Hof'mai

Body

The light it carries was never an organ. It is a bloom of blight held in a sac at the front of the head, and it burns a steady red that carries a long way in black water, and everything that swims toward it is what the Hof'mai eats.

The cold that stops the blight everywhere else is what makes this one possible. Spore dies above the frost line, blight will not spread through stone that stays below freezing, and the blight cannot cross cold open water at depth, which is why the sea is not blighted. At that depth the mutagen never completes, so it neither spreads nor kills its host, and the arrangement holds for as long as the vent does.

Life

They are infertile in the ordinary sense and appear where the vents are, so their numbers rise and fall with the volcano. Where a fisher finds a red light at depth, the correct practice is to cut the net.

Remembered

The Alverians noticed it and used it, briefly, as living lamps in deep-ocean architecture, and the holds that used them are the holds that went over first. Nobody at the time joined the two facts.

The Hof are given the cross-reference at Tier Three so that nobody goes looking for the Hof'mai in the Hoard. The Unsei bucket, the makers' own catch-all for failed fish experiments, is where the Alverians put it, and that is less useful than setting it down with the blight that made it.