Crag
The Crag are the deep kin, and the record does not soften them. "Evil, and monstrous in size, these colossal four legged Craega of the deep are the great scavengers, now turned gold hoarders without a ruling class over them. Their bodies carry upon them treasures and the corpses of all those who have tried to take them; ancient technology is buried within their flesh. They only speak ancient Alverian."
They have "immeasurable strength" and can "descend to the deepest depths." They live in thousands of years and nobody has counted the ceiling, because they are ancient and no one has watched one die.
Body
No Craega has ever seen a Crag moult. The deep families say the Crag stopped moulting long ago and grew their hoards into their shells instead, and the Crag do not correct them. A shell that never splits never sheds what has grown into it, which is why the hoard is in the flesh and why nothing lodged in a Crag has ever come out.
Everything that makes a Craega able to work the deep is in a Crag at a size nothing else reaches: no gas anywhere to crush or expand, gills in a chamber that is never out of water, an eye made for blue-black and blind to red, and the mineral lattice across the shell that reads metal and dense stone through mud. Applied to a body that size, over thousands of years, in a realm floored with a god war, it accounts for the hoard.
Country
The deepest water of the Deep Realm, below the reach of the shore kin and below the reach of anything that hunts them. On the bottom the Eeshmorg take Craega, and the Crag take the Eeshmorg. They keep no domes and no dome-fields; the hoard is the home, and there is no ruling class over them, no Oldest Shell and no Hoard-Reckoner counting what they hold.
They surface rarely and it is remembered when they do. The one the fishers call Deepmouth came up in a shallow bay speaking a language no one had heard aloud in four thousand years, and was clearly asking for something.
Tongue
The Crag "only speak ancient Alverian," which makes the deepest and richest of the kin unable to bargain with anyone who has not studied a dead tongue. The rest of the people speak Common for trade and Cragtongue among themselves, a clatter-and-hiss that carries underwater; the Crag speak neither.
What that means for a people whose entire law is trade is that the Crag stand outside it. They do not haggle, they are not entered in the Soft Calendar, and the only beings who can put a question to one are the scholars of a dead language, of whom the Squeesh have several.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How long a Crag actually lives, and whether any has been seen to die
- What Deepmouth surfaced to ask for
- Whether the Crag remember the Alverian holds directly, or only the tongue
- What the ancient technology buried in their flesh still does