Basics

Biography

In Dullahan culture, your horse is your life. You get one as soon as you are old enough to ride, and if it dies, you are cast out, and considered dead. Normally, a Dullahan's excess life force is given to their horse, giving them the same unaging immortality a Dullahan has, but Lucille had a problem. At birth, she immediately awoke as a magic user, specifically an adept, causing an implosion of dark energy. Her head became a nexus of unholy magic, drawing it out of the space between  realms and absorbing it, creating a vertiable cursed cloud of death  wherever she went. It made it very hard to take care of her as a baby!  But, when she was a little older, a genius Dullahan magic-user placed a seal on her in the form of a tattoo on her back. She gained a way to suppress her death aura, but she would still need to vent out all that unholy energy from time to time, or else the buildup could prove fatal.

However, her troubles were not over. There was still tremendous amounts of unholy energy, enough to kill a human, flowing through her body at a given time. At the age of 6, the masters of her clan linked her to her horse, only for the horse to immediately fall gravely ill. The link was severed, as a last resort, but it was too late: the incident cost the horse at least a decade of its natural life. So, Lucille rode with her clan as long as she could, but her horse was not as immortal as she was, and she always knew that one day, her horse would die and she would be cast out. When that day came, there were no tears shed, she'd been prepared for her whole life.

Pathway Gland

Here's a bit of Dullahan Biology Lore, that doesn't really fit anywhere else in Lucille's biography. I'd come up with this stuff only recently (well, as of this writing); I drew weird boney plates in Lucille's original design, and I hadn't decided at the time what they were for beyond looking #aesthetic. People who've drawn Lucille since then interpreted them more as jagged, scar-like patterns, so I made that canon. Then, I came up with this lore while drawing her current reference.

The "scars" on Lucille's body are not scars, actually. They are part of a strange organ Dullahans have called the Pathway Gland. The gland, on the outside, looks like a series of tube-like organs. They are exposed to the surface outside the body, and skin grows over it only partially and haphazardly. In addition to wrapping around the knees and elbows, plus one that runs down the front of the body and through the neck stump, there's one in the back of a Dullahan's jaw. These tubes don't appear to be connected, rather they look like 6 distinct pieces. But, they actually form an enclosed, non-euclidean space; the inside of the organ is one spherical area, slightly bigger on the inside (it has the same total surface area, and spheres have the greatest ratio of volume to surface area), divided into two chambers for food and air. The non-eucliden nature of a Dullahan's pathway gland means if you took a spear and impaled the gland at the elbow, it'd travel half a foot through the organ, and pass through the other side virtually anywhere; the chest, the knees, or even right out the back of their head!

When a Dullahan eats and breathes, it enters this non-euclidean space through their head's Pathway Gland. From there, food is digested, and blood is oxygenated, and the rest of the body draws from these. Their nervous system passes through this gland as well, and that's how their head can control their body. As such, damaging a Pathway Gland can paralyze that part of the body temporarily, but the gland is durable (its tissue is similar to tanned leather, and its very thick), and good at healing itself. No single injury to the gland can fully paralyze a Dullahan, too. Furthermore, if you cut off a Dullahan's arm before the elbow, the arm still has the organ in it, which is still connected to the body, and so the arm can be controlled remotely and will not die if the wound is treated. You will almost never see a Dullahan paraplegic, there's no nervous cluster in their spine, so back injuries cause no paralysis, which is useful because Dullahans can suffer nasty falls from their horses!

The reason why the organ is exposed to the surface is because a Dullahan exhales through it. A dullahan can constantly breathe in through their mouth and out through their pathway gland simultaneously, meaning they rarely get winded. This means that if you put a Dullahan's torso underwater, you'd see a stream of CO2 bubbles rising up from their body! It also means Dullahan's don't visibly breathe. If they overeat, it can compress their air chamber making it harder for them to breathe in general, though.

Final bit of trivia: the area where the skin attaches to the gland can get itchy; and some dullahan pick at it...

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