Lexicon:Modern/Kollgar

Kollgar
Stage	Modern CLT
Pronunciation	/ˈkoɬ.gaɾ/
Part of speech	Noun
Etymology	Veisdra, Kamra, Stoendh, Skrafna

Kollgar — the coordinated pack predator of the high mountain. The worst thing in the Known World.

Notes

A long-limbed running animal, upright at the shoulder and lightly built, standing perhaps five feet at the back. Gray-white and difficult to see against snow or scree. The head is small for the body with forward-set eyes, and the limbs end in gripping feet that hold on rock where a hoofed animal could not.

It is the only thing in the Known World that fights as a formation rather than as a group.

Runs in groups of nine to fifteen and does not hunt as a group of animals hunts. It divides. Some hold the high ground, some cut the descent, and the rest move quarry toward them, and it is done without sound and without any signal anyone has identified.

It watches. A Kollgar pack near a settlement observes it — when the gate opens, where the patrol goes, how long the stretch between one passing and the next — and takes people at the gap. A defense that does not change is a defense that will eventually be read.

This is why Clearhold’s patrols rotate on a fixed interval rather than a fixed route. The interval is a number in the Registrars’ records, worked out from losses generations ago, and it is followed exactly. Somebody once measured how long it takes a Kollgar to learn a pattern. Nobody has revisited the figure.

The near ground was cleared in the first centuries at a cost the early registers do not soften. What remains is territorial and finite, which is the only reason the city exists.

Engineered pre-Fall. The survivors knew what was on that mountain, warned the settlers plainly, and were disbelieved because they could not say how they knew.