Deoth

Written by Patrick Stuart

ALIENATED FROM NATURE

IImagine if, when you looked at a tree or a flower unfurling, or a cloud crossing the sun, you felt as if you had seen a spider crossing your hand. Or if, when you saw a green shoot in fresh soil or a baby lamb, it felt as if you were looking at a skull, picked clean by insects and time. These things aren't necessarily awful, or even inherently ugly or monstrous, they can be said to have their own strange beauty. But they are strange, alien, and unpleasant. They are not like you.

The Deoth feel and intuit nature, in its immediate forms; trees, plants, forests, weather, wind, rain and storms, the sun (but not the stars) as something alien. Wherever they come from or however they were made, those things were not natural to them and no matter how long they have been here, those things remain other to them. The instinct never fades. They are not at home. For them, being in a meadow surrounded by flowers is like being surrounded by a field of crawling insects would be for you. Not necessarily awful, but not fun, and they feel the same way about natural growth as you do about decay. It’s not evil, but you wouldn't want to sit there staring at it.

BODY AND FORM

If Somon (Human) proportions are roughly 1 by 3 by 9, i.e. three times as wide and nine times as tall as they are thick, then Deoth proportions are more like 1-2-6, twice as wide and six times as tall as they are thick. They have slightly denser mass than Somon and roughly the same amount of flesh, just differently proportioned. This makes them heavy, wide, and strong.

Deoth live around 300 to 400 years of age, and have blood that is denser than water, doesn’t disperse in it, and condenses into cuboid crystals, like salt, when it dries out. Their bones are also thicker than a Somon’s

They are omnivores, like Somon, and can survive on very little, but they like to eat a LOT, especially foods heavy in carbs. They are happy if they can add in extra carbs as a drink at the same time. In addition, they will sometimes nibble small pieces of particular metal and can often identify metals by taste. They aren’t getting nutrition from them, but they may integrate trace elements into their senses. They like to drink alcohol, partly because their extremely fast calorie conversion means they have to work to get fat, and perhaps drinking aids them with their mild and continual alienation from the ‘natural’ world. Low-level alcoholism is common to many Deoth cultures.

SLEEP AND DREAMS

Deoth almost always lucid dream. They are aware they are dreaming and can change the nature of the dream. These dreams are of enormous precision, so Deoth will spend a lot of time in dreams planning and building, making and shaping. They have a near-perfect memory for objects and every Deoth has a kind of internal catalogue of plans and built things which they have developed from childhood.

They do not fundamentally need to sleep, but they can and do enjoy it. Their dreams of craft are one of the few pleasures they are afforded in their strange world and they are opportunistic sleepers. Sleep also re-energizes them a great deal, a regularly-sleeping Deoth will seem to have a lot more energy than a Somon on the same schedule and will usually wake up full of plans. Tired or poorly fed Deoth don’t dream, which is distressing for them, and their para-senses and craft skills suffer. This isn’t very noticeable to other races - to an outsider their gross physical actions remain the same.

Deoth find humanities formless memoryless dreams, dreams in which the dreamer not only cannot control what is happening but does not even know they are dreaming, exceptionally weird and borderline mystical.

SENSES

Deoth have a partial magnetic sense, like a pigeon or migrating bird. They describe it as a kind of ‘tightness’ in the air. They have a very precise pressure senses in their sinuses, like the Somon experience of quickly gaining or losing height, but much more exact. They always know exactly how deep or how high they are. They have a blotchy and imprecise infra-red sense and they can sense, but not ‘see’, the presence of ultraviolet light and even more high-frequency particles, which are probably interacting with trace-element mineral structures in the brain.

The combination of the magnetic sense, slight infra-red vision, a sense of ‘brightness’ from high-frequency particles, the pressure sense, and a complete absence of claustrophobia or of any fear of being trapped in a small space, means Deoth are very comfortable underground or in enclosed spaces of any kind. Somon become uncomfortable in these situations relatively quickly and Aeth even faster, but Deoth are completely happy rambling about through narrow tunnels for days, months, or forever really. There are no ‘infinite’ depths for them since they always know how deep they are, and they never have the sense of being crushed or buried.

CULTURE

Traditionally, a Deoth is meant to wear and use things that they made themselves. Most Deoth in the Blackriver have been ‘corrupted’, or just relaxed enough to make do with items available to all. It may be that those on the Blackriver are low-status, radical, outgoing, or chloeaphile enough to not care about ‘old ways’. The chaff of a deeper society, cast-offs and tourists.

