Species
The people known across the shard-coasts as Fraxari are sentient, thorn-skinned succulents whose vascular flesh mingles plant fibre and pliant stone. Each adult body weaves lignin-rich strands around silicate granules, producing a living composite that fractures into razor flakes when struck and then seals again over days. Sap circulates in capillary veins, delivering both water and trace minerals scavenged from soil and sea fog; under sunlight the sap brightens from grey-green to washed amber as photosynthetic pigments quicken.
Physical form and sensory traits
A Fraxari stands upright on two jointed legs and balances its mass through an elongated spine that stores water the way a barbed yucca stores sap. Dense clusters of articulate thorns sprout along the forearms, shins, and nape; any sharp stress causes a few spines to snap free as flint-keen splinters. The face is triangular, framed by flexible vine-tendrils that can unfurl into thin leaves during bright hours. Round, dark eyes are recessed beneath a translucent mineral lens; beneath each lens a ring of pressure receptors senses vibration with precision equal to sight. Slender nose-slits sample humidity, salt, and trace metals, granting an uncanny ability to follow underground water seams or scent fresh-broken stone.
General size and body pattern
Most adults measure between seven and eight feet in height, yet mass remains modest—one hundred eighty to two hundred twenty pounds—because much of the trunk is a hollow reservoir. Colouration shifts with hydration: deep basalt grey during drought, pale limestone when engorged with water. Every decade a Fraxari flower-crest bursts from the scalp tendrils; petals resemble coloured glass shards, displaying the mineral profile of the diet—cobalt blues from copper sands, crimson if iron rich.
Life cycle
Germination begins as a thumb-sized seed-stone carried within a bloom on the matriline’s head until the seed darkens and drops. Planted in warm scree, each embryo anchors through a root-like foot and, after three years of slow photosynthetic growth, detaches to walk. Juveniles appear fragile — spines soft, reservoir thin — and therefore remain close to communal nurseries inside fortified quarry-gardens. Sexual maturity arrives on the seventeenth to nineteenth summer; at that moment the avatar gains the capacity to channel gear-linked magic. Average longevity spans two and a half centuries, though elder trunks may desiccate into brittle pillars if deprived of light.
Potential positives due to form
• Internal water cache allows survival for weeks amid shard deserts.
• Rapid self-sealing fibre grants natural resistance to laceration and limited regrowth of lost spines.
• Thorn clusters provide a near-constant supply of cutting edges for improvised tools or ritual fractures.
• Photosynthetic metabolism cuts daily food requirements by half under adequate sunlight.
• Mineral sense and vibration hearing excel at tracking quarry movement through stone halls and cliff tunnels.
Potential negatives due to form
• Severe cold crystallises sap, causing lattice fractures that heal slowly and leave white scars.
• Prolonged submersion leaches nutrients and induces root-sprout shock, weakening mobility.
• High flammability when desiccated; wildfire can flash-calcine outer tissue.
• Heavy salting of soil or weapon can draw water out of the body, producing rapid dehydration.
• Thorns caught in fine cloth or chain jerk painfully if snagged, complicating certain armours.
Tags: Thorned, Photosynthetic, Succulent, Silica-Spined, Matrilineal, Shard-Skinned, Water-Reservoir, Mineral-Sense, Vibration-Hearing, Hollow-Torso, Crown-Bloom, Spine-Sheath, Flammable-Desiccated, Quarry-Born, Plant-Composite, Self-Sealing, Breaker-Blood
Specialised item slots
Beyond standard humanoid placements, the Fraxari possess two additional slots:
• Crown-Bloom Slot – worn circlets, shard-petal helms, or pollination veils anchor directly to the seasonal flower structure without occupying the head slot reserved for eyewear and crowns.
• Spine-Sheath Slot – a harness along the dorsal ridge can carry up to three shard-blades or fracture rods; because the items rest within loosened thorns, they count as a single sheath slot and may be drawn by retracting the spines that hold them.
Environmental adaptability
Evolved on sun-blasted scree and knife-edge mesas, the Fraxari thrive in rocky uplands, basalt deserts, and quarry cities where stone dust thickens the air. High ambient magic and flickering tectonic ley-flows nourish their mineral metabolism. They tolerate aridity and alkalinity yet struggle in humid jungle or polar zones unless equipped with heat-lattice cloaks or crystal furnace charms to maintain internal equilibrium.
