Shrakur

Origin

The war ended thousands of years ago, nobody told the Shrakur, and they would not have stopped anyway. They are "dedicated to destroying Orton, no matter the time spent or the cost," "monstrous, and blood hungry," "strategic, but blinded by rage." They hold Bahr-Gar, an ancient ravine in the deep ocean, where they keep Abominations of Chaos in chains and where their king rules by a law of teeth. They dress in the skins of Omari. They serve Aezithis still, after the Collapse; some of them deny that the war ever ended, and the rest fight to keep it alive.

The Shrakur are Alverian, Omari and shark, built as the undersea Alverian force against Orton's supply chain and armies, the raiding arm of the deep war. Their genome is locked: "There is only one variation of their species; the Alverian's locked their genetic code," and the lock means a Shrakur cannot breed with any other species, as they contain within them several genetic codes. The four sub-lines written under the kin below are castes and regional morphs of that one locked genome, shapes the same blood takes in different water, and no new splice. Like the rest of the Lesser Four, the first Shrakur came out too perfect and were lessened. In the Shrakur the makers cut nothing from the body, since the body was the point; they locked it, and they cut from the mind the sense of an ending. A Shrakur cannot conceive that a task given is a task that can be finished, and the makers thought this a virtue in a raider until the makers died and the task did not.

"After the Alverian's fell, Orton and the Shrakur, among other abominable's still fight to this day over the mighty sea tower." "Their masters may have fallen to memory, but they speak to them still, commanding their subterranean legions." They serve Aezithis. The war in the deep was the Stone God's war as much as Alveria's; the Alverian raiders and the abominations that crawled out of the ravines of Aezithis' heart-wound fought Orton on the same side, and when the Omari were broken on land and "a great host of Omari were encircled and slaughtered," the Shrakur were in the water waiting for the rest. Bahr-Gar is one of those ravines. The Shrakur camped at its mouth to fight what came out of it and, being what they are, found that what came out of it could be chained. The ravine has been their pen and their throne since before the sky went dark, and the voice that reaches them from its floor gives the same orders their masters gave.

The lock is often misread, and the misreading is worth settling. It means that no Shrakur line throws kin of its own: what a Shrakur is in one sea it is in every other. It does not mean that nothing was ever made out of Shrakur stock. The Craega, the Squeesh, the Eesha and the Hof are not Shrakur descendants and never were. They are separate peoples the Alverians built in the vats out of Shrakur tissue and something else, which is the makers working rather than the species breeding, and the difference is the whole of the lock.

Body

Angler-shark-like qualities, with seahorse tail-legs, allowing quick bursts of speed. The legs change the silhouette entirely, and they are the reason a Shrakur on land moves in lurches rather than strides. The mouth is the horror: a blend of leech and anglerfish oral structures, multiple rows of curved, long teeth. Their skin is black-blue, with translucent qualities, so that what is under it shows in poor light. The eyes are white with no visible pupil. On the crown sit the holosonographic nodes.

There is almost no bone in them. The frame is cartilage, laid heavy and dense at the spine and the jaw ring and light everywhere else, so a Shrakur cannot be broken in the way a Nu'uman is broken and can be crushed in ways that would leave a Do'urssan standing. The braincase is a cartilage box with no vault of bone over it, which is the single reason the holosonographic nodes work at all, since the nodes sit on the crown and read and write straight through a skull that has nothing solid in the way. It is also the reason a Shrakur's own head is the most vulnerable thing in the deep to another Shrakur's pressure wave, and why the first rule of the war-chorus is that the legion faces the same way.

The tail-legs are the seahorse half and they are built of bony rings, the one place hard bone survives in the body, stacked in a double column and sheathed in muscle. They coil, they anchor, they lock, and they throw. A Shrakur on the hunt holds the rings locked around a spur of rock and hangs motionless in the current for hours, then releases the whole column at once and crosses forty feet before the thing it is eating has registered the water moving. On land the rings have nothing to grip and the column has to be dragged, which is the lurch. Their architecture answers this exactly: the shoal-holds of Bahr-Gar have no floors and no stairs, only anchor-bars driven into the honeycombed rock at every height, and a Shrakur hold is read by another Shrakur as a hunting ground rather than as a building.

