Eesham
"The ever-smiling eel-shrakur. The Eesham are a sadistic strain of Eesha, who find themselves within dry subtropical climates. Their skin is gray-black and they do not surface unless they have to. Their colonies are within the water, and you can find massive hoard pits which contain hundreds of them, all slithering together." They hatch countless spawn and build underwater mud dens, and the Eesh Pit that the whole species is known by is theirs: a large mud hole containing hundreds of them, where you drop food at the mouth and stand back.
These are the Bogish-hunters who sell to the markets, which is the original Alverian purpose still running four thousand years on. Five feet, and never seen singly.
Body
Five feet, grey-black, with the fixed smile the kin is named for and the beady eyes of the species. They are the only kin with a proper sense of touch in the face, a pair of short feelers under the snout, which is what lets them work the mud blind and which is what makes them the ones the baronies hire.
The two sets of jaws, the six clawed fingers and the field-sense are the species' entire, and the touch is laid on top of them. An Eesham in black mud with nothing to see by is not working blind at all. It is reading the pulse of everything in the pit with the flank pores and feeling the ground with the snout, and it does not come up unless it has to.
Country
Dry subtropical wetland, and the pits. A pit is a dug bowl of mud with galleries running off it below the waterline and a single mouth, kept deliberately foul because foul water hides what is inside it. The Hundredmouth is the largest known, its mouth ringed with the bodies it has been fed, and Vrassil of the Hundredmouth is an Eesham who has never left the water and to whom the land-going houses send their ledgers to be weighed.
What a colony of them does to a country is the species' worst case, because they are the most numerous. They eat and kill everything and they breed into corpses, and a wetland with an established Eesham pit loses its fish in a decade, loses its frogs in fifteen, and becomes a mud country of eels and Eesha and nothing else. The Torgai baronies tax them where they sit and cull them when the eel yield drops. A pit that dries in a drought is a hundred Eesham cracking to death in a mud bowl within sight of a river, and the baronies have dammed for that purpose more than once.
Regard
The Bogish are prey, and the Eesham "hunt them to sell at the market." That is a trade with a price list and it is legal in the places where it happens. The SnakeFishers are the enemy, and their method is built for Eesham ground: the lesser-snake burrows for a pit, disturbs the nest, the Eesha burrow up, and they are caught.
A Torgai barony that has hired an Eesham bailiff has hired the thing that will one day lay eggs in the baron. Everyone involved knows this and the arrangement holds anyway, because an Eesham bailiff collects.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How many pits there are and which baronies they sit under
- What a Bogish fetches at market, and who buys
- Where the Hundredmouth is
- How a pit decides anything, given that it has no rule but hunger