GENDER

Deoth are less concerned with gender than Somon. The classic look is a bearded male and a tattooed and pierced female. However, males do shave occasionally, and they often don’t overtly portray gender. Deoth generally like to have something on their face, either a beard, a mask, tattoos, or some other form of body modification or piercing.

It is theorized that Deoth have a breeding season or some specific thing that activates sexual desire, with sexual desire being low or neutral the rest of the time. Whatever it is, they don’t talk about it much and others are often too embarrassed to ask.

Deoth are as easy to breed with as Aeth, with the same low likelihood of producing young and the near-impossibility of producing fertile young. However, since almost no human wants to sleep with a Deoth and they have little interest the other way, half-Deoth are much rarer than Half-Aeth, with Aeth being considered much more sociable, charismatic, attractive (to Somon) and generally sexually active.

INTEGRATION IN SOCIETY

There have been Deoth in the Blackriver cultures since before anyone can remember. They are usually allowed high-status functionary roles that generally don’t involve them interacting too much with people. Anywhere from Blacksmith, to Bureaucrat, to Executioner. However, they are usually kept out of Somon hierarchies and politics. Their tendency towards low sociability and disinterest in social position means they barely object. It is standard for most Deoth to have at least one or two of the personality traits we associate with Aspergers; difficulty with facial expressions, literalism, trouble with eye contact or metaphors. They are not necessarily very deep on the spectrum but it’s rare to meet one that has none of these markers at all. Just because they have difficulty in social situations does not mean they are necessarily anti-social. They can draw as much pleasure from the company of others as anyone, but their strange relationship to the world, strange mentality, intense focus, object obsession and long lives (300 to 400 years usually) mean they find it hard to maintain social bonds.

Generally, as they age and get more familiar with Somon they find ways to adapt to the surrounding culture. A local Deoth might be the village blacksmith, money changer, house builder, night watchman, village drunk, or all of the above. They live so long, and with such regular habits and private interests, that to Somon they seem almost to fade into the background. They can do well in the military, where social roles and reactions are all written down and their enormous capacity for work is rewarded. There are no Deoth Emperors or Kings, but you will sometimes find one acting as the Marcher Lord of a watch-tower on the margins of the Waste, a mix of military commander, colonist, monster fighter, and feudal lord.

The Deoth essentially built the Grey Cities and the material basis of the culture that has survived this long. It is hard to tell under the eons of decrepitude and grime, but beneath the tattered flags, collapsed icons to forgotten faiths, and crumbling spires, many of the key buildings, and much of the core design of the Grey Cities, is their work. Things must have been very different in that long-forgotten age.

THE STEEL KEEPS

For the Deoth of the Blackwater, the Steel Keeps are legendary places. They are described as mountains of steel or huge towers of metal, mistaken for shining castles but growing deep, deep into the earth, with mountains and forests grown up around them. Deoth legends say the Steel Keeps are what brought them here, from wherever they were before. Either falling from heaven, summoned directly, or rising up from the ground. The stories differ except to say that the Steel Keeps pierced the world and the Deoth came forth.

The Steel keeps are lost (for the most part). Lost to the Wastes, lost to monsters or time, or the children of Yggsthrathal, or to cultural change, left abandoned, ruined, and sinking. Most Deoth have some kind of vague dream of repairing or reconquering the Steel Keeps - or a specific one - though to exactly what effect they either do not know or will not tell. A vision of shining walls on a distant horizon hangs before their eyes - a dream that mutes the loneliness of a world that never feels quite right or makes sense.

One Keep is known, in the Mountains of Reality. Beorthonon, (popularly called ‘The Beothoborg in Blackwater), a sky-piercing shard that shines like ice, with black scree-slopes gathered around it like blankets. Deoth from there are even stranger than most Blackriver Deoth. High-minded and difficult to deal with, they say they make food by alchemy and nothing grows inside.

RUNIC MAGIC

The Deoth of Beorthonon maintain what is called their ‘Rune Magic’. They consider it not magic, but a means of forming stable dimensional knots that warp and refract reality nearby in a particular way. They are extremely angry about this runic magic being stolen and blame the more integrated Blackriver Deoth for sharing this skill with the Somon in ages past. Many Somon magics are based on Deoth concepts, adapted or misused, mixed with other arcane practices while the Deoth of the last Steel Keep are extremely unimpressed with how that has gone.

WAKING UP

As with Somon, there are more and more reports of Deoth springing into unlikely action. Striding into the ash to seize back names from Name-Takers, fighting spindle-limbed taskmasters, troubling or even directly defying the authorities. There have always been a few radical monster hunters, easy enough to divert into pointless or low-success missions out in the ash, but now things are getting really out of control. Who would have thought it, from the Deoth of all people?