Two organ systems define them. The lungs: sonar pressure when released from their lungs can tear someone apart, the building of pressure to release a shock wave that can tear a target apart, a physical weapon that works best underwater, where the pressure has somewhere to go. An air-breather would fail to recognise them as lungs at all. Gas exchange is done at gill slits under the jaw ring; the paired organs in the chest are compression bladders, walls of ringed muscle laid over a cartilage brace, and the Shrakur draws water in, winds the rings down against a closed throat valve, and opens the valve. What leaves is a wall of water travelling faster than the water around it. It ruptures an Omari at ten feet and kills a Nu'uman diver at thirty.

It also costs. The valve tears a little with every release and the recoil drives the brace back into the body's own organs, and the working rule in every shoal is that a Shrakur has two shots and a third that will bleed him inside. Two and hold is a battle order given in the deep as routinely as a surface captain orders a halt, and a Jaw who calls for a third release is understood to be spending his own shoal to buy something, and is expected to say what. The Shrakur Cannon exists for this reason and for no other. The Alverians, who had built the organ, watched what it did to the thing carrying it and issued "hand pressure cannons developed by the Alverian's" so that the war could be fought without the raiders killing themselves at the rate of one in four engagements. The Shrakur hold the Cannon in something close to reverence, as a gift from the masters that says the masters were paying attention.

The nodes: they create vibrations off of their prey's skulls, producing mental imaging to lure them in, so that a Shrakur hunts by putting a picture inside the head of the thing it is about to eat. The mechanism runs both ways and cannot be made to run one way. To write a picture into a skull the node must first hold the shape of that skull, which means reading it, which means that for as long as the lure is running the Shrakur is receiving whatever is happening inside the head it is lying to. A Shrakur taking an Omari by the lure feels the Omari's relief at seeing its child, then its confusion, then its terror, then the specific quality of its dying, in full, at close range. Every Shrakur has known exactly what its food feels since it was ten years old. Nothing whatever has come of that knowledge. It is the coldest fact about them and it is the one the other peoples refuse to believe when they are told it.

Their blood is a beacon: "Shrakur blood, when dropped in the water, will summon forth an Omari, thinking they have died, and wishing to claim their corpse." The reason is in the splice. Omari is a third of what they are, and the blood carries enough of it that an Omari in open water smells a dead kinsman and comes in good faith to gather what is left of a cousin. The Omari have known for thousands of years that the water lies to them in this one particular way and they come anyway, because the alternative is leaving a kinsman unclaimed, and the Shrakur have built a tactical doctrine, a taboo, a succession law and an entire export trade on that decision. It is the deepest grudge in the deep, and it runs one way; the Shrakur do not resent the Omari for coming, they resent them for being right about what the blood is.

The skin is translucent over a layer of fibre, and what is under it shows. A Shrakur cannot conceal a wound, a full stomach, a swelling or a pregnancy from another Shrakur, and this is why the law of teeth functions at all. Rank among them is assessed by looking through one another. Everything in Bahr-Gar is decided by who is bleeding, and it can be decided that way because bleeding is visible from the inside out and a lie about one's own condition is not available to the species. They have no word for a boast about strength. They have four words for degrees of visible depletion.

They have no swim bladder and sink when they stop, so they never stop. A Shrakur rests by shutting down half the mind at a time and continues to swim on the half that is awake, and a shoal at rest is a shoal circling. There are no beds in Bahr-Gar and no rooms in which a Shrakur lies down, and their word for night is the word for the water being cold. Every conversation the species has ever had has been conducted in motion.

What they sense is pressure. Sound is sight to a Shrakur; the node builds the ravine, the wall, the shoal and the prey out of returning echoes, in a resolution that shows a fish's spine and the contents of a stomach. The white pupil-less eye registers light and shadow and nothing else, enough to know that something large has come between them and the surface. Colour does not exist for them in any form, which is why there is no Shrakur ornament that can be looked at; their marks of rank are worn to be felt and to be heard, the jaw on the cord that swings and clicks, the notch-rows cut into a hold wall that a passing Jaw reads with a hand. They also feel the electric wash of a living body through the water, so a heart is a thing they can find behind a rock, and a Mekuhlian's cold skin and stopped warmth hide nothing at all from a Shrakur, which is one of the few facts that frighten Mekuhlian envoys and one of the reasons no memory house has ever opened a quarter on a Shrak'mor coast.

