Cragish
The Cragish are the integrated shore-and-city strain, and what a market means when it says Craega. The makers gave them three words, "Normal, civilized," and then said nothing else about them, because everything the record sets down about the body, the moult and the law of the people is a description of a Cragish.
They are the ones who came ashore after the fall, who built the camouflaged domes at the tideline and who sell what nobody else can reach. Two hundred years, rust-red through slate to bone, four legs held as two until there is a reason to hold them as four.
Body
Four to six feet and two hundred and fifty to four hundred pounds, most of it shell. The shell is the skeleton and there is no other; muscle hangs from the inside of the plate, so a Cragish grows in steps and cannot grow at all without first becoming naked. The blood is clear in the body and flat blue in the air, carried by copper, which is why they are slow over a long run and immovable over a short one.
There is no gas anywhere in them, so nothing crushes on the way down and nothing expands on the way up. A Cragish goes as deep as it cares to and comes up as fast as it likes, and that single absence is the whole of the trade the strain lives on. The gill chamber under the head-shell must stay wet, packed with weed and sponge for a walk inland and wetted at every trough, which is why no Craega has ever founded an inland city.
Society
A shore dome-field answers to its Oldest Shell, and age is asked politely as "how many shells." The Hoard-Reckoners keep the Soft Calendar that lists who is thinning and when, and the calendar is copied to every dome-field on a coast, because a trading people that goes helpless on a schedule builds the schedule into its law. A declared Soft Season freezes a Cragish's debts and voids any contract it signs while soft.
They buy and sell nothing on appearance. The eye is blind to red and made for deep water, so a Cragish handles, taps, weighs and holds a thing against the mineral hairs of the forearm and names the price of the material. This makes them trusted by smiths and despised by collectors. Their finery is bolted straight through the plate and lost at every moult, so what a Cragish wears is a record of the last seven years and no longer.
Country
The shores of the Surface Realm. Saltcount is the largest known shore dome-field and is a market before it is a town, and the scraping of barnacle crust off the mineral hairs is a whole minor trade in it. A field is a scatter of domes spaced a shell's-length further apart than a running charge, and their mineral senses overlap, so a field knows what walks on it.
A coast with a Cragish field on it has nothing rotting on it: no carcass lasts a night, no wreck lasts a season, no drowned sailor is ever found. Fisher towns downcoast notice the clean beaches, and notice twenty years later that the shallows have been taken apart. Two Nu'uman ports on the same bay have gone to law over a field that would not move, and the field did not move.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where Saltcount stands, and which crowns it trades under
- How many shore dome-fields there are, and on which coasts
- What a shore field does with a find the deep families want back
- Whether a dome-field has ever been taxed successfully