THE LORE · THE MIRRENMERE
The Hessk
Scaled, cold-blooded folk of the drowned valley who breathe the green water of the Mirrenmere as easily as air. The Silt Hands and the Divers are mostly Hessk crews; the drowned shrines hold no terror for a people who can sit on the bottom and wait.
Where settled folk drown, the Hessk walk the silt. Their hide is scaled in river-greens and slate, their blood runs cool, and rot and fever slide off them as water slides off a stone. They came up out of the Mirrenmere's flooded valley and made Sresh-Dar their free-port — the word is theirs before it was the city's — and they crew the salvage hulls and pearl-dives the dry-landers can't. Whatever it is that leaves a Vyr shaking in the drowned shrines runs quiet in cold blood, so the same water is, to a Hessk, merely cold and dark, full of things worth taking, and the Lady of the Long Water's own keeping besides — which is no one's business but hers. Land-folk distrust the unblinking patience of a people who never need to come up for air.
KIND
race
WORLDVIEW
The deep keeps what it is given, and patience outlasts panic — take what the dry-landers cannot reach and wait, for the water answers to no crown. Sresh-Dar is free because the word was theirs before it was the city, and a free-port stays free only so long as no House or king holds the salvage-rights of the drowned valley.
TEMPERAMENT
Patient, literal, unhurried, fiercely independent.
PLAYABLE
yes
Connected
Appears In
Type Fields
All Relationships (13)
references
- →Sresh-Dar — Sresh-Dar is the Hessk free-port — the word was theirs before it was the city's.
- →The Drowned Shrine — Drowned shrines that madden a dry-lander are merely cold and dark to a people who sit on the bottom and wait.
- ←The Silt Hands — The Silt Hands crew the salvage hulls with Hessk who walk the silt the dry-landers drown in.
- ←The Divers — The Divers are mostly Hessk — pearl and relic salvage no air-breather could match.
- →The Unclosed — The Note runs quiet in cold blood; the Hessk hear less of the ringing and fear it less.
descendant_of
- ←The Drowned Fangs — The hostile warband splintered from this people — kin who went the other way.
- →Issuthra, the Drowned Crown — The Hessk name her the first coil — the mother every clutch traces back to, whether by blood or by legend.
aligned_with
- ←The Five Elements — The Hessk are Water's people — patient, dissolving, living in change. The Note runs quiet in cold blood as it runs quiet in deep water.
documents
- ←The Birth of the Races — The Hessk emerged when Earth eroded into Water — first life in the dissolving deep, the oldest of the low races, cold-blooded as the element that made them.
worships
- →The Lady of the Long Water — The Hessk breathe her green water and trust her to keep the drowned whole rather than let them fall out of the world.
- →The Sworn Gods — The Hessk still bow the green water to the Lady of the Long Water, a Sworn God who never answered after the Sundering.
- →The Lady of the Long Water — The Hessk bow the green to the Lady — a diver touches the silt and lets a breath go, and that loosed breath is the prayer.
member_of
- ←The Keepers of the Deep — The Keepers of the Deep are a Hessk institution — an old-blood salvors-and-divers brotherhood and harbor council of the drowned valley's native water-folk.
This world ships in Valenfeld. Play the game →