrust of strapping, glistening “beastmen” across stage. These productions have enduring popularity.
- Most folk are unaware that beastmen are real. Only recently have newspaper exposés run real photographs of gory, broad-chested beastmen on an ominous forest verge. They claim beastmen populations have sprouted within 200 kilometers of population centers, well beyond their usual Eastern marchland range. This has inspired a run of panic-pieces and a bevy of penny dreadfuls eager to cash in on the fear of the rapacious “beast at the gate.”
- Ekhein biology, aesthetics, and behaviors are the product of Beautiful meddling, including their territoriality, their flagrant sexuality, their physiques, and their tendency to ignore structures. Ekheinum were made to “hold down” land, not develop it (or ruin it.) They were bred to be amusing and enjoyable to look at—according to a violent, stylized, and fetishistic sensibility. Even their propensity to avoid buildings is in-bred: Beauties desired their ekheinum lair not too close to their palaces.
- Ekheinum are theorized to understand and obey orders in Formal Idran, a dead language extant only in written form. It is written largely by libromancers—scholars authorized (or unauthorized) to correspond with incunabula. The way to accurately speak the Formal tongue lies in books that cannot speak. Even if intelligible language were spoken to them, the speaker would likely need to spoof the seeding Beauty’s authority to have any meaningful sway, a task likely impossible merely for the impossibility of determining exactly which Beauty birthed those specific beastmen’s ancestors.
- The recipe to create beastmen is likely not lost. It remains in the bound-up brain of some incunable—perhaps in many. Getting the recipe is doubtless easier than concocting it: All chimeras (save crude pigmen) require a philosopher’s stone to engender, and crafting one of those is among the pinnacle arts of sorcery, requiring a recipe rarer and more difficult than any individual chimera.