“In settlements, they could be tempered by grudging civility, their brutish nature held in check by the need to coexist.” [B1.C15]
Since 625, Bormen started taking over the southern settlements amidst the Barnstreams, actively suppressing tairan influence.
TRIVIA
Appearance
BUILD
They are built like a beast of burden, with dense muscle packed onto a squat frame covered in thick fur. Their strength comes from sheer bulk and brute force.
EYES AND COORDINATED ATTENTION
"Bormen had tiny, beady eyes set deeply into their faces, which meant that they always moved their whole head to look around. And they did look. It was disturbing, especially when there were more of them. When there was a pack of them out in the open and settlement people passed by, you could see them literally turn, from person to person as their attention shifted, the same thick motion replicated across every neck. It was creepy to watch, and even worse when it was your turn.
Yu knew what bormen were. Everyone in the settlements knew. You needed to watch them, always, because they could lash out any second, without pattern of warning and without provocation. They could turn on you from any distance, for anything or nothing at all. But it was one thing to know that, and another to feel it. It was one thing to pass danger in the street, keeping your head down, and measuring your five plus one steps plus as many more as possible. And then it was an entirely different kind of terror to see the danger staring back at you; when a bunch of three meter brutes all together, suddenly, angled their massive heads and focussed solemnly on you." Yu in [B1.C19]
Communication
Bormen show difficulties in learning the common language. They speak a distorted, often simplified form of Teh.
Social Standing
"[Their] – again using the word as the most of abstract placeholders – culture did not seem to go anywhere but backwards. They were a peoples that rotted in place. Their only tradition was decline." [B1.C19]
Amongst the original Barnstrem settler races, bormen are disregarded as selfish brutes. They are feared for their physical strenght.
"He knew too well how brutish bormen were, how impulsive, how often they turned from words to violence, and just how quickly they lashed out against all need for caution and common sense." [B1.C18]
"He had been taught, repeatedly and harshly, to keep a five-step distance to any borman. And that was if he was in public, with other people watching. He knew that a borman could crush a full-grown fina’s head with one paw" [B1.C18]
HABITATION
BARNSTREAM SETTLEMENTS
DISRUPTING SOCIETY
"Where the borman took over, all of it went to shits. They did not maintain the established organisation of things, because they were either too savage to uphold order or too stupid to actually understand civilised administration in the first place. No structures lasted. No archives held.
'Maintenance is in a peoples’ culture, not in their nature', Tria had said once. 'It is the choice to live a more strenuous and restrained present, in exchange for a safer tomorrow. It is in the culture of those who live for the generations that come after them, not for their own selfish, momentary pleasures.'
It was not just incompetence — though there was plenty of that. It was deliberate. It was useful to them.
'Disorder is a weapon. A way to disrupt and dispute and destroy the trail of tairan heritage and, with it, their rightful claims to these lands. To let bormen take over is to set back a cultured society three hundred years. It is a passive war', Tria had said. [B1.C18]
REPARATION RIGHTS TO HUMANS
"Tria had told him what the bormen did to their humans. What they did to those given as restitution for the old wars, under their repulsive Reparation Rights. Yu had never wanted to know any of it, but Tria had insisted. She had told him in great detail, 'because these atrocities do not deserve to be forgotten'. And oh yes, it was brutal. It was disgusting. It was monstrous. They were only humans, but still, what the bormen did with them were things not permitted even with animals." [B1.C18]
Opposing bormen, Tria eventually abolished their Reparation Rights, which grated at lest one human to each settlemengt borman. Her official document reads one of the many excerpts of her determined speeches: "If humans draw such cruelty out of our midst, if their presence alone degrades our civility so easily, even now, then their war on us has not yet ended." [B1.C18]
"There were still a few settlement bormen who owned humans, simply because they got them before the selling ban. Their ownership remained legal under the oldest Reparation Rights. But the issue was the cause for great tension, with the potential for another civil war. The bormen refused to give up their humans. The tairan lacked the manpower to take them by force. From that stalemate grew the unspoken consensus to simply wait it out, to let the problem resolve itself when the last privately owned humans finally died out. In the meantime, those rare cases of non-habitat humans were hidden from sight. That was a rule not confined to the Barnstreams but upheld across the continent. Humans did not walk unbound. [...] They were meant to be locked away. Whatever their owners did to them was supposed to stay behind closed doors." [B1.C18]
INDIVIDUAL BORMEN
A glossary of characters that have been mentioned or appeared.
Gurs Farr-Rah
Abilities: Unknown.
Age: Unknown.
First appearance: [B1.C15] Albweiss Mountain Guild guard.
"Gurs Farr-Rah, a borman, had been as coarse and disdainful as any of his kind Yu had ever met. Built like a beast of burden, with dense muscle packed onto a squat frame, Gurs carried the air of something feral, something never fully tamed. His thick fur was the colour of riverbed clay. His face and paws were of a much darker brown, though marred by jagged white scars. The low-set, black eyes beneath his heavy brow made no effort to disguise their contempt. He had barely spoken during their introduction, but words had not been necessary. Yu had seen the curled lip, the stiff posture, the subtle flare of the nostrils. The disgust. So much for politeness." [B1.C15]
Gurs is one of the residentual guards at the Albweiss Mountain Guild.
He speaks a distorted form of Teh and shows a rather limited understanding of magic.
Kel-Khadar
Abilities: Unknown.
Age: Unknown.
First appearance: [B1.C12] A companion of Samasira with whom he climbed the Varren.
THE CARRIER
"... she was eternally grateful for his help." [B1.C12]
Kel-Khadar is mentioned as one of Samasira's companions. Together, they climbed the Varren to seek oracle from Faroah. [B1.C12] revealed that he carried both Samasira and Abar for long passages. [B1.C17] shows how he carried Abar and the injured krynn and insisted them to be treated in the Albweiss Mountain Guild.
THE CARING
"Yu realised that he wanted to help but did not know how. " [B1.C18]
In [B1.C18], Kel-Khadar is shown greatly worried about Abar, determined to see her broken leg treated properly by the Albweiss Mountain Guild guards while struggling to understand the applied measures.
SHAMANIC READING
During her reading in [B1.C17], the shaman of the Albweiss Mountain Guild claimed that Kel-Khadar carries rage: “But not the kind that destroys. You bear the kind that shields. Not flame, but gravity. Heat pressed inward and endured [...] You do not seek to break. You hold.”
TRIVIA
▪ When introducing them to the Albweiss Mountain Guild guards, his krynn companion claims that Kel-Khadar was born "in these lands". [B1.C18]