The Tide-Pickers

Living salvage-divers who race the twice-daily tide into the drowned Tidewrack shrine to strip its altar — defying both the drowned faithful who keep it and the Ashen Temple that claims them, and moving the take through Sresha Silt's smugglers.

Twice a day the Tidewrack sink empties enough to run, and the Tide-Pickers run it. They are breath-divers and rope-hands out of Gull's Watch who have the drowned shrine's rhythm memorized to the minute: in on the slack, strip the altar of its salt-blackened plate and the older offerings the orthodoxy never blessed, out before the sea comes back to drown you against the faithful who never left. The drowned keepers do not chase — they simply stand their stations until you make a mistake. The Ashen Temple calls the take sacrilege and the Pickers thieves of consecrated dead-goods; the Pickers call it salvage the church abandoned to the sea, and sell it through Sresha Silt's people, who can move anything that's wet and deniable. Every season the tide keeps one or two of them. They go back the next slack anyway.