Squeesh

Origin

Shrakur spliced with octopus, "Bred to spy on Orton and the Omari, and although they are not a fighting species, they do have within them fight or flight." Their code was locked at the making. Since the fall they have drifted from water to water, building libraries under it. Eight feet of translucent blue-white with a brain that can be watched thinking, a Squeesh was bred to spy on a god and has spent the four thousand years since reading. It cares for knowledge and for nothing else, guards it with its life, and is rude to anyone who has not read as much, which is everyone. The salamander scholar-knights who share a wet skin and a library habit are the Sael'mund, a separate people.

Body

"Tall, bulbous bodies, with a large floppy mass atop their head where their liquid expansive brain resides. They are extremely flexible and able to increase or decrease in size from ten feet to two feet. Their base color is a hyper blue-white, and is translucent." At full standing height a Squeesh is eight to nine feet. It can draw itself down to two and stretch, for a short while, to ten. It weighs three hundred pounds and can pour most of that through a gap a hand wide.

Nothing in the body is rigid. There is no bone, no shell and no cartilage; the Squeesh is a solid of muscle laid in three directions across itself, and it holds any shape by bracing one set of fibres against another. A limb is stiffened by being squeezed from within. This is why a Squeesh at rest sags and a Squeesh at work stands like a column, and why a tired Squeesh is visibly a puddle with a face in the top of it. The only hard thing in the whole animal is the beak, a black hooked pair of plates at the centre of the underbody, which is what surgeons of other peoples find when they cut one open and cannot place at all.

The brain is liquid and it is not in a skull. It fills the floppy mass over the head and runs down into the trunk in ropes, and the throat passes directly through the ring of it. A Squeesh that swallows something too large for the gap presses the food through its own mind, and the pressure costs memory: hours of it, sometimes days, taken out cleanly and never recovered. Every Squeesh learns this once, young, and never again. The species eats small things, seldom, and without interest, and the reason is not asceticism.

The blood does not clot. There is no mechanism in them for it. A cut Squeesh seals itself with its own saliva, the same mucus it waterproofs its books with, pressed into the wound by hand and held; a Squeesh who cannot reach a wound will empty. This is the single most important fact about how they fight, which is that they do not, and about how they live, which is alone and behind a sealed door.

"They have three eyes, the third only opening if they feel safe." The first two are ordinary in placement and remarkable in build, with a slot-shaped pupil that holds level however the body leans. The third sits in the brain-mass itself and has no lid of skin; it is shuttered by a ring of muscle, and it reads the grain of light, the angle at which light comes through water, which the other two cannot. A Squeesh with the third open sees what is behind it as a change in the water's shine and cannot be approached. A Squeesh with two eyes open has not decided to trust you and has not decided to hide it. Among their own kind the opening of the third eye is the whole of intimacy; there is no other gesture of it, and no Squeesh has ever opened it for another people, which is why no other people has ever seen one at ease and why they are all agreed that the Squeesh are cold.

The skin tastes. It is a tongue over the whole body, and a Squeesh reads by laying a hand flat on a page and taking the ink through the palm, which works in complete darkness and works on a page that has been washed blank. A den is therefore unlit, and a den cannot be robbed of its light, and a Squeesh brought into a court can tell what was written on a scraped parchment, which is a service several crowns have bought and several crowns have regretted. The same skin does the blending: "They blend into any surface," done by a field of colour-cells under the translucency that copy what the skin is tasting rather than what the eyes are seeing, so a Squeesh matches a wall it is touching perfectly and matches a wall it is only looking at badly.

They spit a paralytic ink, and the cost is exact: "once this is done, they have two minutes of adrenaline, and then their body becomes severely weakened. This takes two weeks to heal back from." The ink is drawn from a sac beside the gut and it takes the body's stored strength with it. Two weeks of a two-thousand-year life is nothing, and a Squeesh will still not spend it, because for two weeks it cannot brace, cannot stand at height, cannot seal a wound and cannot carry a book. Their saliva dries into a waterproofing mucus. They live two thousand years and retain everything they read.

What they cannot do is speak. The beak and the rasping tongue behind it were built to grip and tear, and the voice is made further back, in a soft sac that shapes air into hisses, long vowels and a great many sounds that live at the back of the throat. Ancient Alverian was written for exactly that apparatus. Common Tongue is built of stops made with lips and teeth, and a Squeesh has neither. Everything they say in Common arrives soft, breathy and slightly wrong, which the world reads as insinuation, and which is anatomy.

