Crieke
The Crieke are the war strain. "Four legged surface Craega, bred and conditioned for war and the defence of aquatic regions or coastal cities. Their bodies are severely sharp, and primarily are dark in colour, as to remain undetected. They are of few kind words."
They live as long as any Cragish and seldom do, since coastal cities hire them for exactly the work that shortens it. What they are is a trading people's body with the trade taken out.
Body
They walk on four always. Every other Craega conjoins its four legs into two and separates them only in battle, which leaves the upper pair free for handling, tapping and weighing; the Crieke do not, which costs them the two-handed trade of their kin and buys them a charge nothing on a beach survives. The shell is dark to stay unseen and severely sharp along its edges, where a Cragish runs rust-red through slate to bone.
Under the plate they are what any Craega is: copper blood, a gill chamber that must stay wet, no gas anywhere to crush or expand, an eye blind to red and made for the blue-black, and the full body clench that closes the shell into a shield and stops the chamber pumping while it holds. A patient enemy waits that out, and the coastal cities that hire Crieke know it as well as the Crieke do.
Life
They are found on garrison beaches and raised by the garrison. A Craega dates its life from the First Shell and calls whoever found it its parent, and a Crieke asked who found it names a fort. A Crieke garrison raises its own crawling young on the beach it holds, which makes the fort the family in a people that has no mothers and does not look for any.
Their Soft Seasons are timed by the garrison and not by the body, forced early with heat and feed so that no two of a watch are soft together. The Soft Calendar exists precisely to record when a Craega is helpless and to protect it while it is; here it is used to schedule helplessness around a duty roster. The practice bends them, and the garrisons keep doing it.
Regard
They are of few kind words and are hired for that as much as for the charge. Craega armour is "an offence to many within the more civilised regions," and a strain kept in garrison on a city's own beach is a standing argument about what the city is willing to have standing on it.
A Setting that is disturbed sets wrong, and a soft Craega struck or lifted or made to move hardens around the wrong shape. A field can tell at a glance which of its elders were mishandled young, and in the Crieke the mishandling is policy.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which coastal cities keep Crieke garrisons, and on what terms
- Who conditions them now that the makers are gone
- What a Crieke does when its fort is abandoned
- Whether a Crieke has ever taken a name outside a garrison