Slayer

What it governs

• There are no slayer masters. The skill is knowledge, and nobody hands it out.Charter, Part V — Utility group
• Each formidable creature has its own particular. The regenerating thing dies only burned — and nobody is told that.
• Learned by surviving, by studying the kill, and above all by being taught. A veteran's wolf-lore is the transmission line.
• Assigned tasks become contracts citizens write themselves: a plagued village pays a specialist.
• Every creature is world-run and none of them think. There will never be a sapient monster in this world — citizens are its only minds, and that stays true.
• Strangeness scales with remoteness: mundane at home, dire in deep caves and the strange north, strangest under the isle's permanent night.
• At the very top: sea monsters in the two deep crossings, which threaten ships rarely enough that most voyages pass and the rare attack becomes superstition; and at most two dragons on land, long-cycle and near-mythic. A sighting is a chronicle entry. A kill is an era.

What happens today

Putting down a boar, a wolf or a bear — a beast that stands its ground — teaches Slayer, where a deer that flees teaches only the hunt. And when such a beast answers a swing that did not come off, what it lands is warded by the citizen's own Slayer: nothing turned aside by an untrained body, half of it by a master. A body that knows how a wolf turns takes less of it. Nothing says so; the wound is simply smaller.

What opens, and when