Grindyloc

Green-skinned and rubbery, with fingers far too long, the grindylocs hold the drowned places: weed-choked ponds, sunken hollows, and the cold black bottoms of lakes. They are the finest swimmers in the world, Undine included, and they resent the comparison being made in the other direction.

They have an old and well-earned reputation for pulling the careless under. Their position is that anything entering their water uninvited has made its own arrangements.

Appearance

Long, loose-limbed, and green through black, with webbed hands whose fingers run to nearly the length of the forearm. Out of water a grindyloc moves badly and looks worse, which is the only form in which most Faeries have ever seen one.

Attuned Magic

Deep water — distinct from the Undine's command of it. A nascent grindyloc sees perfectly in black water and moves without disturbing it. A powerful one can hold a current still, chill a body of water past survivable, drag the light out of a pool, and travel between connected waters faster than anything can follow.

Society

Dispersed, territorial, and organized around the water itself: who holds which mere, and which channels connect them. Vahl the Weedking holds the deepest and most connected of them, which in the Meres is what a throne amounts to.

Relations

The Meres run beneath the Kingdom's border and surface in the deep parts of the Manywaters, which makes the grindylocs the Goblin King's finest smugglers and spies. It also makes them the subject of the Kingdom's most persistent lie — that grindylocs are beasts — because acknowledging them as people would mean acknowledging that a foreign power's territory extends underneath the Undine's own capital.