Other information
The matrilineal royal house—known formally as the Prism-Bloom Line—features individuals whose crown flowers refold into glassy diadems at will, a visible marker of sovereignty during council or combat alike. In governance the Fraxari uphold a doctrine called the Lease of Shards: all land remains the Crownstone’s bedrock, yet every citizen may quarry or cultivate so long as a tenth of each harvest’s weight in thorns, ore, or coin flows upward. Public festivals revolve around ritual fracture; citizens present dull core stones to Breaker-priests, who strike them so that newborn spines rain across the crowd. Children scramble to claim a still-keen shard, symbolising the moment they will one day bloom and join the adult tier.
Thorn-Cavity Who Spoke With Shards
Long before the sky cracked along its secret seam, and before water remembered how to climb inside the stone, there walked a lone Fraxari who the cliff tribes later mis-named Khi-Sar the Cavity-Bearer. The scrolls say Khi-Sar’s shape was woven in the dry hush after the Third Furnace Season, when the mountain spasms shivered every root and turned sap to glass. In those mornings the sun sat low, dull as a burnt ember, and the island’s thorn-folk stretched their limbs but found no warmth for photosong.
Khi-Sar, being hollow from neck to pelvis — that cave inside the chest where other seed-stones dream — felt the chill bite worst. Sap retreated to the ankles; thorns dulled and fell off like tired moons. The matriarchs gathered beneath split basalt and called to Klagg for a fracture of mercy, yet the god of sudden edges kept silence, for nothing had been broken that day.
So spoke the woven record:
“Khi-Sar looked at empty self and decided, ‘I will borrow the sun and pour it into my hollow, so sap will sing again.’”
These words remain carved crooked on six wind-eroded tablets, their vowels partly eaten by salt.
The journey began westward where the horizon grows teeth. Khi-Sar’s feet bled mineral dust, and each step cracked a spine that re-grew behind, leaving a path of green shards for starving kin to gnaw. Birds of hammer-beak followed, mistaking the shards for fish scales and snapping their tongues to splinters. Thus the road was guarded by accidental pain.
At the twentieth twilight Khi-Sar reached the Plateau of Glassfall, where spears of silica rain forever from a hanging cliff. There a stranger waited — a Stillex beast made of echoing ribs, said to be the first child of sound. Its question was reported badly by the translators:
“Why is your inside outside, and your outside thirsting for fire?”
Khi-Sar answered in Brak-Sor so ancient that consonants scraped each other raw:
“Because hollowness is thirst, and thirst is proof the vessel was once promised water.”
The Stillex beast laughed until its ribs shattered into bells. Hearing such music, Klagg’s eyelash twitched somewhere beneath the crust, and a seam split open across the plateau. Magma breath surged upward. Khi-Sar leaned over the newborn crack and drank heat through the hollow, filling the inner cavity with red luminosity. In that moment every thorn flashed molten gold, and the succulents of half the island turned their heads east, believing dawn had returned.
The scroll continues after several lost lines:
“…and Khi-Sar carried the glowing self back toward the matriarch groves. But each mile cooled the fire; droplets of light leaked through hairline pores, seeding tiny ember-plants that withered as soon as they bloomed. By the time Khi-Sar reached the basalt sanctuary, only a fist of warmth remained.”
The matriarch council cut their palms on flint and mixed blood with sap, forming a circle around Khi-Sar. They struck their hammerstones upon the great Exhausted Core at the grove’s center — that stone already beaten smooth by centuries of prayers. On the seventh strike the Core refused to break. Despair loomed.
Then Khi-Sar, whose body was built for fracture, whispered:
“Let me be the shard that sets the others free.”
With those words Khi-Sar slammed a forearm against the Core. The living composite shattered, arm separating into a thousand keen flakes; the Core split likewise, at last. Sun-fire trapped within the Forearm Shard sprayed outward, lighting thorns of every witness. Sap woke, photosong resumed, and Furnace Season ended two cycles early.
Where Khi-Sar’s arm had been, new fibres soon wove pale green filaments. Though forever scarred, Khi-Sar walked again, teaching that a hollow space can carry dawn if one dares fracture for the journey.
Tablets conclude with a line the translators struggled to smooth:
“Better to wander cracked and bright than sit unbroken in endless night.”
Moral of the Tale-Scroll:
Only the vessel that accepts breaking may carry the light that saves the grove.