Eeshak
"Ancient keepers of fouler and darkened regions of the saltwater shore communities, these creatures are truly old, and need to be within salt water to channel their lightning abilities. Their features are sharp, bulbous and wrinkled." The field-sense that every Eesha uses to read a pulse runs backwards in the Eeshak. Where another Eesha only reads the electrical wash of a body, an Eeshak makes one, out of stacked tissue down both flanks, and salt carries it where fresh water will not.
Six feet. Their years have been counted in thousands, and they are simply the Eesha who have been hardest to kill. The oldest of them remember not having legs at all; there are Eeshak on the salt shores who learned to walk in adulthood and have never entirely forgiven it.
Body
Six feet, sharp-featured, bulbous and wrinkled, and older than anything else standing on the shore. The stacked tissue down the flanks is the organ that separates them from the rest of the kin: it makes the charge rather than reading it, and it needs salt water around it to work, so an Eeshak out of the surf is an Eeshak with the weapon disarmed.
Everything else is the species' and is present in its worst degree, because the species accumulates. An Eeshak of two hundred years is a ruin by the ordinary measure and an Eeshak of two thousand is a ruin that has been rebuilt badly many times: hips long gone, skin permanently split, teeth broken and regrown crooked, one arm shorter than the other. Rank holds them upright. The field-sense and the voice hold the rank, and both work best in the dark, which is where they stay.
Country
The foul end of a saltwater shore community, in the dark, at the edge of the water. Foul water hides the field-sense of what is inside it, and an Eeshak keeps its ground foul for the same reason a pit is kept foul, which is a defensive measure taken deliberately by a people that knows what living in filth does to it.
They do not go inland. Salt is the whole of the weapon and the shore is the whole of the country, and an Eeshak that leaves it is an old cracked thing with a cane and nothing else.
Regard
They hold the land-going houses in contempt for the same reason a swimmer holds a crutch in contempt, and they are contemptuous of the rest of the kin about equally. Thessrak Salt-Old, an Eeshak of a saltwater shore, claims to remember the Alverian lords and is not doubted to their faces.
Shore towns leave them alone, which is less tolerance than arithmetic. A thing that can put a charge through the water it is standing in is not taken by wading after it, and the SnakeFishers' methods do not work on salt.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How old the oldest Eeshak actually is
- What they remember of the Alverian lords, and whether any of it is true
- Which shore communities keep an Eeshak at the foul end
- What the charge does to a body, and how far it carries