Undine

Blue and green-skinned, finned and gilled, the Undine hold the Singing Sea: an entire ocean of reef shallows, open water, lightless abyss and northern ice, and by a wide margin the largest thing in the Kingdom. 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.

Depth marks them: the deep families of Tidewell are paler, larger-eyed, and slower to warm, and a shallows Undine can identify a Cecaelia household at a glance and generally does.

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.

The practical everyday form is surface tension: an Undine can break the skin of the water to let a drowning Faerie through, or hold it closed, and both are taught. The second is not called a weapon and is one.

Life

Wall-terraces, ledge-halls, and reed-woven shallows houses, with the whole province connected below the surface — an Undine can cross the Manywaters without coming up, and social life is organized around that fact. Households are large, property is held in common between siblings, and the household argument is the fundamental unit of Undine culture.

Names. Paired. Every Undine carries a personal name and a household name and is addressed with both, always, by everyone, including intimates — dropping the household half is how you signal a rift, and it is noticed instantly.

Arrival. A new Undine is taken into a household by vote, not by whoever found them, and the vote is public and can be contested. It is the most bureaucratic arrival custom in the Kingdom, it takes weeks, and the newcomer sits through all of it — which the Undine consider the beginning of citizenship and everyone else considers an ordeal.

The bloom. Twice a year the algae go and the shallows are lightless and airless for three weeks. Everything stops. The province visits, argues, marries, and settles its books in the dark.

Society

Tidewell is a stepped city built down the wall of a great blue hole in the Great Reef, with the noble quarters deepest and the visitors' quarters at the top where the air is. Lady Nerissa, Cecaelia 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.

Governance is communal and slow: the Cecaelia is elected by a process that takes months, and the province's formal complaints to the capital are drafted collectively, which is why they are so long and so effective.

Tribes

Three tribes in the Manywaters, and a fourth that has not seen the sea in living memory.

The Nixies are the tribe the other three forget to count, and they have noticed.

Currents

The Deep Families. Six old households of the lower hole. Obstinate, respected, and incapable of moving quickly.

The Reedmoot Assembly. The shallows' merchants and reed-cutters, who do the province's trade and resent being governed from a hole in the ground by people who never come up.

The Deep Claim. Those who want the Abyss pushed and the grindylocs driven out of water they consider legally Undine. Never a majority. Never closer.

The Ferrymen. Unlicensed carriers moving goods and people between the Manywaters and the Meres. Half of them are grindyloc; the Undine half do not advertise which trips they take.

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.

Playing One