Threshold Crickets

Overview

Threshold crickets are small pale crickets that the Dark Elf houses of the Roothollows keep in their threshold chambers, where the way enters and strangers are received. They chirp steadily through the watch, and fall silent when someone they do not know comes in. A house calls them its oldest door-warden.

Appearance

A threshold cricket is the length of a fingernail to a thumb-joint: a humped, wingless cricket with very long, fine feelers, longer than its body, and long, strong hind legs. It is pale, ivory to light amber, nearly translucent, with small dark eyes it hardly needs.

The males chirp by rubbing a ridge on the hind leg against the body, a soft, dry, steady sound like a slow clock, and a threshold chamber with a good colony of them is never quite silent. They move in long, sudden leaps, and stand still with feelers waving.

Habitat and Range

Threshold crickets live in the dry chambers and store-hollows of the Roothollows, among the root strands and in cracks, and at the edge of the Stonewake Deeps where root gives way to stone. The houses keep their own colonies in the threshold chamber, in niches cut in the living root for them.

Behaviour and Temperament

They eat fungus, crumbs, dead root, and the dead of their own kind. They live in colonies and chirp together. They feel the ground and the air through their feet and feelers: a footfall of a weight they do not know, a breath of air from an opened way, a change in warmth, stops their chirping. They grow used to the people they live with and keep on chirping through the house's ordinary comings and goings.

Life Cycle

Females lay their eggs in the soft fungus-litter of the niches. The young look like small adults and moult several times as they grow. A cricket lives about a year, and a colony for as long as the house keeps it; some houses say their colony is as old as the house.

Uses and Dangers

They give warning. A route keeper on the threshold watch listens to the crickets as well as the way, and a silence among them sends the keeper to the door. They are harmless, and they eat a little of the fungus stores.

Lore and Belief

A house's crickets are part of its threshold, and a house that moves takes its colony with it; a newcomer admitted to an outer chamber is said to have been accepted when the threshold crickets no longer fall silent for them. Some houses say the crickets know a liar's step. A house whose crickets die out without cause gathers to ask what has gone wrong with its door.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals