Hork-Bajir

The Hork-Bajir are a reptilian race from K.A. Applegate's Animorphs series.

Biology
The Hork-Bajir are bipedal, have strong reptilian bodies with dark green-black leathery skin, and at least two hearts. They have snake-like necks with a sharp beak at the end of their heads, tyrannosaurus-like feet, three claw-tipped fingers and a thumb on each hand, and measure to a height of seven feet in adulthood. Their most notable feature is that they have huge, long blades all over their bodies: their elbows, wrists, feet, legs, head, and tail. Male and female Hork-Bajir are told apart by the number of blades on their heads; males have three blades while females have two. According to Jara Hamee, there is another difference, but claims that it's only for Hork-Bajir to know.

Although they look fierce, they're a race of pacifists. They never even understood the concept of violence or fighting until the Yeerks showed up. Their blades are used for stripping bark off the huge 100 to 1,300 foot trees on their homeworld. In fact, there was a lot they didn't understand, since their Their intelligence is equivalant to that of a human toddler. Although, some suspect that they may simply be intelligent in different ways that they don't show. They can't see well in the dark, but they do have an excellent sense of hearing and smell. Their blood appears in shades of deep red and deeper blue-green. They also can withstand a lot of pain and heal quickly.

History
The Arn, a now-extinct race, created the Hork-Bajir to look after the huge trees of their homeworld by stripping and eating the bark off of them. The Arn attempted, but ultimately failed, to weed out the gene of intelligence within the species. Because of this genetic mishap, a gifted Hork-Bajir is rarely born every thousand years or so. Such a rare Hork-Bajir is known as a "seer". Seers are much more intelligent than the rest of their kin, and in times of trouble, the other Hork-Bajir typically look to them as a leader.

Normally, however, Hork-Bajir intelligence isn't exactly up to par with other civilizations. Still, they have a domineering physical form that does not exactly fit the mold of a peaceful, gentle bark-eater. For this reason, the Yeerk s saw them as prime candidates for conquest, colonization, and integration into their parasitic empire. The Yeerks attempted to enslave them en masse, turning them into fierce soldiers that would hopefully be used to fuel later conquests. In a last-ditch attempt to stop this enslavement, Andalite War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corrass engineered a Quantum Virus to kill any of the Hork-Bajir - free or otherwise - who were still on the planet.

In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, a young Hork-Bajir seer named Dark Hamee befriended an Andalite named Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan during the Hork-Bajir war. Aldrea morphed and permanently became a Hork-Bajir Nothlit, allowing the two to be together for the rest of their days. They married and had a son whom Aldrea named Seerow after her father. Their lineage would eventually produce another seer in Aldrea's great-granddaughter Toby Hamee.

During the Series
Along with the Taxxon s, the Hork-Bajir are regularly used throughout the series against the Animorphs as Yeerk shock troops.

In Animorphs 13: The Change, Tobias and the other Animorphs are directed by the Ellimist to help a Hork-Bajir couple named Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak escape the Yeerk Pool and establish a free colony for the species in a hidden forest valley. Throughout the series, Jara and Ket continue to help other Hork-Bajir to freedom.

By the end of the series, with the destruction of the Yeerks, the Hork-Bajir became a free species. They established a home on Earth that was under the protection of the American government.