Moon-Misers
"You open the box, and something climbs out. Something has a glistening carapace the colour of smoked sapphires. Something is made almost entirely of legs. Too many legs."[1]
Moon-misers are mysterious, bug-like creatures that reside on the roof of the Neath. Their colossal size and bioluminescence makes them visible from London, which has led Londoners to call them False Stars.
Their bluish glow is known as moonish light, which turns Apocyan when reflected off the crests of the waves of the Unterzee.
Biology
Moon-misers are insectoid in appearance, albeit with far too many legs which they use to walk along the cavern's roof. They are covered in a chitinous substance which they molt regularly. This molted chitin falls to the Unterzee in the form of glim, to be used for jewelry or burned to create a brilliant light and powerful noxious fumes.
One particularly useful secretion of theirs is moon-milk, a substance which causes the imbiber to fall madly in love with the first thing they see, be it a person, an object, or even a color. This obsession fades over the years and is shallow in comparison to real love. Perhaps a hybrid between a moon-miser and a human could produce a variant more amenable to human digestion, creating an effect indistinguishable from true love.
The matriarch of the moon-misers is the Moon-Mother. She is so large as to be confused for a great stalactite, and her glim carapace is notably darker than usual. Starved Men have hollowed out her insides and practice their Shapeling Arts within her with her amber secretions. The servants of the Moon-Mother have retained more sanity than most of their kind, and tend to her well-being.
Their reproductive cycle is as strange as everything else about them. One is born about once every decade. For this to happen, the False Stars must align into a particular arrangement known as the Counterfeit Constellation, and the child needs to be coerced from the womb using the Song of Birthing, which is customarily sung by the Moon-Mother. The infant must feed on nectar extracted from stalactites by its father (the jellied remains of some burrowing ceiling creature, perhaps), and must be swaddled in their mother's silk while their carapaces develop, which is produced at the moment of birth.
Boxfulls of Intrigue
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Astrology?
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
