Overview
The Debt-Carry Leech Folk is the clannish, quick edge of The Gullet Pits, a pale, quick parasitic marsh-kin of the blood pits who carries the debt and keeps the shallow rings, the pit's clannish, quick, and most certain edge. It stands just under 1.44 m tall, pale and quick, with the kind of certainty that comes from a life measured in kept debts rather than years. Where the Pit-Sense leech folk senses the current, the Debt-Carry leech folk of the pit carries the debt, and it has been carrying the first debt in the first pit for a very long time.
Habitat
The Debt-Carry Leech Folk keeps to the shallow rings of The Gullet Pits, a blood pit of the marsh where the surface is a constant pale shimmer and the air is a constant drip. Its dwellings are hollows of wet stone and kept blood, their floors dissolving and re-forming with the drip, their faces catching the pale shimmer of the pit on the inside and the shelter of the stone on the outside. It favors the shallower rings where the debt runs widest and the carrying is widest, the places where a debt can be carried without the pit's own motion breaking it.
Appearance
A Debt-Carry Leech Folk is about 1.44 m tall, pale and quick, with wet pale-grey skin that reads as cold in the pale shimmer-light. Its flanks carry the sea-black leech-rings, a deliberate mark worn as a record of the long art of the carrying, and its jaw ends in the dull maroon lips of the pit, the color of the pit's own blood at low drip. Its eyes are washed-out pit-white, bright and certain beneath the brow, and they hold still in a way that no other eye in the pit does — they are reading the debt.
Behaviour
The Debt-Carry Leech Folk is clannish, quick, and profoundly territorial, a creature of long debts and long attention who rarely surprises and rarely is surprised. It waits before it carries, often for hours, waiting on a ring or a stranger or a debt until it understands the shape of the bite, and only then does it carry, and then with an exactness that feels rehearsed over years. It is not unkind, but it is not easily moved, and a debt named by a Debt-Carry leech folk is a debt the pit will keep long after the carrier has gone.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The Debt-Carry leech folk is no open-marsh fighter and carries no blade, for its power is the carry and the pit itself, not force. Its primary defense is the pit, for it knows every hollow of the shallow rings and can lead a pursuer through The Gullet Pits until the pursuit loses its nerve and its footing in the dissolving floor. Should it be forced to act, a Debt-Carry leech folk is quick and precise, 4 m/s across the pale shimmer and low, and it fights to unmake a threat rather than to wound it, dimming a light, holding a ring, or carrying until the threat is spent.
Magic Alignment
The Debt-Carry leech folk is attuned to the long word of the pit, for the word is the carrying and the carrying is the whole of its power, and a leech folk that has a pit and a jaw and a debt does not need a spell that is not its own. Its primary domain is divination, and its named powers are the pit-sense, the dark-sight, and the debt-carry, and it is not attuned to any art that is not the pit's own, and the not being attuned is the whole of its way of being free.
Society
The Debt-Carry Leech Folk keep to The Gullet Pits in clannish, quick pits of ten to thirty, bound by the debts they carry rather than by blood or by place, led by the Ledger-Keeper. There is no elder beyond the Ledger-Keeper, for a leech folk that has carried the most and kept the most is simply the one the others listen to, and the listening is a carry and the carry is the whole of their society. Decisions are made on the ring, by a company of washed-eyed carriers that has already decided and is only agreeing, and once made they are kept, for a leech folk that breaks a carrying is a leech folk that has broken the whole of what it is.
Culture & Lore
The culture of the Debt-Carry Leech Folk is a culture of the kept debt, a whole way of life organized around the idea that a word that is clannish and quick is the only honest word in the pit. They keep no records, for a leech folk that has carried a debt does not need a record, the carrying is the record, and the carrying is clannish and quick and does not fade. Their stories are slow and quick, told on the ring at the low drip, and they are stories of debts carried and ledgers kept and the clannish, quick difference between them, told in a voice that is dripping and means every carrying.
Home
The Gullet Pits are the Debt-Carry leech folk's home and its carrying, a blood pit of the marsh where the surface is a constant pale shimmer and the air is a constant drip, where the leech folk carries its debts and keeps its clannish, quick words. It is a strange and quick place, one that stands as if it were a very old animal holding its breath, and the Debt-Carry leech folk has learned to live in that pit rather than against it. The pale shimmer of the pit that runs across the shallow rings is the pit's own, a cold light that the leech folk has come to read as the color of a kept debt.
Relations
The Debt-Carry Leech Folk keeps a long, careful truce with the other creatures of The Gullet Pits, a truce of kept debts that has held for a long time and is the oldest and most fragile thing in the wet stone. To the pale shimmer of the shallow rings the Debt-Carry leech folk is a clannish, quick, and absolutely territorial presence, a washed-eyed carrier that is at home in the rings and on the debt, and the shimmer has learned to glow wide and let the carries pass, for a leech folk that has carried you has decided you are a promise and not a lesson.
In the Story
The six who arrived through the The Threshold never came up to the pit, but the pit has been carrying since the oaths were sworn below, and the shallow rings's debt-carriers have been carrying a day earlier than they should. This season a ledger came back with an entry the pit had not kept — an entry that the Ledger-Keeper does not remember, and the not-remembering is the whole of the warning, because the pit keeps its ledger, and the ledger has started to write itself. The Debt-Carry sees the debt the ledger is keeping, and the debt is the whole of the story's edge.