The Merrow

The Undine everyone means when they say Undine: fish-tailed in the water, legged on land, amphibious enough to spend weeks either way though visibly happier wet. The Merrow hold the Great Reef — which to a surface-dweller is a scatter of low islands and to a Merrow is a continent — and they would love to show it to you.

The Reef

The Reef's real geography is submarine: reef walls, channels, kelp stands, sand flats and lagoon systems that the Merrow navigate by names appearing on no chart, because the charts are drawn by people who only ever saw the parts above water.

Tidewell is built half above and half below the waterline on the largest atoll, which makes it the only provincial capital in the Kingdom that a landbound ambassador can visit without special arrangements — and the reason the Undine have more diplomatic traffic than their population warrants.

The Welcome

The Reef's tourist trade is entirely Merrow doing, and it has made them wealthy and slightly notorious. A Merrow guide will keep a visitor out past sunset explaining coral spawning cycles to someone who only asked where the beach was, and will be genuinely hurt if the visitor leaves early.

Beneath it they are serious. The Reef is fragile, they know exactly how fragile, and the welcome cools very fast for anyone who treats it as scenery. Merrow law on reef damage is the harshest civil code in the Kingdom and is applied to visiting nobles without adjustment, which the Chancery has raised eleven times.

Ways

Strong, practical water magic — current, pressure, the mending of coral — and a guardianship they treat as a job rather than a calling. They are the Kingdom's ferrymen for everything crossing to the eastern provinces, and every Faerie who has ever seen the Elderlands got there in a Merrow's care.

They meet the Cecaelia seldom and the Selkie more often than either admits. Of the Nixies they are fond and faintly patronising, which the Nixies have noticed.