Shrakvol

Body

The spread crown is made by taking a pup down the ravine in its first season, where the pressure and the dark do the work. The pups that come back up with the head are Shrakvol, and the ones that come back up without it are given to the shoals. Nothing about the genome differs; only the water a pup was held in during the year the shape is settled.

They wear the Omacran's webbed crown as a veil over the nodes, which is the one piece of Omari hide worn for something other than a boast or a disguise.

Faith

They officiate the Descent, pour the offerings into the ravine, keep the count of the dead in the chorus, and go down the throat of Bahr-Gar to bring up the orders. The orders have not changed since the first, which the Shrakur take as proof that the voice is true.

They are the one class permitted to bleed on purpose, and the offering of their own blood into the throat of the ravine is the central act of the rite. Everywhere else in the species blood is a catastrophe; in the priest's hands it is a sacrament, and a shoal that would tear its own bleeding Jaw apart will hold station in perfect order while a Shrakvol opens his arm above the dark.

Frailty

Node-burn is the priests' disease. A lure held too long pulls the prey's dying all the way into the node and leaves it there, and a Shrakur who has carried too many deaths goes quiet, stops hunting, and lies in the current with the node running on nothing. They call it carrying.

The old Shrakvol are all carrying something, and the Shrakvol hold that this is the price of the office and that a priest who is not full of other things' dying has not been doing the work. Whether any of it is still in there, or whether the node is simply ruined, is a question the species has never thought worth asking.

Regard

They are the only Shrakur it is taboo to eat. In a species whose entire jurisprudence is one sentence about blood, that single exemption is the nearest thing the Shrakur have to a protected office.