Craetan
The Craetan are the fresh water kin. "Their shells are more rounded, smooth and darker in colors; ranging primarily dark blue, forest green and brown." They pass as townsfolk on purpose: "most are neutral towards the goings on of surface folk, and would rather fit in. They dress similar to surface folk, than that of their kin."
They live sixty to seventy years where their salt water kin live two hundred, and that is not temperament. It is the water. Region decides temper as well, and a Craetan out of a foul lake is another matter entirely.
Body
The build is the build of any Craega: shell for a skeleton, muscle hung from the inside of the plate, copper blood that goes flat blue in air, a gill chamber that must stay wet, and no gas anywhere to be crushed or expanded. The shell itself runs rounder, smoother and darker than the sea kin's rust-red through slate to bone, in dark blue, forest green and brown, and lake shells run dark as a rule.
They moult as their kin do, thinning for two months, splitting in a night, and setting three days on the floor of a pit. On sixty or seventy years that is fewer moults than any other Craega gets, and it is the reason the disease of foul water is so much worse in them.
Frailty
Shell-rot is a black pitting that eats inward from a scratch and does not stop until the next moult carries it off. Fresh water is warmer, fouler and kinder to it than the sea, so the lake kin get it worst, and the Craetan short lifespan is largely this. A Craetan of fifty is already patching.
Everything else that goes wrong with a Craega goes wrong at the moult, and a shorter life does not soften it. A shell that will not split kills over nine or ten days with the Craega conscious throughout, and the cut-out ones come up crooked and are called bent and are barred from deep work by every Hoard-Reckoner on every coast.
Society
They live at inland market towns and dress the way the town dresses, which is a decision and not an accident, and it is the one thing that separates them from the shore kin in the eyes of everyone else. On the Golden Road at Ikarma, three Craetan merchants stand over a large Hof skin hide under crystal light, weighing its worth. Three of them, because a Craega does not appraise alone.
Their eggs go into lake shallows rather than over the drowned war-fields, and what crawls ashore is claimed by whichever dome's shore it reaches, so that the finder is the parent here as everywhere. The Soft Calendar reaches the lakes too, and how an inland town behaves around a declared Soft Season is the measure of how well the Craetan have passed.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which lakes hold Craetan domes, and where Ikarma's Golden Road runs
- How inland towns handle a Craetan Soft Season, if they handle it at all
- What a foul lake does to a Craetan over a lifetime
- Whether the lake kin keep their own Hoard-Reckoners or answer to the coast