Life

A Squeesh breeds once, and late. A female past her first thousand years seals herself into a den with a clutch of two or three hundred eggs and tends them for eleven years without eating, fanning them with water, walling the den with her mucus, and reading to them from whatever she has carried in. She dies as they hatch. The male has already died, within a year of the pairing, as his kind does; the deep families of the Craega call it the Spending, and the Squeesh have no word for it at all, because no Squeesh has ever been alive to describe it. Every Squeesh is born in a library its mother made and sealed with her body, and its first inheritance is her books.

The hatchlings are two feet long, mute and translucent, and read before they speak, since the skin reads and the skin is finished before the voice-sac is. They are the Unspoken for their first decade and take no name. What follows is the Reading, thirty years in the sealed den among the mother's volumes and the mother's body, with no living thing present and nothing to do. They leave the den at forty, singly, each carrying one volume, in what they call the Carrying Out, and the volume carried is the name taken. They speak little because they were raised among the dead and the written.

The long middle is nineteen centuries. A Squeesh does not marry, does not settle, does not accumulate anything but text, and moves every few decades. Old age shows as a clouding of the brain-mass: the liquid goes opaque, slowly, from the top, and an elder can be read at a glance by anyone who knows what to look at. A clouded Squeesh still retains everything and takes longer to reach it, which they find unbearable. When a Squeesh dies away from its den, other Squeesh come for the books, and only for the books. The body is left; it goes to nothing within a week, since there is no bone in it, and there is no Squeesh grave anywhere in the world. They eat shellfish, fish and small drowned things, seldom and without interest.

Frailty

The great fear is not death. A Squeesh at two hundred already knows what it will die of and has eighteen centuries to arrange the library. The fear is the mucus failing. The waterproofing is made by glands in the mouth and those glands thin with age and stop entirely in the last century, and a den-keeper whose mucus has failed watches the collection rot from the bottom shelf up and cannot stop it. This is why elders take apprentices they otherwise despise, why the Ninth Reading has been refilled nine times, and why a Squeesh will trade almost anything for sealed jars.

The Slack is the injury of their trade. A Squeesh that stretches to ten feet too often tears the long fibres, and the tears do not knit in a body with no clotting; they scar into slack cord. A Squeesh with the Slack cannot hold height, sits where it should stand, and is taken for old at four hundred. Stretching also thins the brain-ropes, so a Squeesh at full extension is stupid for the hour after, which is why no Squeesh has ever negotiated at height and why one seen stretched is one that is running.

Drying is the death they are most often given. Out of water a Squeesh loses skin-taste first and goes blind to everything it is touching, then loses the colour-cells, then cannot seal a wound; a day in dry air will kill one and three hours will ruin one. Slave-takers know this and it is the only leash that works on them.

There are worms that live in the brain-liquid, taken from eating drowned things, and a Squeesh with them loses memory in patches and can be seen checking the same page over and over. They dread it more than they dread fire. And there is the thing the makers' own record names and does not explain: "Always mimicking other species and backgrounds, there is a depression prevalent within them that they never truly are themselves." The dens call it the Unselfing. A body that copies whatever it touches, a life spent inside other peoples' towns pretending to be from somewhere, and two thousand years of perfect recall with no one to tell, produce it reliably, and the ink-drinkers come out of it.

Country

The Deep Realm and fresh water. The Squeeshen Sunken Knowledge Dens: "Using the waterproofing ability of their mucus, their great knowledge dens, partially submerged, can contain countless tomes of great knowledge, all water proofed to survive their elements." The settlement pattern is a slow infiltration of the archive kind: "Once accepted into a community, typically near a body of water, they will construct a protected submerge library and slowly bring their historical knowledge to that location, living there as long as they can before moving on without notifying anyone." Two dens carry names. The Drowned Stack is the oldest, beneath a lake that has had four names. The Ninth Reading is a river den that has been abandoned and refilled nine times by nine different Squeesh who never met.

A den is shaped by a body with no bones. There are no doors, only slots; no stairs, only a shaft; no rooms of a fixed size. The shelves are set at heights that suit a creature which can be any height it likes, and the whole of it is unlit, so that a thief who gets in cannot read what is on the shelf he is standing next to. The only large space is the surfacing chamber, open to the sky for the Reading of the Dark.

A Squeesh takes very little out of a country and puts back less. It eats a few pounds of shellfish a month and competes with nothing; the water it lives in is better for the den, since the mucus that seals a book also seals a silted bank, and the reed beds over a long-held den grow thick and straight. What the presence of a Squeesh does to a country is done above the water. Towns that have hosted one for fifty years find their charters clean, their disputed boundaries settled and their old quarrels quietly documented, and then find the Squeesh gone and the documentation gone with it, and discover that they had been keeping their memory in a tenant. Three river towns in the Surface Realm date their decline from the week a Squeesh left, and none of them can say why, having lost the records.

