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.