Overview
The Tunnel-Carry Rat Man is the quick, certain eye of The Underwarrens, a clever, grey-furred underwarren kin who carries the colony's goods and its people through the tunnels, the underwarren's quick, patient, and most certain eye. It stands well under a meter tall, watchful and quick, with the kind of certainty that comes from a life measured in carried loads rather than years. Where the Word-Keep rat men keep the word, the Tunnel-Carry rat men of the underwarrens carry the load, and they have been carrying the first load in the first tunnel for a very long time.
Habitat
The Tunnel-Carry Rat Man keeps to the open tunnels of The Underwarrens, a range of hidden, waste-fed ground where the undercity is a promise and the secret is a treaty. Its dwellings are coaxed into the faces of the tunnel-walls, hollows of packed earth and laid stone that catch the dim tunnel-light on their inner face and the shelter of the underwarren on their outer. It favors the older open tunnels where the paths run longest and the carrying is oldest, the places where a load can be carried without the undercity's own motion breaking it.
Appearance
A Tunnel-Carry Rat Man stands about 0.60 m tall, small and quick, with coarse grey-brown to black fur that reads as bright in the dim tunnel-light. Its whiskers are long and fine, bone-white-tipped, and the carry-knot at the root of its left whisker-braid is a deliberate mark, one for every load it has carried, worn as a record of the long art of the path. Its eyes are small, dark, and certain beneath the brow, the color of the tunnel-light's own glow at dusk. It wears a patchwork of leather and cloth in muted grey and deep brown and carries a single carry-stone at its belt, set with a single path-loop at the brow, the loop of a carrier.
Behaviour
The Tunnel-Carry Rat Man is quick, patient, and profoundly certain, a creature of long carries and long attention who rarely surprises and rarely is surprised. It observes before it carries, often for hours, watching a tunnel or a person or a bargain until it understands the shape of the path, 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 Tunnel-Carry rat man is a debt the underwarren will keep long after the carrier has gone.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The Tunnel-Carry rat man is no open-ground fighter and carries no blade, for its power is the load and the path itself, not force. Its primary defense is the tunnel, for it knows every corner of the open tunnels and can lead a pursuer through The Underwarrens for days until the pursuit loses its nerve and its balance. Should it be forced to act, a Tunnel-Carry rat man is quick and precise, 6 m/s through the tunnels and low, and it fights to unmake a threat rather than to wound it, cutting a root, dimming a light, or carrying a load until the threat is spent.
Magic Alignment
The Tunnel-Carry rat man is attuned to the long word of the path, for the path is the carrying and the carrying is the whole of its power, and a rat man that has a tunnel and a load and a path does not need a spell that is not its own. It is not attuned to any art that is not the path, and it is not bound by any word that is not its own, and the not being bound is the whole of its way of being free. Its one signature thing is the carrying, which is not a magic but is a thing that the rat men of the underwarrens have carried for a very long time, and the carrying is the path, and the path is the whole of its power.
Society
The Tunnel-Carry Rat Men live in The Underwarrens in colonies of hundreds, bound by the loads they carry together rather than by blood or by place, led by an elected Whisker. There is no elder and no ruler, for a rat man that has carried the most and walked the most is simply the one the others listen to, and the listening is a carrying and the carrying is the whole of their society. Decisions are made in the tunnel, by a company of dark-eyed carriers that has already decided and is only agreeing, and once made they are kept, for a rat man that breaks a carrying is a rat man that has broken the whole of what it is.
Culture & Lore
The culture of the Tunnel-Carry Rat Man is a culture of the carried load, a whole way of life organized around the idea that a word that is quick and patient is the only honest word in the underwarren. They keep no records, for a rat man that has carried a load does not need a record, the carrying is the record, and the carrying is quick and patient and does not fade. Their stories are slow and quick, told in the tunnel at the dusk, and they are stories of loads carried and paths walked and the quick, patient difference between them, told in a voice that is barked and means every carrying.
Home
The Underwarrens is the Tunnel-Carry rat man's home and its carrying, a range of hidden, waste-fed ground where the undercity is a promise and the secret is a treaty, where the rat men carry their loads and their quick, patient words. It is a strange and quick place, one that stands as if it were a very old animal holding its breath, and the Tunnel-Carry rat man has learned to live inside that undercity rather than against it. The dim tunnel-light that runs up through the open tunnels is the underwarren's own, a soft grey glow that the rat men have come to read as the color of a carried load.
Relations
The Tunnel-Carry Rat Man keeps a long, careful truce with the other creatures of The Underwarrens, a truce of carried loads that has held for a long time and is the oldest and most fragile thing in the underwarren. To the dim tunnel-light of the open tunnels the Tunnel-Carry rat man is a quick, patient, and absolutely certain presence, a dark-eyed carrier that is at home in the open tunnels and in the path, and the light has learned to glow wide and let the carryings pass, for a rat man that has carried you has decided you are a keeping and not a lesson.
In the Story
In the story of the underwarren, the Tunnel-Carry Rat Man is the quick, patient edge of the tale, the place where the loads are carried and a path is walked and a carrying is read. It is the figure that carries a new load in the dusk and holds the path very quick and very certain, and the figure that, when the truce with the word-keeping rat men grows thin, is the one that remembers what the truce cost and keeps the old load quick and patient and absolutely certain.