Being unable to be deceived by appearance, they are exceedingly easy to deceive by sound, and their whole art of war is false echo. To be beyond the reach of the node is their word for exile and their word for death; a Shrakur driven out is said to be out of the echo, and the phrase is used for corpses and for the banished with no distinction drawn.

Lifespan is nine hundred years, and a rare few reach three thousand. A Shrakur of the common shape stands seven to nine feet from the crown to the coil of the tail-legs, and weighs five to nine hundred pounds, most of it muscle over cartilage; there is little bone in them. They never stop growing. A Shrakur of a thousand years is twelve feet, and a Shrakur of three thousand is a thing that cannot leave the trench, and those are the ones who are still personally angry about the first war. What one notices first, in the dark, is the lure: a faint cold light at the crown, and then the teeth.

Life

They breed as sharks breed, made stranger and worse, and their childhood is vicious. The young are thrown into the water against the Abominations of Chaos, and those who survive, survive. A female carries two wombs and a dozen pups in each, and the pups begin eating one another before they have eyes. This is the Winnowing, and it is the first stage of a Shrakur life and the only one that happens out of sight. The mother's belly sings with it; the sonar of a womb-fight can be heard by the whole shoal, and the shoal gathers to listen and to lay wagers on the count. One pup comes out of each womb, sometimes two, already blooded, already toothed, and the mother eats on the spot whatever comes out small. Birth is in open water in the frenzy season, when the blood in the water is so thick that the Omari will not come to it. The Shrakene alone lay egg-purses on the reef, which is one of the reasons the rest of their kin hunt them.

Which of the four morphs a pup becomes is settled in its first year and settled by water. The genome is locked and identical in all of them, and the lock holds a set of shapes rather than one shape; cold and pressure on the trench floor turn a pup pale and slow and vast and make a Shrakar, warm open water makes the fast lean Shrak'mor, the reef thins the blood-hunger and broadens the body into a Shrakene, and a pup carried down the ravine in its first season by the blood-priests grows the wide head and becomes Shrakvol. Two pups out of the same womb raised in different water are different creatures at ten and cannot be exchanged afterwards. This is common knowledge in Bahr-Gar, and it is why the ravine hunts the reef: a Shrakene is simply what happens to Shrakur children when nobody makes them suffer.

A pup swims with the shoal and eats what the shoal leaves until its tenth year. These are the shoal-years, and a pup in them has no name that is used and no standing whatever; it is fed last, it is struck freely, and roughly a third of them are eaten by their own shoal in a hungry season, which the shoal does not consider a loss. Then comes the Descent. The pup is sent down the throat of Bahr-Gar alone, with nothing, into the pens where the lesser abominations are kept loose for the purpose, and it must come back up the ravine with a piece of one of them in its teeth. Most do not come up. Those that do are Shrakur, and are named a second time. The dead of the Descent are not mourned; they were never Shrakur.

After that comes the Lengthening, which is the whole of the rest of a life. Ageing is growth and nothing else; the body does not weaken, it enlarges, until it is too large for anything but the trench floor. There is no senescence in the species and no old age as other peoples would know it, and the last stage, which they call the Floor, is reached by a Shrakur of some three thousand years who can no longer lift himself off the bottom of the ravine. He is not dead and does not die. He is fed.

The dead are bait. A Shrakur corpse is towed far from the ravine and opened, and the shoal waits in the murk for the Omari who come to claim it; or, if the corpse is of no use as a lure, it is fed to the pens. Diet is flesh and blood, raw and alive where possible, the flesh of Omari above all. They do not drink, and they do not cook, and they regard a people that does either as prey that has grown confused.

Frailty

The valve is the first thing to go and it goes to everybody. Every release tears it a little and nothing in the body repairs cartilage, so a Jaw of four hundred years has a valve that seats badly, fires soft and leaks pressure back into the chest, and by six hundred he can no longer make a killing wave at all. Rank does not fall with it, since rank is counted in leashes rather than in shots, and the deep is accordingly commanded by a class of old Jaws who cannot personally do the thing their shoals are for. They compensate with the Cannon, which is the other reason the Cannon is revered, and a Jaw's Cannon is the one possession in the species that is inherited rather than taken.

