The Surry keep to the deepest underground ecosystems, where no sunlight reaches and food is whatever the dark provides: fungi, giant insects, and whatever protein wanders into their territory, including unwary visitors. Their cannibalism is not malice. It is the plain arithmetic of a place that grows almost nothing, where flesh that walks in is flesh that can be eaten.
The making
The Surry did not pale by living in the dark. They were bleached in a single night they call the Sinking. Their founding gallery sat on the underside of the world, the deep floor where the lightless current wells up from below toward the Wastes, and one season that floor gave way. What came through was not water and not air but the deep dark itself, a current with no light anywhere in it, and it washed the whole sealed clan before anyone could climb clear. It took their color in one pass, leaving skin you can see the veins through, and it opened their eyes to read a world without a single lumen in it. The clan bred true from there. The same stroke that gave them sight in the dark made the light intolerable, so they cannot follow it back out. Everything the Surry are now, the white skin and the unblinking sight and the habit of reading all flesh as food, is the shape the dark left when it claimed them.
Surface dwellers find the Surry unsettling on sight and worse in conversation. They draw no moral line between an animal taken for the pot and a traveler taken the same way; both are protein, and protein is not a thing their kingdom wastes. To them this is not cruelty. It is simply how the deep has always fed.
Aspects
- All flesh feeds the deep
- Hunger knows no moral boundaries