Tzautan are tiny creatures with a lifestone instead of a heart, grown from successful, small scale grafts of soma on a variety of keltza. These beds are commonly called tzautan beds.

Tzautan are a byproduct of soma and lifestones research, but they have proved useful in many ways since their creation. Nowadays, they have become fairly common and a good number of lifestones have been a tzautan at least once.

Tzautan can take many, often unexpected, shapes, from a slender tzolot (a cat/ferret type pet) like body to literally just an eye with tentacles among many other forms.

Since their discovery, tzautan have found two main uses that correlate with the circumstances of their creation, which influence their life greatly. They are thus divided into two categories:

Old Life tzautan: these tzautan are created from a deceased Somatei’s lifestone, directly put into a tzautan bed. These creatures retain their memories and can still talk and write depending on their tzautan body’s limitations. Such tzautan are only created to retrieve important information from the deceased tei it was created from. These tzautan are overall weak and will often spontaneously develop necrosis. Standard practice is to provide gentle palliative care and retrieve the stone once the tzautan passes away. Somatei born after being an old life tzautan do not retain any memory of these events.

New Life tzautan: if a lifestone is put in a natural soma bed for a few weeks before being transferred to a tzautan bed, the resulting creature, while physically similar, will be very different: it will have no memory of its past life and act much more like an animal. It will also not suffer from necrosis; as a matter of fact, the lifespan of new life tzautan lifespan is estimated around 15 years - though most will get to the next stage of their existence out of social pressure rather than tragedy. Indeed, new life tzautan life is supposed to be short, as they are created to be keepers for dormant lifestones, and are supposed to be laid in a soma chamber once a spot is open.

However, new life tzautan are able to learn and given a few year, they can even start to speak. Some express the wish to remain in their tzautan form and leave their soma chamber spot for the next tei in line. While this is tolerated, it is often seen as lazy by others and the longer a tzautan waits to begin its real new life, the stronger the social pressure gets.

When a new life tzautan is put in a soma bed, the creature is gently placed in its designated spot. The soma slowly covers it as it falls asleep and a Somatei body starts developing around the lifestone. Many believe that the tzautan body is integrated into the Somatei one.

Somatei born from a new life tzautan remain fuzzy memories of their tzautan life, and some habits acquired during that time might be hard to get rid of.