Emaciated arms and legs a mass of tangled bone, looking like tangled thorny tree branches. Or a bunch of stags that had accidentally got their horns tangled together in a rather too enthusiastic head-on collision. When it comes to mutation this one has truly rolled snake eyes. Uncontrollable bone growth. Their teeth have grown and fused together. Forever sealing their mouth. In a hopeless attempt not to starve to death, most briermen create a small incision above their stomach and attempt to use it as a makeshift mouth. Admittedly getting food into that makeshift mouth is a tad difficult when instead of hands you have an incomprehensible tangled mess of bone. Briermen are not exactly friendly and it’s easy to understand why.

If I could barely feed myself and endlessly had to cope with the growing pains I had as a teenager, but times a thousand, I have no idea how painful the insanity they have gone through must have been. And with all of this, they don’t even have a mouth to scream obscenities at the state of it all. I too would like to punch the face of passers-by, just to let off some steam. And when you are being punched in the face by somebody whose fist is made of sharp jagged bone, it tends to leave an impression. One of their more notable features is they the tendency to hang the corpses of beasts and men they from trees and use it as bait for any stupid scavenger who is dumb enough to go for it. And then the Briermen only end up eating it when it is too decomposed even for the crows to stomach. Considering that they completely by pass the tongue thing with a hole going immediately into the stomach, it probably helps as they have the mercy of never having to taste the thing they are eating.

Lily’s notes:

Brierman isn’t a natural mutation, it is a purposefully induced one likely through human experimentation. Their capability of re-growing bones and body mass in general is beyond any humanoid species. If they lose an arm or a leg or a rib cage it will grow back. The issue is, when it comes to bone, bone doesn’t know when to stop growing. Likely their ancestors purposefully gave themselves this mutation to aid in their survival; being able to re-grow arms and not losing bone density to old age sounds like a bonus, without fully realising the consequences of their genetic alterations. They likely induced this mutation to attempt to increase their longevity. Most brierman die when their bones grow to such a degree that they will pierce their internal organs or they are so overcome by bone growth it entirely restricts their movement. Usually caused by joints sealing together, or the weight of the mass of the additionally grown bone. At the centre of the brierman territory, can be normally found a bizarre twisting amorphous mass of bone. If you Look at it, it looks like another tree in the forest, but this one is pearly white. The briermen in theory try to feed it and they can be heard cooing soft lullabies to it to ease its aching bones. I’m sorry that I can’t give a more detailed and scientific description I usually leave the poetic language to my co-author, but due to my inability to get near the damn thing without being assaulted by briermen, this is the most I could do. I had to rely on my co-author to help me explain. I find it hard to express my thoughts from such a brief encounter, and one which isn’t on a dissection table. I especially take issue with the line about aching bones as it is profanely theoretical. But then he kept saying;

“Poetic license. And you can’t prove it’s not true.”

But it does feel like it is.

And sadly I will have to end on more speculation which is possibly true but unverifiable at this point. Maybe there were people who were searching for longevity and even possibly immortality, and through their endless desperate research found it, but it turned out more hellish than death could have ever been.