Quaver

The first repeater a Pyre Purger ever kills is usually the wrong one. You go in low through a breach, you find the rooted thing singing in the dark, you put it down — and the swarm doesn’t break. It keeps flanking. Keeps pre-empting. Keeps one set of eyes on you. Then you look up. There’s a winged host turning slow circles two body-lengths above the horde, ribcage hollowed into a sounding-box, throat lit green, and it has been watching you the whole time through everyone else’s eyes.

That’s a Quaver. It isn’t an elite. It’s a grunt the Choir grew wings and a resonator onto and threw into the air, and the Scourge will spend a hundred of them on a bad afternoon without flinching — because a relay that flies is a relay you lose. It never holds still: it wavers and bobs on its own updraft, trembling at the top of every wingbeat, the motion the old-world musicians named it for. It keeps a careful gap and spits green from above while the horde screens its body. Hit it once and it folds like wet paper. The whole trick is having a barrel free when you finally notice it.

At a glance: Flesh-host Choir-repeater, the airborne/mobile relay class · fast, fragile, hovers out of melee reach and spits at range · keeps a local pocket of swarm coordinated where no rooted node stands — kill it and that pocket drops feral · the Choir’s cheap, expendable sky-ear, spent like ammunition · appears in Scourge-Survivors / Deadlane.

Behaviour

• Airborne and restless. Hovers about two body-lengths up, out of melee reach, on a trembling bob; never roots, never holds a spot for long. A mobile relay has to keep moving to keep the net stitched over ground the swarm hasn’t filled.
• Holds the gap and spits. Keeps its distance and lobs toxic-green signal-bolts — a chip of the Choir’s own voice spat as a weapon. Backs off and holds fire rather than let anything close; the horde underneath is its wall.
• Screened, not armored. Light and fragile. It flinches hard off a single hit and a solid burst drops it — staggering one cuts the signal mid-note. It survives by altitude and by the bodies below it, never by toughness.
• A mobile mini-repeater, not an anchor. While it flies over a patch of swarm, the locals stay connected to the Choir through it even with no rooted Chorister in range. It does not sever a front the way killing a Chorister does — it patches gaps: over open killing-ground, during a push, in the seconds before a node roots.
• Kill it and the pocket drops. Every Scourge it was carrying in that patch goes briefly feral (CANON §6) — loose, blind, instinct-only — until another Quaver drifts over or a rooted relay covers the gap. A soft, local, temporary version of the Chorister severance.
• Spent freely. Killing one doesn’t dent the wider Choir (CANON §2); the Scourge simply lofts another. It grows them off cheap flesh stock and treats them like ammunition.

Gameplay Read

• A soft-priority target: not a pressure unit you must kill to live, but the reason the horde around you feels smart. Drop it and the nearby swarm gets dumber for a few seconds — tracking goes loose, flanking sags.
• Lofted once a front matures. You won’t see them in the opening push; they thicken the longer a run survives or a lane holds.
• Pays out for the awkward shot. Out of melee reach and hiding behind altitude, it taxes your ranged answer and your aim-up. Worth the most XP of the common hosts because it’s the hardest of them to punish.
• Telegraph: a green throat-flare before each spit, and the bob steadies for half a beat as it sounds. Heavily screened — the challenge is carving a firing line up through the horde.

Visual Motifs

• A gaunt flesh-host — the same blood-and-rust Rot-Infested Flesh Host grammar as the swarm below — given grown flight membranes: broad, ribbed, leathery wings stretched over parasite cartilage. Nothing clean about them.
• The relay organ is its own ribcage, hollowed and re-strung into a sounding-box — open between the ribs, resonator membranes stretched across the gap, breathing.
• A toxic-green Choir node at the throat and a horned crown, brightest when it spits; the emitter and the only clean color on it.
• Talons and a ruined, hanging lower body that never touches ground — clearly something that was lifted, not something that walks.

Sprite Brief

• Views: front, side, back.
• Reads as airborne and fragile at a glance — wings spread, body small and high; never mistakable for a grounded charger.
• Hover-bob plus a trembling wingbeat in motion; a steadied half-beat on the spit telegraph.
• Throat/crown node is the focal point and the brightest pixel; flares on fire.
• Must read at Scourge-Survivors’s close framing and Deadlane’s lane-top camera; small silhouette, clear wing read.

Prompt Seed

Scourge Choir-repeater, airborne flesh-host relay: gaunt blood-red parasite body with broad ribbed leathery wings grown on raw cartilage, hollowed ribcage re-strung into a resonating sounding-box with stretched membranes, toxic-green Choir node glowing at throat and horned crown, taloned ruined lower body hanging, hovering two body-lengths over a horde and spitting a green signal-bolt, blood and rust and gunmetal, DOOM-like heavy shadows, no neon, no clean sci-fi.

Appears In

• Scourge-Survivors — the airborne harasser that keeps a maturing run’s swarm coordinated from above. A Pyre Purger learns to spend a clip up before going for the rooted node — or fight a smarter horde the whole time for skipping it.
• Deadlane — lofted over a contested lane to hold the Choir across a stretch the swarm hasn’t massed enough to cover. A Warden gunline’s reason to keep one angle on the sky.
• The-Listeners — the cheapest ear, and so the easiest to take alive. A staggered, downed-but-still-singing Quaver is the field-expedient node the heresy fishes out of the dirt when there’s no Chorister within reach (CANON §8).