Omivar

Body

"Their fish-nu'umanoid bodies are intricate in the way of coral, while holding the softer qualities of fish. Their strength beneath the sea, and their six-webbed fingers allows them to be expert in their building, and detail oriented in the construction and cultivation of Orton's empires. Their eyes are opal with dual pupil in each eyeball, with fluid coral hair. Their gills are along their necks."

The dual pupil is the reason they can build. An Omivar sees a thing and the growth of the thing at once, the near focus reading the surface and the far focus reading how the surface is moving, so that an Omivar watching a wall can watch it grow.

They go bare and let the reef grow on them as it likes, which in the deep is what rank looks like. The pleated tissue under the shell that every Omari uses to grip water is worked against coral instead, and an Omivar at work does not gesture: the water in the room changes, and then the thing that was going to happen has happened.

They are the lightest caste, from three hundred pounds, and the shortest lived in the body, three hundred to a thousand years before the Tidefall. Like every Omari they carry the lifestone in the centre of the stomach, where it sits deeper and glows less than an Omacran's, and where a knife that knows the anatomy can still find it.

Society

They are architects and cultivators, "caretakers of their home," and the builders of "Orton's empires." They keep the creches of the Weave, and they seal the Cradle: the deepest ward of Ien, the nursery trenches where the fused elders wait for their passing, closed behind coral that shuts on any mind it does not know. It is an Omivar's mind the coral knows when it decides whether to open, which makes this caste the door of the most heavily guarded place in the Deep Realm.

The creches are where they do the work that matters most and shows least. A child of the light swims within the hour and hunts within the month, but the memory woven into it surfaces slowly, over decades, so that a child of thirty who has never held a tool lays coral like a master because a body that passed into it laid coral for a thousand years. The Omivar call this the second learning, and the whole craft of a warden is pacing it. A child given a task too early meets a memory it has no room for and goes silent for a year; a child given nothing to do meets them all at once in the dark. Creche walls are grown to damp sound, the wardens speak in short pulses, and no adult brings a grievance into the Weave, because a grievance heard in the wrong year is inherited twice.

Because they raise the children, they hold the side of the argument the garrisons do not. An elder's passing gives the deep a hundred children who remember the god war and ruins some of them, since a chain of many hundreds of names is more than a child can hold. The Omivar favour waiting, and have favoured waiting since before the Scourging. Yuu'takwe, creche-warden of the Weave, has raised nine Tidefalls of the unwoven and has argued to the Cradle, without success, that they be told what they are.

They "can speak various undersea languages," which no other caste is recorded as doing, and they are the only Omari who make an object at all.

Country

Ien entire, and the reaches around it. The city lies below the reach of any surface light, lit only by the Omari themselves, and the Omivar shape it by thought out of the coral and ocean tissue they are connected to. It has no facades, no windows and no ornament that could be called visual, because nothing in the deep is seen from a distance and everything is heard from every distance. What they shape instead is return: halls grown to give back a particular echo, a corridor that answers a pulse with a chord, a ward whose walls tell you what ward it is before you have arrived.

Omari art is echo, held in coral. A great work by an Omivar cannot be moved, photographed, described or stolen, only visited and sounded. It has no market on the surface and the Omari have never understood that this is a loss.

Outside the city they farm the water without owning any of it. Shoals are driven rather than netted: an Omivar lays a current the way a farmer lays a hedge, the fish run where the water runs, and a reach of ocean under Omari management carries three times the fish it would carry wild. Kelp is cropped in rotation and the cut beds are seeded from the creches. The Bone Yews of the deep, the scavenging things that keep the trenches clean, are fed and kept away from the wards, and nothing else on Nu would call that tending.

The work shows from a boat, which is the irony of it. Over a century the reef spreads and stiffens, the silt settles, the water clears and the shoals fatten and rise, and the surface fleets working that reach bring in catches that make a fishing town rich in a generation. When the Omari leave, the current-work slackens within a year and the coral goes feral within ten, the trench mouths open, the scavengers stray upward, and inside a century the fleets have moved and the town is timber. There are four such towns on the eastern coasts, and none of them has the faintest idea what actually left.

Frailty

An Omivar who moulds coral for centuries is grown into by its own work. The reef takes the hand, then the arm, then the shoulder. The creches keep cutters on hand for it, and a certain number of old Omivar decline the cutter and are left where they are, still speaking, part of the wall.

Their coral is the other thing that outlives them. Soulcoral, the fluid coral hair and the reef grown on an Omivar body, stays alive after death if kept in seawater and can be coaxed to grow, and the Alverian facilities held tanks of it. An Omivar considers its growth a child.