River-Beasts
River-Beasts is the name for the creatures that have mutated by living in the Blood River. The river gives everything that drinks from it too much life, and what lives on it for long grows into something larger, hungrier, and harder to kill than its kind. Two of them are named and feared enough to have their own pages, the Blood-Eels and the Blood-Spinners; the rest are ordinary animals pushed past their shape.
Appearance
A River-Beast is usually recognizable as what it was, and wrong in the way the plants of the banks are wrong: swollen. Frogs grow to the size of dogs, their skins mottled crimson; water rats grow fat as piglets; a heron may stand taller than a man, its legs red to the knee. Their veins show dark through thin skin, their wounds close over as they are made, and many carry growths of extra flesh, a second jaw or a spur of bone, where the river’s surplus had nowhere else to go.
They smell of the river, iron and copper and wet earth, and the bank around them squelches and pulses like the ground everywhere near the flow.
Habitat and Range
They live in the flow, along the soft banks, and in the oversized growth that crowds the river’s edges. Their numbers follow the river’s own: plentiful while it runs, crowding the last pools as it sinks.
Behaviour and Temperament
River-Beasts are always hungry, because the river’s gift burns through them as fast as it is given. Grazers strip the banks; hunters take anything warm that comes close, including each other. Many follow the river’s pulse, growing restless when it surges at a death and sluggish when it recedes. They do not fear people the way their kin elsewhere do, and they gather where blood is spilled.
Abilities
They heal quickly, grow beyond their kind’s size, and need far more feeding than ordinary animals. A River-Beast carried away from the river does not keep its strength: it weakens and often dies of the same hunger that made it.
Life Cycle
They breed fast and grow faster, and a clutch laid on the banks can reach full size in a season. When the river withdraws, many die in the thirst that follows, and their remains are taken up into the flow if it is still there to take them.
Uses and Dangers
Hunters on the edge of a Blood River sometimes take River-Beasts for their meat and hides, which are thick and heal over small cuts for a while after the kill. The meat is said to make the eater hungry for more. Their danger is to stray livestock, to children at the bank, and to anyone who mistakes a swollen familiar animal for a harmless one.
Lore and Belief
Farmers whose land a river drains blame the River-Beasts for the dead fields, though the river does that itself. Some valleys hold that eating river meat lets a little of the river’s healing into the eater; physicians answer that it lets in the river’s hunger as well.
Valleys a river has woken in pay beast-hunters by the head for what crawls out of it, and the hunters say a River-Beast heals as fast as it is wounded while it stands in the water; the trick is to drag it out.