The Manywaters

A single ocean, the Singing Sea, and by a wide margin the largest thing in the Kingdom: reef shallows in the west, open water everywhere, a lightless abyss in the south and pack ice in the north. To a Faerie of any other race it looks like paradise, which the Undine find funny, since most of the Manywaters is a place you can only visit if you can breathe it.

The Land

Continuous, and an Undine can cross the province without surfacing. Most of it is empty open water; the three subregions the Undine actually inhabit are widely separated, and the reaches between them are crossed rather than lived in.

The warm shallows of the Great Reef hold most of the population. The Abyss, miles down beneath the southern sea, is a different world entirely, and the Undine treat it as a separate country they happen to own. The Boreal Shards in the far north are a third, colder argument.

At three inches tall, water is not a liquid so much as a material. The surface is a skin: a Faerie can stand on it if they are careful, is held under it if they are not, and the province's entire safety culture is built around the fact that getting wet is a structural condition rather than an inconvenience. Undine glamour handles it. Nobody else's does.

• The skin. Surface tension will bear a Faerie's weight at a walk. It will not bear a fall, a landing, or a laden pack, and a Faerie who breaks through wearing anything at all goes down like a stone in a wet cloak. Every dock in the province has a hook-pole and someone paid to hold it.
• Warm water, cold water. The reef shallows run bath-warm year-round and most of the province lives in them. Below the thermocline the water turns lethally cold, and divers' chill kills more Undine annually than every predator combined.
• The clarity. The Manywaters is transparent for hundreds of feet, which is beautiful and which means there is no cover. Undine settlements are built into walls and under ledges for a reason, and Undine warfare is entirely about who is silhouetted against the light.
• The bloom. Twice a year the algae go, and the whole province turns green, opaque, and airless in the shallows. Trade stops. Predation stops. Everything that can leave, leaves, and the ones who cannot spend three weeks in the dark listening to each other breathe.

Subregions

The Great Reef. A scatter of shoals and low islands above water and a continent of coral below, guarded by the Merrow and open to any visitor willing to learn.

The Abyss. Miles down beneath the open sea, lightless and chemosynthetic, held by the tentacled and deeply private Cecaelia.

The Boreal Shards. Ice floes giving way to a solid shelf in the far north, where the Selkie live on the ice by preference and swim in sealskin.

Flora and Fauna

Tidewell

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. Undine society is fiercely communal and famously stubborn; the province's tithes to the Eternal City are always paid, always late, and always accompanied by an itemized complaint.

Other Settlements

Reedmoot (20,000) — a shallows city woven through standing kelp, half of it above the water and half below, and the only place in the province where a landbound visitor can live comfortably. Consequently it hosts every embassy, factor, and spy in the Manywaters.

Skimmer's Rest (8,000) — a raft-town on a drifting mat of sargassum, moving slowly with the current, tied up seasonally to whatever atoll it fetches up against. It has been legally in four different districts this decade and has paid tax in none.

The Terraces (uncounted) — pondwort farms running for miles down the shallow shelves, worked by snail-drivers and beetle crews with no census entry, whose output feeds most of Tidewell.

Colddoor (1,200) — a dive-station at the Reef's southern lip where the shelf falls away, and where the deep expeditions launch. Grim, well-paid, and superstitious in the specific way of people who go down for a living.

Factions

The Cecaelia's House. Lady Nerissa and the deep families: old, communal, obstinate, and genuinely popular. Their authority rests on the shared conviction that the water belongs to the Undine, and this conviction is load-bearing for the province's entire self-image.

The Reedmoot Assembly. The shallows' merchants and kelp-cutters, who do the province's trade and resent being governed from a hole in the ground by people who never come up. Not separatists. Not entirely not separatists.

The Deep Claim. A faction inside Tidewell arguing that the Abyss should be pushed — that the grindylocs hold water that is legally Undine and that a generation of expeditions could take it. They have never held a majority. They have never been closer.

The Ferrymen. Unlicensed carriers who move goods and people between the Manywaters and the Meres through the deep channels. Everyone knows they exist. Half of them are grindyloc; the Undine ones do not advertise which trips they take.

The Bloomwardens. A quasi-religious order who read the algal blooms as omens and are, embarrassingly for everyone, extremely good at predicting them. Their forecasts are sold to the Wardency and to the Ferrymen alike.

Sites of Interest

The Thermocline. Not a place but a depth, and treated as a place: the wall of cold at forty feet where the province ends. Above it, warm water, sunlight, and law. Below it, Undine claim and grindyloc reality. Colddoor's divers cross it in weighted suits for a wage that only makes sense if you have seen what they bring up — cold-water pearl, black pondwort, and the occasional piece of worked stone that nobody will admit is worked.

The Sunken Stair. A stone stair descending from Tidewell's deepest occupied level into the dark, cut into the blue hole's wall, going down past every level the Undine use and continuing. It is older than the city. It has a handrail. Nobody built it for Undine, who do not need stairs, and this observation is not made in polite Tidewell company.

Blooming Shallows. During the algal bloom the reef shallows become lightless, breathless, and completely safe from predators, and the Manywaters' least legal business is done in that three-week window: contracts, exchanges, and the occasional quiet disappearance. The Bloomwardens sell the dates. Everyone buys them.

The Weedking's Boundary. Far below the Abyss, at a depth where even a Cecaelia expedition can stay perhaps four minutes, there is a line of standing weed running east to west for as far as the light reaches. It is cultivated. It is maintained. On the far side of it, Vahl the Weedking rules, and every few years a Tidewell party goes down to establish that the line means nothing, and every few years the line is a little further north.

Hooks

• A Deep Claim expedition needs surface-breathers for the shallow leg and is not telling them what happens at the bottom. The pay is extraordinary. The contract is unusual in what it does not mention.
• Skimmer's Rest has drifted against the wrong bank and is now, technically, inside a Wardency tax district that has noticed. The raft-town would like to leave. The current disagrees.
• The Bloomwardens' forecast is wrong for the first time in two hundred years — the bloom does not come — and something that has been using the dark cover for a very long time is suddenly visible.
• A crayfish landholder is suing Tidewell over a shallows concession, in an Undine court, with an Undine advocate, and if the case is heard at all it establishes that a Low-Brood creature can hold property. The Chancery has sent someone to make sure it is not heard.
• Somebody has cleaned the Sunken Stair. All of it, all the way down, in one night.

Relations

The province's unresolved problem lies at the bottom, where the sunlight quits and the black meres begin. The grindylocs were there first, and their territory runs beneath the Kingdom's border. The Undine, who consider themselves the water's rightful people, have spent centuries insisting that the deep does not count as part of the sea.