Aieko

Body

Five feet, on the common Aiekah frame and with all of its consequences: broad sheets of marbled muscle built for flavour and yield, thin bones set wide, a shallow shoulder socket, and the grip ridge along the underside of each forearm where a hand closes. Nothing about being an Aieko removes the handle.

What is theirs is the colour, iridescent blue where their kin are grey-black, and the three hundred years. The deep-set white eyes gather light as all Aiekah eyes do, and in an Aieko surfacing under both moons the haze off them is the thing the whole lake is looking at.

The shroud is a use of the same bladder that sinks them, held at a pitch rather than spent, and an Aieko holding the shroud cannot sing anything else and cannot rise. That is the shape of every gift this people has: one organ doing the singing, the floating and the hiding, and never two of them at once.

Country

The deep lakes, and only the surface of them, and only at night. Depth is the whole of the defence, since an Aieko has no weapon, no speed and no armour any more than its kin do, and a deep lake is a place a boat cannot reach the bottom of.

They long for the sea and they are not of salt water. That is a frontier written into the body and there is nothing to be done about it, and it is the nearest thing to grief the record sets down for them.

Society

An Aieko is the Voice of any community that has one, which is the eldest singer, the one who decides when the community sings and when it stays under. In a people that lives forty to fifty years, a singer of three hundred is not simply old. The moon faith's oldest songs are theirs, carried in one throat across the lifetimes of eight ordinary Aiekah, which is why a community with an Aieko in it has rites the others have only heard about.

Ombree was an Aieko who sang at a duchess's feast as the entertainment and was served as the last course, and whose song the household still hums without knowing where it came from. Aieko Meat is "rare and more costly blue-white Aieko Tuna Meat, that carries with it 'the flavours of the moon', as it is known that they sing to it. Extremely rich and sweet." A people that is worth more dead the longer it lives does not get to grow old quietly.