Undine

Blue and green-skinned, finned and gilled, the Undine hold an enormous interconnected system of lakes, slow rivers, reed-shallows, and one coast — warm, clear, and unreasonably full of life. To a Faerie of any other race it looks like paradise. The Undine find this funny, since most of the Manywaters is a place you can only visit if you can breathe it.

They are the most communal of the Faerie races and the most stubborn. Undine tithes to the Eternal City are always paid, always late, and always accompanied by an itemized complaint.

Appearance

Blue through deep green, with fins along the forearms and calves, functional gills, and fan-shaped iridescent wings that fold flat against the back and double as fins underwater. Undine are the only Faeries whose wings are useful in both mediums, and they are insufferable about it.

Attuned Magic

Water. A nascent Undine moves small amounts of water at will and bends the water around themselves to swim at speed. A powerful one calls a deluge out of a lake, commands rain from a clear sky, and — at the far edge of the art, and not discussed politely — moves the water inside another living creature.

Society

Tidewell is a stepped city built down the walls of a flooded sinkhole, with the noble quarters deepest and the visitors' quarters at the top where the air is. Lady Nerissa, Deepmost of Tidewell, rules from the bottom. Loyalty to kin outranks loyalty to the crown in practice, and everyone involved has agreed not to test this.

Relations

The Undine's unresolved problem is at the bottom, where the sunlight quits and the black meres begin. The Grindylocs were there first, they are better swimmers, and their territory surfaces inside the Manywaters itself. The Undine, who consider themselves the water's rightful people, have spent centuries insisting that the deep does not count as part of the lake.