Society

Scholars first, spies by manufacture. "Severely intellectual." "Mysterious and never wanting to properly settle down, for fear of becoming too comfortable." "They trust few and speak fewer words." Only "the bold and colonised ones live within towns and cities." The saddest line in all the WildKin writing is theirs: "Always mimicking other species and backgrounds, there is a depression prevalent within them that they never truly are themselves."

They are neutral, slightly aggressive and rude as a people, because they care only for knowledge and protect it with their lives. Where more than one Squeesh shares a den, the one who has read most keeps it, and the Reading Order is settled by asking. They never lend; they copy, by hand, in the dark, at a speed no other people can match, since the copying hand does not need to see the page it is copying from. Dress is nothing, or a wet cloak for the streets. They make no music and think less of peoples who do. The oath is sworn on the unread page. Taboo: to burn a book, any book; to open the third eye for a stranger; to speak Common where Alverian would serve.

The etiquette of the eyes governs every dealing they have with one another. Two eyes is business. Three is trust and is almost never given, and a Squeesh who opens the third and is then deceived does not recover from it; there are two recorded cases of a den-keeper walling itself in afterwards and reading until it died. The world outside reads a Squeesh as conniving because it never sees a Squeesh relax, and the Squeesh know exactly what is being said about them, and have written it down.

Faith

The Squeesh worship the Constellation Court. The evil few among them worship the Void Princes. To a Squeesh the Court is the one library that was never burned: the stars are the pages that stayed up when everything below was lost, and the sky is read each clear night by the den-keeper and entered in the den's book. This is the Reading of the Dark, and a den will surface into open air for it, which is the only thing that brings one up. They believe the soul is entered in the Court's ledger at death and read there forever. The truth is near enough to hurt. The soul goes to the star gods, to be auctioned. A Squeesh told this would be offended and not surprised. The few who serve the Princes are the ink-drinkers, who sell what they have read to the void for the promise of reading what nothing living has.

Tongue

They speak Ancient Alverian and the older tongues "beautifully." Common Tongue defeats them: "Their oral construction was only formed to speak Alverian and the older tongue of languages. They struggle, and some can barely succeed at [Common]. They speak to their own kind the most, and do so in whispers."

A Squeesh takes as its name the title of the first book it read alone, in the tongue it was written in, which is why Squeesh names are long, Alverian-shaped and whispered. Among other peoples it uses a den-name, two syllables, chosen to be sayable. In the short form the names run: Ssuvaeth, Iolloqu, Vheshanei, Ossiquel, Thaumiss, Elloveish, Quiessa, Naurhil.

Regard

"Snobbish intellects." "Conniving and manipulative, often isolating themselves." "You never know when they are coming or going, and can never map their habits or day to day tasks." "They are spies."

They are descended from the Shrakur, were made against Orton and the Omari, and are no longer at war with either. The Iziakotie lizard-kin share a hide quality with them, which is why both are hunted. The Craega are the one people they trade with, wreck-relics for mucus. The Librar keep everything and the Squeesh keep everything, and the two have not spoken in living memory, which for both is a long time.

Harvest

Squeesh Jelly: "Used in cooking as a fine delicacy; due to their intense biological makeup, the Squeesh jelly is squeezed out of their dense muscles, and is tart, and extremely sweet; iridescent-green in colour." The pressing is done on a living Squeesh in the places that take it, since the three-way muscle goes to water within days of death.

Paralytic Ink: "If injected in large amounts, can leave someone paralyzed up to six hours; green-black in colour." A drained sac refills over two weeks, and the trade keeps its sources alive and empty. Squeesh Hide: "Translucent once taken off of their body, this rare hide can, for five years after its removal, be adapted to take on its surroundings. If you wish to hide in the mud, rub mud on it and it shall look just like that." The five years are the colour-cells dying; the hide works by taste, which is why it must be rubbed and not merely shown.

Water-Proofing Mucus: "Their saliva, once dried, can be used to waterproof items; its translucent blue." The mucus is sold by living Squeesh and is legal. The rest is taken from dead ones and is legal too, in most places, which the Squeesh have entered in their books.

Remembered

Ossiquel of the Drowned Stack, who has kept the same den for eleven hundred years and left it once, to retrieve a book a fisher's child had taken, and returned the child.

Naurhil, den-name of an ink-drinker who sold the Reading of the Dark of three centuries to a void summoner and was found dissolved in her own ink, all three eyes open.

The kin

None. "Their genetic code was locked." The lock holds, and no caste or morph stands under this name. The three salamander kin once laid over the octopus belong to the Sael'mund.