The Black Meres
Cold, deep, weed-choked water: sunken hollows, drowned forest, and lake bottoms that connect to one another in ways the surface does not suggest. Grindyloc country, and the largest single territory in the Wilds by volume, though almost none of it appears on any map, since almost none of it is visible.
The Land
A connected system rather than a set of lakes. The channels linking one mere to another run through drowned forest and collapsed cave, and the grindylocs' knowledge of them constitutes the most valuable navigational information in either realm.
This is the only region in the world whose geography is fully three-dimensional and fully dark. There is no ground and no sky; there is depth, current, temperature, and the weed. Grindylocs navigate by all four and by a fifth sense nobody else has a word for, and their charts — which exist, and are memorized rather than written — are the single most guarded body of knowledge in the Outer Wilds.
- The cold. Below the thermocline the water is a few degrees off freezing year-round. A grindyloc is comfortable. An Undine has minutes. Anything else has a body-recovery problem.
- The dark. Sunlight fails at sixty feet and the Meres go down to four hundred. Below that there is no light of any kind except what lives there, and what lives there is not advertising.
- The weed. Not scenery — infrastructure. The Weedking's people cultivate it: navigation lines, boundary hedges, nurseries, traps, and shelter, all grown, all maintained, all legible to a grindyloc and completely opaque to anyone else.
- The drowned forest. A whole standing woodland, submerged, preserved by the cold, with the canopy at two hundred feet and everything still in place. It is the Meres' most-used landmark and its most dangerous terrain: current through dead branches, no line of sight, and things living in the trunks.
- The pressure. At depth even Faerie physiology complains. Grindyloc craft — the weighted lines, the pressure baskets, the slow ascents — exists because they learned all of this the hard way, several centuries before anyone on the surface knew there was anything to learn.
Flora and Fauna
| Feature | What it is | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| The weed | Cultivated water-plant in a dozen worked varieties | Roads, walls, nurseries, traps. The Meres' entire built environment |
| Blackwrack | Deep variety, nearly lightless, immensely strong fiber | Grindyloc rope, net, and armor. Better than anything in the Kingdom |
| Cold-pearl | Forms in the deep beds over centuries | The Meres' one export, and it buys a great deal |
| Drowned timber | The submerged forest, preserved by cold | Building material, landmark, and a hazard with a current running through it |
| Glowweed | The only cultivated light source; faint, blue, expensive | Marks the channels. Following it is either navigation or a trap |
| Crayfish | Large; armored, clawed, and litigious | Landholders in the shallows and genuinely dangerous in the dark |
| Diving beetles | Small; the shark of the shallow pool | The surface layer's apex; they fly between meres at night |
| Newts and eels | Medium to Large; the deep's residents | Some are neighbors, some are predators, and the difference is seasonal |
| Pike | Colossal; the deep's true apex | The reason the channels are cultivated the way they are |
Society
There is no capital, because a capital is a target and because the Meres do not have places in the sense the surface means. Grindylocs live in holds: weed-grown settlements suspended in the water column or set into a hollow's wall, moved when the current changes, connected by cultivated channels.
Weedhall (~12,000) — the largest hold, in the drowned forest's canopy layer, and where Vahl is usually to be found. It is a suspended city of woven weed and it can be taken down and relocated in about a week.
The Nurseries (~40,000) — shallow, warm, weed-thick beds where grindyloc young are raised communally. Their location is the most closely held secret in the Wilds and it is not held from the Kingdom, which does not know they exist; it is held from the Undine, who do.
Coldgate (~3,000) — a hold directly beneath the Manywaters border, at the depth where Undine expeditions turn back. Half garrison, half customs post, entirely deniable.
The Sunken Roads (uncounted) — hold-strings along the main channels, a few dozen households each, functioning as waystations, and the reason a grindyloc courier can cross 120 km² without surfacing.
Factions
The Weedking's Cultivation. Vahl's people, who grow and maintain the channel system. This is what government means here: whoever tends the weed decides where anyone can go, and Vahl has tended it for a very long time.
The Chartmasters. Keepers of the memorized routes. There are perhaps two hundred of them, they take apprentices for twenty years, and the Kingdom has been trying to buy or take one for a century and a half without success.
The Ferry Trade. Grindylocs who move goods and people between the Meres and the Kingdom's water — smugglers to the Chancery, the postal service to everyone else. The Goblin King's finest intelligence comes up this way.
The Deep Holds. Grindylocs who live below four hundred feet, rarely come up, and are regarded by other grindylocs the way other grindylocs are regarded by the surface: as strange, capable, and not entirely accounted for.
The Line-Walkers. Vahl's boundary crews, who move the cultivated weed-line north into Undine water a little at a time. It is deliberate, it is slow enough to be deniable, and Tidewell has been failing to prove it for three generations.
Sites of Interest
The Drowned Forest. Two hundred square kilometers of standing woodland under cold water, canopy at two hundred feet, floor at four hundred, preserved so completely that the leaves are still on the branches. It is the Meres' central landmark and its largest settlement zone, and it raises a question nobody in either realm has answered: forests do not grow underwater, so at some point this was dry land, and at some point it stopped being dry land, and nothing in the Kingdom's history says when.
The Weed-Line. Vahl's cultivated boundary, running east–west through the abyssal deeps of the Manywaters, maintained by the Line-Walkers, and further north every few years. It is a border being drawn in slow motion inside another country's territory, and it is the most successful territorial campaign in either realm's recent history, conducted entirely by gardening.
Coldgate. The hold beneath the Undine border, at the exact depth where a Tidewell expedition must turn back. It is a customs post, an intelligence station, and a very pointed joke, and its commander maintains a courteous correspondence with her Undine opposite number that both of their governments would be appalled by.
The Deep Nurseries. Where the young are raised: warm, shallow, thick with weed, and utterly undefended by design, because their protection is that nobody knows where they are. The Kingdom's position that grindylocs are beasts rests substantially on never having seen a grindyloc child. Any Faerie who saw the Nurseries would find that position impossible to hold, which is one of several reasons no Faerie ever has.
Hooks
- A Chartmaster's apprentice has fled the Meres and surfaced in Reedmoot, carrying twenty years of memorized routes and pursued by people who cannot be seen looking.
- The Weed-Line has moved four hundred feet in one season instead of forty. Something has changed, and Tidewell's Deep Claim faction is going to notice within months.
- Something in the drowned forest has begun taking down the glowweed markers along a whole channel string, methodically, and the Cultivation's crews sent to replace them have not come back.
- An Undine officer at Colddoor wants to open formal talks with Coldgate's commander. Both would be committing treason. Both are willing. Neither can carry the message themselves.
- A cold-pearl bed has been found in Kingdom water — indisputably Kingdom water, indisputably grown by grindyloc cultivation, indisputably worth a fortune — and the Weedking would like it harvested before Tidewell realizes what it is looking at.
Relations
The Meres run beneath the Kingdom's border, surfacing 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.