Shrakene

Body

The gut shortened, the bladders stayed and were turned to a use nobody in Bahr-Gar has ever admitted is a use: a Shrakene's pressure wave, released soft and wide, stuns a whole shoal of small fish into its mouth. The largest weapon the species grew has become a fishing method.

They are the one morph fresh water does not ruin. A deep Shrakur put into a river swells, the node misreads the density and builds a world that is the wrong shape, and the animal dies confused over about nine days; the Shrakene adapted to it over a long time, which is why the freshwater lines are theirs and why exile up a river is a sentence for everyone else.

Life

They lay egg-purses in the coral rather than breeding as the rest of the species breeds, which the rest of the Shrakur despise as a weakness and raid as a delicacy. There is no Winnowing on the reef, no dozen pups in each of two wombs eating one another before they have eyes, and no mother waiting to eat whatever comes out small.

They fail the Descent more than any morph, and the shoals of Bahr-Gar hunt them for it, as one would cull a strain that has forgotten what it is for.

Country

A reef held by Shrakene is a living water: the filter-feeders take the small life and leave the large, the reef builds, the fish return, and within a century the water around a Shrakene hold is the richest in the warm sea. Bahr-Gar takes this as proof of the charge against them. A shoal that leaves a coast alive is a shoal that has stopped prosecuting the war.

Their other country is the mouths of certain rivers, where they went when the deep grew too hungry for them, and where a town will sometimes hire one as a warden without working out that the suit is not armour.

Regard

The Shrakene say the war is over. No one in Bahr-Gar has ever heard them say it, because no Shrakene goes to Bahr-Gar twice.