Slaves
When the Hive Kin are on the warpath, they sweep through an area en-masse, rising suddenly and without warning to strip the lands and their peoples of all things lootable, edible and drinkable. They are thorough in their desolation.
Is it better to be slain, or to become a slave? It is difficult to say. Most of those taken as slaves will face lives of toil in darkness, hacking stone deep beneath the surface of the world for ore and tsalts, or expanding the tribe's ever-growing network of tunnels.
Though, you will be safe from specific persecutions - you won't be the subject of the deliberate and targeted disdain of the Thousand Spear's thrall, for example. Your masters don't hate you. They don't even particularly look down on you. They just don't care. You'll work, endlessly. It will probably kill you. You might, if you are very lucky, be traded back to your tribe - back to your family. Though this isn't likely.
Though sometimes - very rarely - there is another hope.
Every now and again, a slave will excavate down, and the section of stone they where digging at will fall away. A soft and curious glow will emanate from the hole they had made. "Strange..." They will peer down, raising their meagre lantern, and see that it is no simple cave they have broken through to. It is a tunnel - its walls smooth stone, or panelled with dull metal. Pipes and power cables flank the walls, disappearing off into the gloom of either direction. It is then that some will realise they have broken through to the Ome'kher - the 'passageweb' that runs crisscrossed beneath the Korashi expanse.
And, if they are not already broken utterly to the will of their masters, and reckon their chances in that foreboding gloom better than those toiling to death in slavery, into those uncertain depths they will escape.
Original lineart by Ellen, background composited by Eskalat
Hive Kin
Is it better to be slain, or to become a slave? It is difficult to say. Most of those taken as slaves will face lives of toil in darkness, hacking stone deep beneath the surface of the world for ore and tsalts, or expanding the tribe's ever-growing network of tunnels.
Though, you will be safe from specific persecutions - you won't be the subject of the deliberate and targeted disdain of the Thousand Spear's thrall, for example. Your masters don't hate you. They don't even particularly look down on you. They just don't care. You'll work, endlessly. It will probably kill you. You might, if you are very lucky, be traded back to your tribe - back to your family. Though this isn't likely.
Though sometimes - very rarely - there is another hope.
Every now and again, a slave will excavate down, and the section of stone they where digging at will fall away. A soft and curious glow will emanate from the hole they had made. "Strange..." They will peer down, raising their meagre lantern, and see that it is no simple cave they have broken through to. It is a tunnel - its walls smooth stone, or panelled with dull metal. Pipes and power cables flank the walls, disappearing off into the gloom of either direction. It is then that some will realise they have broken through to the Ome'kher - the 'passageweb' that runs crisscrossed beneath the Korashi expanse.
And, if they are not already broken utterly to the will of their masters, and reckon their chances in that foreboding gloom better than those toiling to death in slavery, into those uncertain depths they will escape.
Hive Kin
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