Hof

Origin

Shrakur spliced with pufferfish, "Bred to be land mines deployed out to sea to be eaten mistakenly by Orton's Omari. Once consumed they would expand and poison those who ate them." They were bred for that sole purpose, as living mines, and the makers gave them no variance because a mine needs none. "When the war ended, their breeding never did, increasing their numbers so substantially that to this day a massive horde of them wanders the ocean, sending individual ones out to go invade the Omari in attempts to explode when close enough to one. Many worry what might happen when the day comes where one within the great sea horde explodes." Every fisher who has seen the Hoard has wondered the same thing.

Body

Five feet, and they weigh next to nothing; a Hof out of water can be lifted by one fisher and is, which is how most Hof die. "Large, rotund and puffy forms, fitted with natural shell armor, only their head and neck fleshy. Their eyes are a thin length of white that circles their head, dotted with numerous pupils that give them a 360 vision. They have tiny, long arms that have three fingers on the end." A Hof cannot be approached from behind. They expand to great size and spikes fire from the body on inflation, "releasing poison through multiple holes along their shafts." The venom is hallucinogenic. They live a thousand years.

The lightness is structural. What bone there is has been reduced to a few cartilage struts and a ring supporting the eye band; the rest of the volume is a foam of small chambers under the shell plates, and a Hof is closer to a float with hands than to a swimmer. It cannot dive. It cannot chase. It cannot flee at any useful speed, and it cannot resist being picked up. Every other people in the tier has some way of making itself expensive to kill, and this one has none.

The weapon is a chemistry kept in two parts. Two liquors sit in the body, one the venom and one the thing that wakes it, divided by a single wall of tissue no thicker than a fingernail. Ordinary inflation, the defensive puff that makes a Hof too large to bite, presses the wall and does not break it. The full inflation, the one that drives the spikes out through the shell, tears it. Then the two liquors meet and the Hof is gone, along with everything within a boat's length of it. The detonation cannot be aimed, cannot be survived, and cannot be done twice.

This is the whole of Hof pacifism and there is no morality in it. A Hof that decides to attack has decided to die, and there is no smaller version of the decision available to it: no blow, no threat carried out, no fight that ends with both sides walking away. The species has therefore not developed anger as other peoples have it, having never in four thousand years been able to afford the ordinary expression of it. What they have instead is a great and visible patience that the surface peoples read as calm and the Omari, who can ask, report as something closer to held breath.

The eye band runs the whole way round the head, a ring of white with many pupils set into it, and a Hof sees everything at once and always. There is no behind. Their tongue has no word for it and no word for turning to look, and the Omari note that Hof directions are given as distances and never as bearings. A people that can always see all of itself has no hiding and no privacy and no ambush, and the Hoard's peace is built on total mutual visibility: ten thousand of them, each watching all the others, none able to approach another unseen.

Below the eyes, taste. They read the water chemically at a great distance, and the signature they read best is the Omari, which was the point. A Hofar on a reef knows there is an Omari in the bay before the Omari is in the bay. They hear as the Omari hear, in pressure and returned sound, and in air they are close to deaf and entirely mute; a Hof taken out of the water makes no sound at all while it is killed, which fishers find easy and travellers find hard to watch.

Life

They spawn in broods, as fish do, in great numbers. Within the Hoard the spawn is loosed at the centre of the pack and the whole Hoard closes around it, so that the sea's hunters meet a wall of mines before they meet an egg. The drifting brood is the Hush and the whole Hoard slows for it. The young can inflate before they can swim, and a frightened child Hof that goes off takes the brood around it, which is why a Hoard nursery is the quietest water in the world and why the Hof move as they do, slowly, with nothing sudden in it. The child that has learned to inflate and has not yet learned when is the Small Loud, and the Small Loud are ringed by adults who do not touch them and do not startle them and simply stay between them and everything else.

A Hof is Full at fifty and old at nine hundred; the shell yellows and the pupils in the band cloud one by one, so that an elder has gaps in the ring and can, at the very end, be approached from a particular angle, which is the only privacy a Hof ever gets and which they are said to enjoy. One that dies unexploded is weighted and sunk by the Hoard so that its poison goes down and away; this is the Weighting and it is the only ceremony the Hoard has ever been observed to perform. They eat shellfish crushed in the beak, weed, and small fish, and the Hofar of the warm shallows eat coral.

