Gorge-Gnats

Overview

Gorge-Gnats are the gnats of the Blood River, among its River-Beasts. They drink the river and the living alike, and grow on it until each is as big as a thumb. One alone is a sting. A swarm can drain a traveller grey.

Appearance

A Gorge-Gnat hatches as small as any gnat and swells as it feeds. A grown one is the size of the top joint of a thumb, its abdomen a tight, glistening bag of dark red that glows faintly like the river, on thin legs that can barely carry it. Its wings are short for its weight and it flies heavily, low over the water, with a deep, wet drone like a bumblebee's. A swarm at dusk is a red haze over the banks, pulsing with the river's heartbeat. Crushed, a gnat bursts like a berry and smells of iron and sweet rot.

Habitat and Range

They breed in the soft, pulsing mud of the banks and among the oversized plants that grow there, and swarm over the water and the banks morning and evening. At dusk they drift out with the river's breath over the land it is draining.

Behaviour and Temperament

Gorge-Gnats feed on the river itself, and on anything living that comes near it. A swarm settles on a beast or a person in hundreds, and each bite is a small, warm sting. They are not driven off by smoke, and the more of them that feed, the more come. When they are full they drop back to the river's surface and rest there, and some, too heavy to rise, sink into it and become river.

Abilities

What they drink from the living goes to the river. Under a swarm a traveller grows weak, cold, and grey as their lifeforce is drawn off, faster than blood loss alone would explain, and the river beats stronger. Their bites heal at once, as wounds do on the banks, and leave no mark but the weakness.

Life Cycle

They breed in the bank mud and hatch within days. They live a few weeks, swell, and end in the river. In a year when the river drains its land hard, the swarms are vast.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing. The Hemophages are said to let the gnats feed on them, as on all the river's creatures. Travellers learn to stay off the banks at dawn and dusk, to cover their skin, and to keep moving; a beast tethered near the river overnight is found at morning grey and dying.

Lore and Belief

Farmers near a Blood River say the gnats carry the river's thirst into their fields and that their crops wither where the red haze falls; whether the gnats or the river itself does the draining is argued, and both may. Some believe a person bitten by a Gorge-Gnat will crave the river's water; the craving comes from drinking it, not from the bite.

Valley elders still date things from the summer the red haze came down over a whole village and the harvest and half the old folk went with it.

Where It Appears

• The Blood River