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Life as a troglodyte is nasty, brutish, and, as Zekt can now testify, short.
Troglodytes are a species of subterranean lizard-like humanoids native to the Material Plane. They have language—with a pheromonal element as well as a spoken one—and in the last few centuries they’ve invented a basic writing system that’s just starting to develop from single pictograms into something with grammar. They’re intelligent enough to understand Good and Evil, Law and Chaos. They have an alignment (usually Chaotic Evil) and, like the other native sapients of this plane, an immortal soul. Therefore, when they die, they are judged and placed in one of the four afterlives.
Zekt was born to two troglodytes of the Paletooth tribe, which dwelt in a cave network beneath the western end of the Snowcap Mountains. She was one of two survivors of her clutch, the two of them having killed and eaten first their fellow hatchling, then the unhatched eggs, within hours of their birth. Their parents did nothing to stop them; they had nothing else to feed their starving newborns.
The Paletooth tribe was neither large nor well-equipped, even by the standards of troglodytes. Some tribes might have a handful of metal tools and weapons looted from past victims, but not this one. Troglodytes don’t have the tools, knowledge base, or labour force to mine and smelt ore. The only money they have is, again, looted from the travellers they kill, which makes traders reluctant to deal with them for fear they, too, will be killed and eaten. They’re limited to flint and bone.
Zekt’s most prized possession was a bone knife given to her by her mother, which had been made by her mother. The bone it was carved from had belonged to Zekt’s great-grandfather. One particularly long and cold winter, Zekt used it to slit open her mother’s belly while she slept, and devoured her still-warm organs.
Troglodytes are obligate carnivores. They don’t farm livestock: for one, livestock animals do not tend to thrive underground, and troglodytes cannot stand the glare of sunlight; and for another, an animal you keep alive so it can breed and give you more animals later is one you can’t eat now, when you and your children are starving. Instead, troglodytes are hunters, scavengers, and—as may be obvious at this point—cannibals.
Even in summer, there’s never quite enough food to go around. In winter, when the average troglodyte tribe can scrounge enough to stretch to half the tribe if everyone tightens their metaphorical belts, even the tightest-run operation will have people glancing at each other and muttering about dead weight—and it’s not a huge leap from ‘dead weight’ to ‘dead meat’. The three most common causes of death among troglodytes are disease, starvation, and other troglodytes.
Zekt, at her death, was that rarest of rarities: a fat troglodyte. Not fat by the standards of more comfortable societies, perhaps, but she had enough meat on her bones that you couldn’t see where the bones were, and a little more to spare.
Over the course of her life, she participated in killing and eating twenty-seven travellers who passed too close to the Paletooth tribe’s lair after dark. One was pregnant; another had young children at home who subsequently froze to death. Zekt also personally killed and ate eleven of her tribemates, ambushing most of them in their sleep, including her mother and three of her siblings. She never had children, so there is no way to know whether she would have eaten them just as readily.
She was killed in her sleep by her cousin, L’thetik. She was fifteen.
Like most troglodytes who bother with the gods at all, Zekt’s parents dedicated her to Ota, the Mother Storm, in a ceremony a few days after her birth. Ota is Chaotic Evil, which means that, unless there are strong indications to the contrary, anyone dedicated to her goes to the Maelstrom, the Chaotic Evil afterlife.
