Sael'mundmor
Seven feet and three hundred pounds, brown and wrinkled, slow in every movement until the one that matters. The wrinkles are the lungs: at that mass the skin must do most of the breathing and the folds are surface, which means a Sael'mundmor must stay in cool moving water more than any other kin and cannot leave a river valley at all.
They are the wandering knights, the ones who go where an accord has been broken and end it, and they live four hundred years. Many of them remember the Alverian envoys that their grandchildren know only from carved monuments, and a Sael'mundmor who says "when the makers held this river" is stating a memory.
Body
Seven feet and three hundred pounds on a frame that was never built for dry land, brown, wrinkled, and cold to the touch. The folds are respiratory surface and they are the reason for the water: a Sael'mundmor out of cool moving water for long is suffocating slowly, and a day of hard sun ends any Sael'mund, this one soonest.
The regrowth runs off the same spinal bank and costs the same quarter of the body's weight, which at three hundred pounds is a great deal of food. Every Accord House keeps a larder for the arrival of a knight that has been maimed on an errand and healed on the road, and a gaunt Sael'mundmor at the gate is the loudest thing that ever happens quietly in that people.
Four hundred years accumulate. Each rebuilt limb comes back paler, weaker and slower to feel than the one before, and a Sael'mundmor of three hundred and eighty is approaching the Stillness, when the bank empties and the cuts stop closing and the house holds the Question.
Country
River valleys, and no further. The whole map of enforceable law in the Surface Realm is the map of the river systems because the arbiters cannot travel away from water, and the Sael'mundmor is the sharpest edge of that limit: the largest enforcer the houses have, and the one least able to follow anybody uphill.
In a dry decade the accords of the high country go unenforced. The Torgai baronies read weather better than anyone and know exactly which summers to break a charter in, and what they are reading is the range of this kin.
Regard
They are the answer to a broken accord and everybody involved knows what the answer looks like. A house sends one where the words have already failed, and a valley that sees a very large grey-clad figure walking its river road in bad weather understands what has been decided somewhere upstream.
Ondramar of Meeting Waters was a Sael'mundmor who carried the same accord between two Nu'uman crowns for two hundred and eleven years and outlived both houses.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- How a Sael'mundmor ends a broken accord, and by whose authority
- How many are left, given four hundred years between generations
- What they actually remember of the Alverian envoys
- What happens to a valley an enforcer cannot reach