Drovigs
| Classification | Sand worm |
|---|---|
| Habitat | The tunnels beneath The Kella Desert |
| Size | Large enough to fill a cavern from wall to wall |
| Notable traits | Eyeless, antennae, layered jaws, burrowing |
| First appearance | Sacred: Eslura's Calling |
Drovigs are the giant sand worms of the Kella Desert. The bestiary appendix, which heads the entry in the singular as DROVIG, describes them as blind and deaf, dormant by day and tunnelling through the desert at all hours of the evening, and warns against getting anywhere near their layers of chomping jaws.[1] They are a byword in Eslura for something best not disturbed: Reagan, talking Aero Ellisvat through a maze, told him to move sideways as though sneaking past a sleeping drovig.[2]
Appearance
A drovig is legless. It lashes a long tail and shoots its body forward like a snake, and its rounded face is bare except for two tall antennae.[3] Its hide is armoured, with grooves and a jagged ridge along the side that a rider can hold on to.[4] The one that pursued Reagan and Tab across the desert opened all three of its jaws to swallow a box whole, and the appendix credits the species with numerous layers of jaws.[3][1]
They screech, and a moving drovig sounds like metal grinding on metal underground. Its passage shakes the ground hard enough to knock a standing person over, and one asleep in a cavern takes up nearly half of it.[3][4]
Senses
The books and the appendix do not agree about a drovig's hearing. The appendix says they are blind and deaf.[1] The novels are firm about the blindness, since a drovig has no eyes at all and reads the ground with its antennae, but they treat hearing as the sense that matters. Tab warned Reagan to keep quiet because drovigs are "sensitive to noise", and Reagan later woke a sleeping one on purpose by shouting and hammering on rock.[3][4]
Either way, a drovig tracks by vibration. Reagan worked out mid-flight that the antennae poking from a fresh hole were feeling for movement rather than looking, and told Tab to stand still.[3]
The tunnels
Drovigs have gouged a tunnel system out of the rock beneath the northern Kella Desert. Its mouth is not a built entrance but a jagged opening torn from the desert floor at the base of a red sandstone outcrop, wide enough for five cars to drive in side by side, and it slopes down into a darkness that swallows torchlight after the first bend.[4]
Inside, hard sandstone gives way to claw-scarred gouges, the walls ribbed with long grooves where something has dragged itself through again and again. The tunnel opens into chambers, and the ground is littered with broken stone, dried cactus and bone. Piles of crushed stone and bone ground to dust sit here and there.[4]
The tunnels are habitable at the edges. Erwin made a home in an indent in one wall, with a bed, a few pots and pans and a fire pit, and says the place is quiet as long as the worm keeps to its nest.[4]
Nesting
A nesting drovig lies coiled across a cavern floor with its young half buried in the sand beside it, some barely moving and others nuzzling against the warm folds of their mother. The nest Tab found held at least a dozen babies.[4]
Aero says drovigs do not expel their insides for moons at a time.[4]
The red stones
Drovigs cannot stomach the blood-red jewels of the Heart of the Kella that fill a cavern under their own tunnels. Erwin ringed the mouth of his cave with them to keep the worms off, having once watched one eat a stone and sicken badly.[4] Aero used the same trick under pressure, throwing a handful into an open mouth, and the worm emptied its stomach onto the sand in a steaming heap and dived back under.[4]
The star-scarred drovig
One drovig appears twice, recognisable by "an odd, star-shaped scar" set in the middle of its otherwise bare face.[3][4]
It first burst out of the sand near Tab's desert campsite while she was moving Reagan across the Kella. The two outran it on a pergonzia, but the beast was too heavily laden, and Tab had to cut loose the large blue and gold painted box she guarded above everything else. The drovig stopped to examine the box with its antennae, swallowed it whole and took it back underground.[3] The box held the Olphin Stone that Tab describes as a shield against Obellius Kalaar's mind control powers.[4]
Tab went back for it with Reagan and Aero, and Erwin led them to the nest. Rather than kill a mother with young, they made her sick with the red stones. Before that they had already used her as transport: cornered in a collapsed cavern with no way out, they woke her deliberately, rode her back down the tunnels clinging to her armour, and jumped clear when she broke the surface. Tab then spent half an hour wading through what the worm had brought up and came out holding the stone.[4]
Disappearance
By the time of Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened the drovigs have gone. The tunnel chambers stand empty and unsettlingly clean, with no nests, no droppings and no half-eaten prey, and Erwin says the rest of the worms left before the star-scarred one.[4] Reagan, crossing the northern Kella later, notes that their absence at least makes the crossing safer, and Aero warns that whatever cleared the drovigs out has not made the open desert safe.[5]
Where they went is not established. Reagan counts their disappearance among the signs that the Nelazgians have been digging their own tunnels under Eslura toward The Sacred City.[6]
In Eslurian culture
Drovigs turn up in the stories Eslurians tell. Barnaby Britto, trying to place Bea's name, asks whether she is named for "the great warrior Lealyn who defeated the rampaging drovig in Varaar".[7] Reslyn Keiser keeps an old drovig's horn behind the bar at The Avonbourn and intends to hang it where Aero's sword used to be.[8]
Behind the scenes
The bestiary appendix at the back of both novels heads the entry DROVIG and annotates the illustration "chomp!". Book 2 reprints Book 1's page unchanged.[1] The pronunciation guide at the back of both novels lists the name under species.[9]