Made for me by http://www.furaffinity.net/user/anbessa .

This is a white tigress priestess of the church. Unlike the workers and the huntresses, they are well fed. They normally wear their robes closed, hiding their bodies from view and reducing their scent-trail, intensifying the impression of being elusive and slightly ethereal. Whilst most huntresses understand that this impression is artifically made due to camouflaging and reducing their scent imprint by wearing a closed robe, most workers who never had to use their noses to hunt and trail food are baffled by this effect.

Priestesses regularly use their rank to have first choice of freshly caught or hunted meats. Where neccessary, they use either their loyal enforcers - huntresses - or use their staffs of office to make their demands stick. Those staffs are ancient relics of the church. Some say they were there at the very begin of time, when the great mother for the first time left her den and went out to teach the white tigers the art of of writing, of fishing and of tool-making. Some say that they are relics from the later time when the white tigers ruled the world from the northpole to the southpole.
Whatever they may be, they are equipped with sharp blades that can be switched between a spears tip to a kind of axe or scythe. The other end has a blunt , thick end. Aside of being used as a club, it can also generate strong electric pulses on impact, stunning if not even electrocuting its target aditionally to the blunt trauma.

The priestesses learn far more about their peoples past than either the workers or huntresses. They learn what little knowledge remains to maintain the electric generators and other systems that keep the caverns liveable.
Most importantly, they learn a few medical skills needed for in-vivo fertilization and for extracting sperm from, as they call it, harvested genitals which the huntresses are ordered to bring in.

Female cubs are raised for the first three years by their mothers before the priestesses fetch them and educate them, selecting and indoctrinating them for their future tasks.
Male cubs live with their mothers until they are weaned. After that, they are swiftly expelled from the caverns of the churchs and dropped off by a priestess in company of several huntresses at the border of the tropical valley.

The tropical valley?
Trapped between high mountains, nestled at the end of a winded fjord heated by volcanic activity deep underground, there is a large area where, even during the polar night, the temperatures seldomly drop below +15°C. The plants learned to cope with the long time of semi-darkness. Many strains cultivate large strorage roots or trunks or symbiosis with fungi.
And not a few switch to carnivorous behaviour during the long night.

Only the highest priestesses know - most of - the truth of their existence. But even they fell prey to ruthless history-editing of their predecessors, lies, self-aggrandizement and the distorted view on reality as a result of a blatant lack of understanding.
The lower echelons of the church know little more than the huntresses. Only higher echelons who proved to be sufficiently ruthless to lie with a straight face to the lower orders are introduced into the deeper mysteries of the church.