Frailty

The wall between the two liquors thins with age. In a Hof of nine hundred years it is a film, and a hard shock, a fall, a net drawn too tight or a bad storm will do what nine hundred years of restraint did not. The old know it. They go to the centre of the Hoard, which is the still place, where nothing sudden happens and no fisher comes, and the Hoard closes around them exactly as it closes around the spawn. The centre of the Hoard is therefore the safest water in the world and also the most dangerous object in it, and the fear that every coast repeats, of the day one goes off inside the pack, is a correct reading of a real and worsening condition. The Hoard is a city whose elders are becoming unstable, and it has nowhere to put them.

The rest of their frailty is the plain helplessness. They cannot descend: the foam chambers will not compress and a Hof forced down struggles up or dies on the way. They cannot ride out weather, and a great storm scatters a wing of the Hoard across a hundred miles of sea and kills the young outright. They cannot be beaten in a fight, only killed, since any blow hard enough to make a Hof fight back ends both parties. And they cannot be taken. A slave that detonates is worth nothing, a prisoner that cannot be threatened tells nothing, and a body that cannot be beaten cannot be disciplined. Alone of all the WildKin, the Hof were never re-enslaved after the fall of Alveria, and the reason is not that anyone declined to try.

Their own young kill more of them than any predator. A Small Loud in a panic takes forty of its brood and whatever adults are nearest, and every Hoard carries that arithmetic forward through the generations, and it is the likeliest origin of everything slow and quiet in their manner.

Country

The open sea, and the Deep Realm's surface. The Hoffen Hoard Of The Deep: "Ever-moving, the Hoard of Hoff travels in a pack, having turned away from their fighting ways, and wishes to no longer wait to be killed. They are a pacifistic group, and although not all reside within, the majority of their species travel in this as a moving city." The Hoard keeps no coast and holds no ground. The Hofar hold the warm reefs, in small pods, and are the only Hof a shore ever sees twice.

The Hoard is a country made of bodies and it moves with the water it is in. It cannot stop, since a floating people that stops drifts onto a lee shore, and it cannot go deep, so it lives on the skin of the ocean in weather and in sun, and the shell of an old Hof is bleached on the upper surface and dark below like a stone that has never been turned. What it eats it eats as it passes: the shellfish of a bank, the weed of a current line, the small fish that shelter under it, which is a great many, since ten thousand floating bodies make the largest single piece of shade in the sea.

That shade is the Hoard's mark on the living world. A Hoard passing over a fishing ground strips it and shelters it in the same week, and the fisher towns of two coasts time their seasons by it: the water behind a Hoard is empty for a month and then extraordinary, because everything that fed on the shade stayed. Some ports pray for it. The Hofar do something slower and worse, since a pod of coral-eating Hof on a reef will take the reef down to rock over a century, and the coral coasts where they have settled longest are the bare ones.

What eats a Hof is what can get one down whole and live, which is nothing, or what can take one apart from outside, which is the Eeshmorg and the great things of the deep, and both learn early. Fishers are the real predator, and they use long poles and weighted nets and never a hand, and the trade has its own dead every year from getting it wrong.

Society

No one outside the Hoard has been told what passes inside it. "Reclusive; none have ever spoken to them on record." From a distance: "Terrified and hateful; on the brink of exploding." "Silent, and calm until aggravated." The Hoard has no rule that any watcher has found; it turns all at once, as a shoal turns, and the old are at the centre.

Its one observed custom is the send-off: now and then a single Hof leaves the pack toward the coast and the Hoard does not look after it. This was long read as the Hoard sending sorties against the Omari. The sorties are real, and they are the Hofar's, the warm-water morph that never joined the peace. The Hoard lets them go because a Hof that wants to explode is safer at a distance.

