Shrakar
The Shrakar are the Shrakur of the cold floor: slow, vast, pale, so translucent that the organs show through the skin like stones in ice, half blind in the white eyes and wholly sighted in the node. Cold and pressure made them, out of the same locked genome every other morph carries.
On the floor nothing has changed since the first order, and so the Shrakar are the ones who deny the war ended. To a Shrakar the war is the water. The name parses Shrak-ar, the deep-shape, and carries no Crimson in it, whatever its ending sounds like to a surface scribe.
Body
The metabolism runs at a crawl, so a Shrakar eats once in a season and goes a year without in hard times. The bladders are enormous and slow to wind, which gives a wave that carries further and takes longer to build than any other morph's, and a Shrakar in a siege line is a weapon that must be aimed well in advance. They grow larger than any morph save the Shrakene, and they grow old.
The cartilage calcifies with the years, so an ancient Shrakar is part rock before it reaches the Floor. The oldest of them lie in the ravine like a second floor, calcified into the rock they rest on and fed by the shoals that keep passing, unable to hunt, unable to rise, and not dying.
Country
They hold the cold lightless floor of Bahr-Gar, where the pens are and where the Descent is run, and they hold the Long Trench and the siege lines before Orton's Sea Tower, which the legions of the Shrakar have kept for longer than any surface kingdom has existed.
Nothing about either posting has changed in three thousand years, and that is not a complaint. A Shrakar who has held the same line for nine hundred years and has never received an order he did not expect is a Shrakar in good standing.
Society
They keep the pens, which makes them the class that feeds the abominations first in a poor season and the class that decides, without saying so, when the ancients are fed the pups instead. The leash-count is counted here more than anywhere, since every abomination taken living into the pens is taken by somebody.
Among the Shrakar it is taboo to say aloud that the war has ended. It is counted a madness, and the mad are given to the pens.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where the Long Trench and the siege lines sit on the map of Nu
- How many of the three thousand year Shrakar remain, and where each one lies
- Whether a Shrakar has ever been moved off a posting
- What the oldest of them remember of the first order