Node-burn is the priests' disease and the hunters' occupational injury. 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.

Growth is the disease of the long-lived among them. A body that never stops enlarging eventually outruns the strength of a cartilage frame and the reach of a heart, and the ancients on the floor of Bahr-Gar cannot hunt, cannot rise and cannot feed themselves. They must be fed daily, by the shoals, in meat, forever, and there are more of them every century. The ravine's ancients and the ravine's pens compete for the same flesh, and in a poor season the Vrahk must decide which of the two is fed. The rule of Bahr-Gar is that the pens are fed first, because a hungry abomination breaks a chain and a hungry ancient only complains, and the second rule, which is not spoken and is universally understood, is that in a very poor season the ancients are fed the pups.

They bleed and cannot stop bleeding. The blood is thin, slow to close and loud in the water, and it summons both the Omari and their own kin, so a wounded Shrakur is a danger to everything around it and is treated as one. There is no field medicine anywhere in the species. There is no word for it. A Shrakur who takes a bad wound in open water is abandoned where he lies or is eaten by the shoal he was swimming with, and the frenzy law has arranged matters so that this counts as a rite; when the blood is in the water there is no rank, only the bleeding and the not-bleeding, and whoever is bleeding is prey. A people who cannot clot has made abandonment into religion, and no Shrakur has ever complained about it, including while it was happening to him.

Fresh water ruins them. 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 and the rest cannot, so exile up a river is the standard sentence of Bahr-Gar for anything short of the pens, and is understood by all parties to be a slow execution with an insult attached. Air is worse and faster: 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 get a lattice of white fissure scars across the shoulders that the coastal towns mistake for age. The old stiffen, since the cartilage calcifies, and an ancient Shrakar is part rock before it reaches the Floor.

What they fear is not death, which does not much interest them. What a Shrakur fears is the pens, which is where the mad and the spared and the failures go, and being out of the echo, and the possibility, never spoken in Bahr-Gar and understood everywhere in it, that the voice at the bottom of the ravine has been finished with them for three thousand years.

Country

The Deep Realm. The surface has no chart of it and no name for most of it, and the Shrakur keep no register of places for anyone else to read. Bahr-Gar is the ancient deep ravine of the ocean where the Shrakur have captured and enslaved Abominations of Chaos, and where their king holds his throne. It is a wound in the sea floor a day's swim long and deeper than sounding, black to the eye and loud to the node; the walls are honeycombed with the shoal-holds, and the pens are the ravine floor itself, where the chained abominations pace in the dark and the Descent is run.

Above the lip of the ravine, in the cold open water, lie the Long Trench and the siege lines before Orton's Sea Tower, held by the legions of the Shrakar for longer than any surface kingdom has existed. In the warm shallow seas the Shrak'mor have cut holds into drowned Alverian ruins and into reef. The freshwater lines hold the mouths of certain rivers, where the Shrakene went when the deep grew too hungry for them.

They farm nothing and they empty everything. A coast worked by a Shrak'mor shoal loses its fish in a decade, its seals and its great swimmers in two, and its fishing towns in three, since a sea with nothing in it supports nobody. The ravine consumes at a rate that no water can meet, because the pens must be fed and the ancients must be fed and neither will ever be fewer. What they have taken instead of farming is livestock they did not breed: the Abominations of Chaos, captured living out of the ravines of the heart-wound, counted in leashes, worked as war-beasts and spent as the Descent. The only thing they have ever deliberately made is the Hof, bred as sea-mines to be eaten by the Omari, which is a kind of agriculture if one is prepared to call it that.

The Shrakene reefs are the one exception and the reason the Shrakene are hunted rather than merely despised. 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.

When the Shrakur leave a water, the water recovers in about ten years and the coast forgets in about thirty, which is the whole reason the surface has never learned what they are. 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 institutional 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

Military, permanently. They command their subterranean legions "to capture the barrier of this world, and defeat the mighty god of the sea," the same order given before the Collapse. "A few civilised neutral Shrakur exist, but not many"; those are the ones in eco-suits on the surface and the ones in fresh water. Their king rules at Bahr-Gar under a tribal dictatorship that is cruel, animal and never still.

