Dust-Eaters

Overview

The Dust-Eaters are the people of the Parched, a plane where water and food are all but absent and every living thing must consume before it is consumed. Their bodies waste nothing and their minds count everything, and to a traveller they are as likely to be trading partners as hunters.

Appearance

A Dust-Eater is of about Human height but gaunt, with long, ropy muscles and no fat at all. The skin is like tanned hide, brown to ochre, creased and hard, and it hardly shows a wound. The face is sharp and angular, high in the cheek, with small dark eyes set deep against the glare. The mouth is the striking thing: wide, lipless, and full of small, close-set teeth, made to strip and crack anything once alive. A ridge of glands swells under the jaw and at the throat, working as they breathe.

They wrap themselves in pale cloth and leather against the sun and sand, and carry their water hidden. They move in short, quick bursts and then stand perfectly still, conserving themselves. Their voices are dry and rasping. They smell of dust and old leather.

Habitat and Range

They live across the deserts, cracked mud flats, and canyons of the Parched, in small, wary groups that hold a stretch of ground and the deep seeps of moisture in it. Every group knows where water lies in its rock and guards the knowledge.

Behaviour and Temperament

To a Dust-Eater every meeting is a negotiation over resources, and trust is a luxury no one can afford. Strangers are competitors or prey. They are territorial and aggressive, but also cunning: they will trade when it pays, keep a bargain while it pays, and kill for a waterskin when that pays better. Charity is a concept they do not have, and generosity seems to them a kind of stupidity.

Abilities

Glands in a Dust-Eater's throat draw trace moisture out of rock, sand, and even the air, so that one can live where nothing else can find water. They can digest almost anything that was ever alive, bone and dried sinew included, and they produce almost no waste.

Life Cycle

They bear few children and raise them hard; a child is taught the seeps of its ground before it is taught anything else. They live about as long as Humans, if the plane allows it. Their dead are not buried: nothing on the Parched is wasted.

Uses and Dangers

They know the plane's seeps, its salts, and its crystals, and a traveller who can pay them, in clean water above all, gets a guide and sometimes an ally. A flask of water buys loyalty from them as surely as anything does. Their danger is that a traveller who cannot pay is something else they can use.

Lore and Belief

Out of the Dry Gates, abandoned wells that go down too far and oases that are thin places in disguise, come tales of desert people who drink stone and eat bones, and the tale is true. Some dry-country stories on Caeldon blame them for wells that go dry, as though they drank them from the other side; the Parched does pull at water, but no one has shown that the Dust-Eaters do.

Delvers who cross for the Dry Wells' relics hire Dust-Eaters as guides when they can and sleep with their waterskins under them when they do, and the tale of the guide who led a whole band to a False Well and drank their blood afterwards is the reason.

Where It Appears

• The Parched
• Writers' Guide: The Planes, Glossary