The Tytheri are musclebound orcs with bleached-white skin and razor-sharp teeth, able to smell blood from miles off. The pallor and the blood-scent are not earned by any one Tytheri; a Tytheri is born with both. Both trace to the ichor they harvest from the Agony Stones, a cursed region in their territory that even other Tytheri approach with caution. The ichor is the blood of a vast and ancient thing that has been dying there since long before the orcs were made.
The making
The Tytheri are Kajiit-born orcs like every other line, but the trait that sets them apart was written long afterward, and not by the eruption. When their tribe was driven off arable country and onto the Agony Stones, the founding clan did not sip the ichor the careful way today's harvesting parties do. They were saturated in it, sheltering deep in the formations through a season they could not leave, soaked in the blood of a being so vast that its dying is counted in eons. That blood holds the charge of one of the world's oldest catastrophes. Sipped in careful measures it addicts; absorbed in that volume it remakes the body outright. The clan walked out bleached bone-white and able to smell blood across miles, the Dying One's own substance lodged in their flesh. Every Tytheri born since comes pale and blood-keen without ever having tasted the ichor. So the harvesting the whole culture turns on did not make them what they are; the founding did. What the ichor does now is wake what the founding left latent.
Within their society, Tythmasters—orcs fed the richest concentrations of this magical blood—grow to enormous size, reaching 10 feet in height as they become the leaders of their people. But the ichor exacts a price: long-term consumption deadens emotion until violence is the only thing that makes them feel alive.
These orcs are constantly at war with neighboring Kadroka, whose dragon-king they have trapped through means they do not fully understand. Their entire culture revolves around blood, combat, and the pursuit of ever-greater physical power—a pursuit that has become an addiction with no cure.
Aspects
- Hunter who smells blood on the wind
- Devoted to the crimson path