The Lesser Four

"Prior to mass experimentation, the Alverian's constructed four species of higher standing, to carry the brunt of their empire. The A'qmuushkey Planuurmaihn (Nu-uman), The A'qmuushkey Ikrhian (Mekuhlian), The A'qmar Shrakur (Shrakur), A'qurssa Kerenian (Do'urssan) would be their First Four. To them this mocked their greater creators, showing they too could be gods."

Everything beneath the Greater Four was made, and the Lesser Four were made first and made best. They are the four working limbs of a dead empire: a soldier caste to hold the deep, a colonist caste to hold the soil, a spy caste to walk unseen between them, and a raiding caste to drown Orton's supply lines in the dark water. Each was built for one purpose and given enough mind to be good at it. Each was given rather more mind than the purpose strictly required, because a tool that can solve a problem it has not been briefed on is worth more than a tool that cannot, and the makers had not yet learned what that surplus does to a people over thirty thousand years of no instructions.

The splice law binds all four. Every people of the Lesser Four carries a strain of Alverian in its blood. The makers were only beginning to experiment with lesser kinds, and the first results came out too perfect: too strong, too long-lived, too whole in the mind. The Alverians lessened them, cut their strengths down until each could be controlled, and the four peoples that walk the world now are the lessened forms. The Nu'uman are ape, Irugaine and Alverian. The Do'urssan are Alverian, Thojar and bear. The Mekuhlian are Alverian, Irugaine, carnivorous ape and chameleon. The Shrakur are Alverian, Omari and shark. What was cut away from each is the measure of what the makers feared in it. In the Do'urssan they cut the size, and wound the cutting into the blood so that it would keep cutting. In the Nu'uman they cut the years and the hide. In the Mekuhlian they cut the room inside the head. In the Shrakur they cut nothing from the body at all and took instead the idea of an ending. Three of those wounds still bleed. The fourth is why the deep is still at war.

The manufacture was the same for all four. "All beings began blue white, the colour of their inner vein networking system," and the Alverians "would blast them with acclimatising rays of atmos, depending on where they wanted to send them, and their bodies within minutes would start changing colour and form, based on the climate they would be transported to." Skin darkened or paled, hair thickened or fell away, eyes narrowed to slits or widened for cave light. The look of every kin below is a record of where an Alverian decided to put it. None of the four remember being made with any accuracy, and three of them are wrong about it in different directions.

The blue white remains under all of them, and a physician who has opened bodies of all four learns to look for it. It is the Alverian vein network, the first thing laid down in the vat and the last thing the rays alter, and it shows wherever a people's covering grew thin: in the pink and purple tracery under Mekuhlian grey, in the hyper blue veining of a Desert Walker who still channels, in the cold lattice visible through the belly skin of a Shrakar on the trench floor, in the throat of a Do'urssan whose plating has not yet come in. Four peoples who agree on nothing share one anatomy at the level where the makers' hands actually touched them, and none of the four regard this as a reason to be kind to the other three.