Everything else about how they live together follows from the eye band and the thin wall. There is no rank that can be enforced, since enforcement requires a threat and a threat here is a suicide. There is no theft, since nothing can be taken unseen. There is no assembly and no speech-making, since the pack turns as one without anyone appearing to begin the turn. What the Omari describe, in the only account anyone has, is a society of continuous mutual adjustment by ten thousand bodies that have each concluded, separately and correctly, that the cheapest thing to do about any disagreement is to drift a little further off.

Faith

Little of their faith has ever left the water. What is known came to the Omari, who can ask a Hof in thought, and it is one phrase, which the Omari render as "the one unexploded day." Whether that is a god, a heaven or a hope, no Omari has cared to ask twice. There is no afterlife in it that anyone has heard of. What waits for a Hof is what waits for everything: the star gods' auction, where a soul that spent a thousand years not going off is entered like any other.

Tongue

Their language is very close to the Omari's, and they speak Common Tongue as well. None has spoken to a surface people. The two facts sit together: the Hof can speak and have not chosen to, except to the Omari, in thought and sonar, who were the ones they were made to kill.

Their names, as the Omari carry them, are soft and round and to be spoken low. The names run: Ohu, Faalen, Umo, Hovva, Eeloh, Thaum, Ohmoa, Iffa.

Regard

"The poisonous hoard of the sea." "Rich and prosperous catch, difficult to find and highly sought after by fisher people." "They look like a massive mass of balls moving across the sea and upon its surface."

The Omari were the target and the Hofar still hunt them one Hof at a time. Fisher people and hide traders take them where they can; on the Golden Road at Ikarma, three Craetan merchants stand over "a large HOFF SKIN HIDE." The Hoard has no allies and asks for none, and the Omari, who could end the Hofar sorties by asking the Hoard, have not yet found the words.

Harvest

Hof Pike: "The Poisonous spikes that come from their bodies are cut off and used on the ends of spears and arrows, and always contain traces of the hallucinogenic poison." The spikes must be cut from a body that did not detonate, which means every pike on the market came off something that was killed without being allowed to fight.

Huffy Venom: "Containing hallucinogenic properties, this venom warps the world and makes things far too small seem monstrous, and heightens the victims fears to the point of near crippling." Drawn from the larger of the two sacs, and the drawers work slowly and at arm's length, since a punctured wall takes the whole workshop.

Hof Skin Hide, traded on the Golden Road as a good of worth: the shell-armour flensed whole and cured, which turns a blade and floats, and a suit of it is a diver's inheritance. The foam under the plate is what floats, and it is why a Hof hide suit will not let a drowning man sink and will not let a diver go down. All three are legal. A Hof has no country to object.

Remembered

No surface people holds a Hof name, and none can while none has spoken to one. The Omari hold one.

Faalen. A Hof who came alone to the coral city of Ien, was asked in thought why, answered, and went away again unexploded. What it answered is Ien's.

The Hof'mai, which is no Hof

The lantern-fish once proposed as a kin of the Hof is no Hof and no people. It is a monster, and it is set down with the Crimson Horrors.

The Hof were bred as living mines and need no variance beyond climate morphs, and the lantern thing has nothing of the Hoard in it but the silhouette. What it actually is: a deep-water strain that took Crimson from a submarine vent, where the blight comes up into cold water and cools without curing. The light it carries was never an organ but a bloom of blight held in a sac at the front of the head, burning a steady red that carries a long way in black water, and everything that swims toward it is what the Hof'mai eats.

The cross-reference belongs here so that nobody goes looking for the Hof'mai in the Hoard. The Alverians put it in the Unsei bucket, their own catch-all for failed fish experiments, which is not wrong; it is simply less useful than setting it down with the blight that made it.

Kin each has a page of its own

The Hof code is locked and needs no variance. Morphs for biome and climate stand within the one genome, and one of them carries a name, the Hofar of the warm shallows and the reef.

One name is set aside here to keep it out of the Hoard. The Hof'mai, the lantern-fish sometimes spoken of as a Hof kin, "living lamps for deep-ocean architecture," is no Hof. It stands among the monster classes, in the Unsei, the makers' own catch-all for failed fish experiments. Octopus stock belongs to the Squeesh, and no Hof kin was ever built on it.