Omasee

Body

Their hair resembles sea or lakeweed "depending on fresh or salt water," beneath a purple-white body. "A massive tail beneath their hips, frilled and thin at its end, with highly iridescent fins along its surface. No mouth opening, but instead they have a thin layer of skin around their lips, speaking through sonar waves. Their ears are curved and pointed, with 12 gills on their face," six either side working up the back of the head.

Holes in their palms unfurl when currents are channelled, opening out of the pleated tissue every Omari carries beneath the shell, which grips water the way a hand grips cloth. The fins on the tail "can harden to a fine sharp edge, allowing their entire tail to be used as a sword." Twelve gills feed a body that carries the longest muscle in the species, a single sheet running hip to fin-tip that does all of the swimming and all of the killing, and an Omasee that has torn it is carried home.

They can descend to the deepest depths of the Deep Realm without harm, because there is no gas anywhere inside them: no lung, no bladder, no sinus, no pocket of air in the gut. Pressure is a quality of water to an Omasee and not a danger. The same absence is what kills them in air, where the ichor thickens and sets and the shell rings, grown wet, crack as they shrink. Their black eyes see five hundred miles through water, further than any other caste, and everything the surface calls warm is grey to them.

Shell rot gets into the hinge cartilage between the forty-one ring bands, and an old Omasee that has fought for two thousand years holds its tail slightly curled for the rest of that body's life. Their ichor does not clot, it gels over an hour, and it goes on glowing while it does, which is why an Omasee fighting in the dark is a lit target and why the Shrakur open a flank and then wait.

Society

The Omasee are the garrisons of the Shelf and the vigil of the Tower. They wear their garrison's coral, grown across the shoulders and chest as the years pass, so that a body states how long it has served before it states anything else. They execute what the Cradle Council rules. They do not debate it.

They are the caste that loses people, and that gives them a side in the one argument the species has. Authority in the deep belongs to whoever has the most left to pass on and has not yet passed it, and the whole constitutional question is when an elder should finally go. An elder that waits is another thousand years of the best counsel available and a hundred children not born. The garrisons favour the passing. The Omivar, who would have to raise those children, favour waiting. The Cradle has lost three seats to void raids while the matter was being settled.

Their work is the mouths of the trenches, where the void things come up, and the watch-reefs grown at them; the Omari word for such a reef is the same as their word for a closed hand. A crowded Omasee, one that was passed more chain than it can hold, tends to go to the reefs, where the work is simple and the void does not ask your name. They kill nothing that did not need to die. An Omari who kills without need is sent up out of the deep, and to be sent up is to be ended without being killed.

The vigil is the oldest posting in the world. An Omasee garrison has hung at the sealed way to the Sea Tower since the god war, waiting for a door that has not opened, while the tide-song carries news of the void and the passing of elders across the whole of the Deep Realm in a day. Tsi'lumeen has captained it for eleven bodies.

Country

The Shelf is the upper city of Ien, the first ward of a living city of coral the colour of bruises grown in water with no light in it. There are no streets. There are currents, laid by the Omivar so that a swimmer is carried where the city wants him, and the Omasee racks hang in the dark along them.

Beyond Ien they hold the watch-reefs at the great trenches and the sealed way to Orton's Sea Tower, which "was cut off and heavily defended." Their range is the Deep Realm entire and the Salted Depths, and they "can be found in lakes and rivers as well, but that is a rarity." Warm water quickens them and they dislike it, which is the practical reason for the rarity rather than any law about it. Nothing preys on an adult Omasee. The void things try, and the void things are not hungry.

Regard

The Nu'uman resemble them, because the Omasee "were the inspiration for the female Nu'uman structure," and the Nu'uman do not know it. The mermaid of surface story is an Omasee seen once by somebody who got home to tell it.

The Shrakur were bred as the raiding Alverian force against Orton's supply chain and they dress in Omari skin. A corselet of banded Omari rings is the badge of a Shrakur captain, and a blade with an Omasee tail fin laid along it is the mark of a killer; both are taken from the dead, because a living Omari does not survive the cutting, and the deep counts either as evidence of murder. Shrakur blood dropped in water still summons an Omasee, which comes thinking a thing has died and wishing to claim the corpse, and the trick is as old as the war and still works.