Shrak'mor
The surface-facing morph, the empire-builders, in whom the Shrakur's power grew furthest. In the warm open sea the node grew strong and the body grew fast and lean, and the Shrak'mor are the only Shrakur whose lures reach a mind standing on dry land.
That reach is the whole of their politics. A node that can write into a skull through air can put a drowned face at a bedroom window three streets inland, and a Shrak'mor does not need to win a coastal war so long as it can make a coastal town believe it is already losing one.
Body
Fast and lean where the Shrakar is slow and vast, with the same cartilage frame, the same compression bladders and the same tearing valve behind them. They are the ones in the eco-suits, and they take them off to hunt.
Air is the price of the work. Out of the suit on dry land the skin cracks, the gills stick and the node goes flat, and the Shrak'mor who work the surface carry a lattice of white fissure scars across the shoulders that the coastal towns mistake for age. They also speak the surfacing-speech, clicks and gutturals and a wet hiss, better than any other morph.
Country
They have cut holds into drowned Alverian ruins and into living reef in the warm shallow seas. A coast they work loses its fish in a decade, its seals and its great swimmers in two, and its fishing towns in three.
Then they leave, and the water recovers in about ten years and the coast forgets in about thirty. A fishing town three generations after a raiding cycle has full nets, a good harbour, a story about a bad time long ago, and no memory whatsoever of the thing in the suit that came up the estuary. The Shrak'mor understand this perfectly and time their returns by it.
Society
They trade with surface lords for iron and take payment in prisoners, they hire out to coastal wars, and they raid. They are the Shrakur who fight to keep the war alive, and their way of keeping it alive is to widen it: every coast they draw into a quarrel with the sea is a coast that will one day send ships against the Sea Tower without knowing why.
The Vrahk of Bahr-Gar takes the Shrak'mor's tribute and does not trust them, and the Shrak'mor know their way to the throne is to bleed him in warm water, where the frenzy comes faster.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where the shallow-sea holds lie on the map of Nu
- Which surface lords trade with them, and what the prisoners are for
- How far a Shrak'mor lure actually reaches onto dry land
- Whether a Shrak'mor has ever challenged for the throne, and what came of it