The king is the Vrahk, the Mouth of the Ravine, and there is no succession, only bleeding. Any Shrakur may challenge the Vrahk by drawing his blood in open water before the shoal; when the blood is in the water the frenzy law holds, and under the frenzy law there is no rank, only the bleeding and the not-bleeding, and whoever is bleeding is prey, Vrahk or pup. If the Vrahk's blood draws an Omari before the matter is settled, the challenger must kill the Omari alone or be given to the pens. A Vrahk who has been challenged and lived wears the challenger's jaw on a cord. Beneath the Vrahk are the Jaws, the leaders of the shoals, each ranked by the leash-count, the number of abominations it has taken living into the pens, and a Jaw whose leash-count is passed by one of its own shoal is expected to swim down the ravine that night and not come back. Beneath the Jaws is the shoal, and beneath the shoal are the pups, and beneath the pups are the pens. Everything in Bahr-Gar is decided by who is bleeding.

The law works because the bodies are legible. A translucent people cannot hide a wound, a gorge or an exhaustion from one another, so there is no need for evidence, oath, witness or trial anywhere in the species, and the Shrakur have never developed any of them. Their entire jurisprudence is one sentence about blood and a set of rules for what counts as open water. Surface envoys who have tried to negotiate a treaty with a Jaw come away describing them as impossible to bargain with, and the difficulty is at bottom that a Shrakur has no concept of a stated position; he has a condition, and the condition is visible, and he expects you to look.

They dress in the skins of Omari. An Omasee's hide is worn as a cloak, wet, the tail split and hung down the back. An Omacran's webbed crown is worn as a veil over the nodes by the Shrakvol. An Omivar's coral plates are lashed to the chest and shoulders as armour, and a Jaw who wears a full Omivar is a Jaw who has killed a builder of Orton's empire and taken his time about it. The wearing has a use beyond the boast. Omari hide in the water reads to an approaching Omari's senses as Omari, so a raiding line dressed in skins is a line that closes the last forty feet before the alarm goes up, and the same splice-kinship that makes their blood a lure makes their coats a disguise. On the surface they wear the eco-suits, and take them off to hunt. Food is flesh and they do not sit to it.

Music is the node and the lung: sonar-song, which no air-breather hears and every fish flees, and the war-chorus, in which a legion builds lung-pressure together and releases it in time against the ravine wall so that the whole trench rings like a struck bell; the Omari at the Sea Tower hear it through the water and are sick. The chorus costs what every release costs, so a war-chorus of a thousand is a thousand valves torn a little in unison, and a legion is permitted two in a year. Custom: the Descent, the frenzy, the leash. The oath is blood in the water before the shoal, and the swearer opens his own arm and lets the shoal smell what he has sworn. Taboo: to bleed inside Bahr-Gar, which calls the Omari to the throne; to spare a pup in the pens; to eat a Shrakvol; and, among the Shrakar, to say aloud that the war has ended, which is counted a madness, and the mad are given to the pens.

Faith

Their faith is their masters, and they are wrong about them being gone. "Their masters may have fallen to memory, but they speak to them still, commanding their subterranean legions." They serve Aezithis. The clergy are the Shrakvol, the blood-priests, and the doctrine they keep is that the masters' orders and the Stone God's will are one voice, and that it speaks from the floor of Bahr-Gar. Its rite is blood: the blood of Omari poured into the ravine after a raid, the blood of the pens, the blood of the Descent's dead, which sinks. The Shrakvol go down the ravine further than any Jaw and come back up with orders, and the orders have not changed since the first, which the Shrakur take as proof that the voice is true.

The Shrakvol 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. That single exception is the whole of Shrakur religion, and it is why they have a clergy rather than only an officer corps.

Their belief about the dead is the chorus: a Shrakur who dies in the water joins the echo, and the sonar that comes back off the trench walls carries the dead in it, and an old Shrakur listening to the return of his own song hears his shoal-brothers answer. The truth of it is the truth of every faith on Nu: the dead go to the auction of the star gods, and the echo is an echo. Whether the voice on the ravine floor is the masters, the Stone God, one of his spill, or three thousand years of orders returning off the rock, the Shrakur have never asked, because a Shrakur does not ask whether a task can end.

