Goliaths

Goliaths are stony mountain-dwelling creatures that can range from five feet to twelve feet tall, and I'm not gonna guess on a weight ratio, but I'm sure they're heavy as fuck. The build is usually haha, chiseled, and wedge-shaped with other wedge shapes on them, (think Iceman after snow but before glassy ice). They eat rocks and sometimes bones or meat or bugs, but mostly rocks. They live in small groups called Families, and keep to themselves in caves.

Goliaths started on the northwestern hemisphere on Saban (Which is the landmass's name as my oldest son has just helped me with) and spread onto Nocwen and started to head up to the north pole, but found it too cold.

I'm not sure when, exactly, but they made either good friends or worst enemies with dwarves and/or orcs (not necessarily at once). They also got to Noress and Elsee by traveling south from the North Pole, via the Dwarf tunnels in the case of Elsee.

Basic Information

Anatomy

They aren't exactly rocks, but they're certainly not meat. It has been argued that they're more like woody plants, except that they're enough magic to be mobile. This is managed by the single solid rock they are being able to move. That's magic for you. The outermost part is referred to as a shell, but it's just as much rock as the rest of them, except that by the time it gets outermost like that, it's hardly being treated by the body as part of it anymore and is now more dust to shed.

They're usually bipedal, but there are anomalies. Similarly, they've usually got two hands.

They don't have hearts or any other organs, though they are prone to falling apart if enough parts are crushed or broken away.

Their magic can spill, not quite like blood but more like a disruption, and as it leave their body, they stiffen until they can't move anymore.

Dietary Needs and Habits

They need to maintain a steady flow of minerals same as most other organics, which they can get via any means necessary, actually, but different kinds of rocks are important to their diets. Certain minerals maintain their outermost shell (skin), certain minerals maintain their body's ability to transport the new minerals to other parts of their body (platelets, only magic and moving through a solid much like the constant electron exchange but bigger).

They excrete the unnecessary material by 'sweating it out', a process they can control and is usually done in designated areas. It's dirt, for lack of a better way, it's ground up and processed stone with a bunch of stuff taken out of it and more stuff put into it.

Most of the time, to keep a steady supply of food, they'll live in extremely rocky places. They've been known to mine, but it's a hugely frowned-upon practice, as it's completely unsustainable. (There have been several attempts to do it anyway. This has always been countered successfully with violence.)

Goliaths are famously difficult to poison, but that doesn't mean they can't be. Certain minerals in their digestive system will harm them by destabilizing their integrity, blocking or breaking other minerals down, or clogging up the 'sweat' so they can't excrete wastes. "constipation" for a goliath is more like kidney failure. They can process blood and meat, but that's mostly a waste of energy, since the mineral to mass ratio is crap.

They're born.... not so much with teeth as they don't need teeth, their mouths act more like hammers than knives; their mouths are pulverizers and their throats are caverns into which the food goes, and they have a hollow core where the important stuff, magic and ore alike, is stored.

Biological Cycle

They start life as a baby. There's no gestation, just conception and then the concept is Real. This has to be done in a very very magical place; they have to find a location with the kind of juice to make it easy enough for most people to do. Occasionally, a magician will be that kind of wellspring, or can summon one, and places that aren't quite the big wellsprings can be used with enough force of will and luck.

The future baby is first laid out, stone by stone, into the desired shape of the parents (that is, everyone who's in on making and raising the baby). The mineral make-up has to line up with some relatively easy ratios that must be abided, lest the soon-to-be goliath be born with an auto-immune disease.

Once the mineral levels are good and the shape is set, the magic must be inlaid. This can happen a variety of ways- the most common is a "growing", where the parent goliaths will circle the baby and pool their magic deliberately, much like breathing exercises, until the levels of magic around them are thick enough to inundate in the collected stones.

The magic doesn't need to be constantly pushed in, but the ambient magic levels has to be high. The incubation period depends on lots of things, from the size of the baby to the kinds and levels of magic around. Usually between five and ten days. After fifteen days, if no signs of life are showing, they bury the pieces and start from fresh, without reusing the old pieces. (This does change here and there every now and again)

They grow slowly for decades and eventually even out and maintain the same size after roughly a hundred years. How big they got is directly related to their food/mineral intake. Too little to eat for the full century can leave a goliath stunted.

Most families will only raise one baby at a time, sometimes two if they have enough adults around to take care of them. As the new life begins to grow, it learns to move around and to communicate. Newborns especially have the ability to smell certain minerals in rocks and instinctively eat them. Babies being babies, they'll also eat other stuff. Most anything, in fact.

Behaviour

Usually, they're pretty chill. They do get territorial, especially over food and good magical wellsprings.

Additional Information

Average Intelligence

The intelligence also grows gradually. Their mind keeps the same 'plasticity', but they don't exactly have brains. The magic that keeps them together also serves as their 'self' or 'soul'. (It's even been said that goliaths are basically soul-jars with rocks inside). Due to that, their intelligence is pretty well locked in where it is, as far as pattern-recognition goes. They do, however, learn a lot. Their memories are long and their capacity for compartmentalization would be considered unhealthy by Human Earth standards.

Civilization and Culture

Major Language Groups and Dialects

They do not have a tongue, and their communication is done largely through vibrations from their cores, using their mouths to send a resonance to their core that amplifies it and sends it out. This can sound like a voice to those accustomed, but words as understood by most ears don't happen this way.

The grinding is often accompanied by clacking noises of their 'teeth' hitting in impactful slamming sounds that interrupt or accompany the grinding and 'hum'.

The language does have a written form with three layers to it, to indicate what kinds of sounds are at what volume.

Unfortunately, this means I can't use their words to name their locations directly.