Zieken Eesha
"Zebra-high finned, tropical, White-Grey and black striped, these rarer Eesha have a wispy fin that runs along their backs, and are one of the more beautiful variants of the species." The snake eel in them burrows tail-first, and so do they. A Zieken sleeps standing in mud with only the head out, in warm water, in the shallows, and that is very nearly the whole of what is known about how they pass a day.
A beautiful and rare thing in this world is hunted accordingly, and few see twenty. They are the shortest-lived kin of a people that does not die of age, and nothing about that is natural causes.
Body
Five feet and slight, striped white-grey and black, with a high wispy fin running the length of the back that stands when the body is out of water and lies flat when it swims. The stripes are the whole of their trouble: no other Eesha can be told apart at a distance and a Zieken can.
The eel head, the split mouth, the throat jaws, the six clawed fingers and the field-sense are the species' and are not softened in them. A Zieken reads a pulse across a table like any of its kin. The skin is bare and must stay wet, as in all of them but the Eeshen, and in the warm shallows it stays wet without effort, which is the reason they are where they are.
Country
Tropical warm shallows and the mouths of rivers. The burrowing is the habit that shapes everything: the snake eel goes down tail-first into soft ground, and a Zieken does the same, and a stretch of warm mud that appears empty at noon is not. Standing asleep in mud with the head clear of it is a resting posture, a hiding place and an ambush at once, and a wetland that has Ziekens in it is a wetland where nobody wades twice.
They do not hold pits as the Eesham do and they do not hold drowned cities as the Eeshmorg do. What they hold is a length of warm shore, thinly, and they hold it for as long as nobody comes looking.
Regard
The Eesha are hated everywhere and the Zieken are hunted on top of it, which is a distinction they would trade. A hide that can be recognised is a hide that can be sold on description, and the trade in Eeshan Hide takes them in preference because the stripes survive the curing.
Among the kin they are thought decorative and treated as junior, which in a people where rank is taken and never given means a Zieken spends its short life at the bottom of a ladder it has no time to climb.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Which coasts and river mouths the Zieken hold
- Whether the stripes mean anything to another Zieken
- Who buys a striped hide, and at what price over a plain one
- Whether any Zieken has lived long enough to hold rank