Tongue

Common Tongue, built in like everyone else's, and sonar. Their own tongue is Vor-Shrak, the deep speech, and most of it is not sound as air-breathers know it: it is pressure-pulse and node-image, pictures pressed onto the skull of the listener, so that a Shrakur telling another where the Omari are does not describe the place, he puts it in his head. Vor-Shrak therefore has no adjectives of appearance and no colour words at all, and a very large vocabulary for density, distance, depth and the state of a body. The surfacing-speech, spoken in air, is clicks and gutturals and a wet hiss, and the Shrak'mor speak it best.

Naming follows the womb. A pup's first name is a sound-shape given by the mother at the birth, one syllable for each sibling it ate to be born, so that a two-syllable name is an ordinary Shrakur and a four-syllable name is a Shrakur whose mother watched him eat three, and moved carefully around him thereafter. The second name comes up out of the Descent and is the name of the abomination's part in the pup's teeth, and it is spoken only in Bahr-Gar. A Vrahk adds his leash-count as a title. First names in the convention: Ghraak, Vrusska, Skorrhal, Thraavok, Kraashe, Hurrgak, Ossraak, Drukhaal.

Regard

"Ruthless and cruel." "No desire besides destruction." The Omari do not speak of them at all, and claim their corpses in good faith, which is the only mercy the Shrakur have ever been shown and the one they exploit hardest. The surface knows them as the thing in the suit that the river town hired to clear the water of something worse, and as the reason the fishermen of certain coasts do not put out at night.

The Omari and Orton are the enemies, and the reason the Shrakur exist. The Alverians are the masters, still issuing orders in a manner of speaking. Aezithis is the master served. Their descendants are the water WildKin: the Shrakur are parent stock to the Craega, with the salt water crab; the Squeesh, with the octopus; the Eesha, with the swamp eel and the river bed fish; and the Hof, with the pufferfish, four peoples that are Shrakur with something else grafted in. The Hof were bred as sea-mines to be eaten by the Omari, which is the Shrakur war carried on by other means. The Abominations of Chaos are their slaves, chained in the pens of Bahr-Gar and used as war-beasts and as the Descent. The surface is neutral toward them, through the eco-suit minority and the freshwater lines only.

Harvest

The Shrakur Cannon, "hand pressure cannons developed by the Alverian's," made rather than cut, and built around the people's own lung. Shrakur Blood, "containing potent and rich qualities," which "when dropped in the water, will summon forth an Omari, thinking they have died, and wishing to claim their corpse"; it is sold as bait and used as such, and the Omari fraction in the splice is the whole of why it works, which is a thing the bait-sellers of four coasts have never been told and would be improved by knowing. Shrak-teeth are curved, long and self-replacing, shed in the hundreds over a life and sold on the surface as blades, awls and needles that do not dull; they are grown out of the same fibre as the skin rather than out of bone, which is why they take an edge no whetstone can improve and cannot be reforged once broken. Node-glass is the holosonographic nodes, dried and set, which alchemists and illusion-workers buy because a node kept in the dark for a year will still put a faint picture in the head of whoever holds it, and the picture it puts there is the last thing the node was reading when its owner died. Deep-hide is the translucent black-blue skin, made into lantern hoods that dim a flame to a glow that carries no distance, which is why smugglers and Doom-sworn pay well for it. It is legal everywhere, since no one loves the Shrakur; but the Omari kill any hand that carries Shrakur blood in the water, and a coast that trades in shrak-teeth is a coast the shoals raid. The Shrakur themselves pull the teeth of their own dead before the corpse is towed out as bait; nothing is wasted that can bite.

Remembered

Ghraak, called Eleven-Leashed, Vrahk of Bahr-Gar, who wears four jaws on his cord and has never been bled below the lip of the ravine.

Skorrhal of the Long Trench, Jaw of the legions before the Sea Tower, who has held the same lines for nine hundred years and has never received an order he did not expect.

Thraavok Blood-Father, eldest of the Shrakvol, who goes further down the ravine than any living Shrakur and has come up every time.

Kraashe, a Shrakene of the freshwater lines, warden of a river mouth for a town that has not worked out that the suit is not armour.

Kin each has a page of its own

Four sub-lines, castes and regional morphs of one locked genome. The Shrakur cannot be crossed with anything, and have not been; what divides them is water. What follows is what the one blood becomes on the cold floor, in the warm open sea, on the reef, and in the priesthood.