grinner

grinner FAUNA — A mud creature. Also known as → muffies or → mud zealots, grinners are swamp creatures that have the shape of men but little else resembling → folken. Named for their extreme grin-like expressions, their bodies are made of soft, organic material—plantlike in makeup—apparently derived from the swampland itself. Despite this, they are very strong and difficult to kill. They eat anything that is organic except plant life. It is believed that a grinner bite or scrape—or any other exchange of bodily fluid—may turn a healthy person into something that is neither human nor grinner called a → leemox. Grinners originate in swampland, but they can survive outside such environments and sometimes travel abroad in search of food—though they rarely stray more than a few days away from wetland. On the whole, grinners are mindless creatures who act entirely out of instinct rather than cunning. A large group of grinners is called a horde, though the creatures most often travel solo or in small groups and avoid people. Lore posits grinners were a defensive response of → Bugge Muelen, or the → Big Swamp—a mythological entity wherein the consciousness of the natural world was embodied within a great swampland—to the careless acts of the folken, whose cities and villages began “consuming” the landscape. Grinners were the design of the Big Swamp to curb the growth of the folken’s villages and cities by literally eating and digesting their people, effectively converting them to swamp fodder. This is not considered a true account but only a children’s morality tale.

Illustration: grinner, by Logan Peyman. The Singing Bones, “Chapter Ten: Grinners”