Eeshen
The Eeshen are "the most common member of the family, next to the Eesha," and the only one of them that a road ever sees twice. The reed fish in the splice breathes air, and what the Eeshen take from it is a skin that dries far slower than any of their kin's. Every other Eesha on land is burning slowly inside a skin that will not stay wet, keeping damp robes and wet rooms and counting the hours. The Eeshen are not, and it changes everything about how they live.
They are land-adapted and house-dwelling, nocturnal by preference, and they "often take to the profession of explorer." They are the only Eesha who can cross dry country and the only ones anybody has ever seen enjoying a road. Five feet, and usually killed by fifty.
Body
"Their bodies are skinny, yellow-green, with two flapping translucent yellow fins on the side of their heads." They are the slightest of the kin and carry the least weight, five feet where the common Eesha runs to six, and the head fins move constantly in air, which strangers read as agitation and which the Eeshen do not appear to control.
The eel head, the jagged teeth, the six clawed fingers and the two sets of jaws are the species' and are unchanged in them; so is the field-sense that reads the electrical wash of a living body, and so is the deafness in air. An Eeshen must be spoken to loudly and from the front like any of its kin. What is different is the skin. It holds its water, and an Eeshen can be a week from any river without cracking, which is why it walks upright on a road where its cousins ride or stay home. The hips are still the species' bad joint and an old Eeshen still takes a cane.
Country
Wherever there are houses at the edge of wet country. An Eeshen does not need a pit and does not keep one; it takes a room in a town, works the night, and sleeps through the light that its milky eyes cannot use anyway. Nocturnal by preference is not a temperament here, it is an eye.
Beyond the towns they go out. The exploring is the one thing the species does that is not extraction, and it is the reed fish's gift turned into a career: a people that can leave the water is a people that can go and look. Where they have been is not written down anywhere a wetland town can read, and the Eeshen do not volunteer it.
Regard
They are Eesha, and the reputation arrives before them. A town that would not house an inquisitor houses an Eeshen because it is the version that can be housed, and then finds it has taken in a lodger who can tell when it is lying. Rank among them is taken and never given, as in all the kin, and an Eeshen returning to a pit after years on the road has to take its place back off something.
What the pits think of them is less flattering than what the towns do. A kin that can walk away from the water is a kin that has stopped being what the makers built, and the old ones in the mud have a word for it that the Eeshen do not repeat.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which towns tolerate resident Eeshen and which do not
- Where the Eeshen explorers have been and what they brought back
- Whether an Eeshen ever returns to a pit for good
- What the flapping head fins actually do