THE PEOPLE OF THE WATER

In a world that brings forth life with gleeful, mad generosity, nowhere is more bountiful than the domains of Water. Fertile as the Motherworld’s lands are, her rivers, lakes and oceans put them to shame. From bank to bank and from shore to shore the water of the Motherworld swarms with abundance, and the People of the Water share its boundless vigour and untiring zest for life. The Water is the only element in which humans and Elementals exist in amity, and the vicious schisms among the other Elements only show to them how tragically debased the other strands of humanity have become. With the riches of the waters to draw on its People want for nothing and they spend their days in hunting, exploring, feasting and play.

It is obvious to any of the Water that theirs is the finest way to live, a life of merriment and plenty, and it is obvious to them that that way of life will prevail. Some day the waters will cover the face of the Motherworld and all her children will live the lives that the Water now do. But like their Element the Water are patient, sometimes rising up to batter at their enemies with the irresistible force of a floodtide but more often happy to flow around their opposition’s head-on assaults, outflank them, seep quietly into enemy territory, softly erode their strength before washing them away.

Some, like the war-hardened Plainsfolk of Earth or the savage warriors of the Fire, dismiss their Water cousins as unworthy enemies, soft and coddled. Such scoffing shows their ignorance of the life the Water lead. The banks of bright anemones wafting in sun-warmed currents are beautiful to the eye, but those fronds are deadly stingers ready to paralyze and trap prey. For every innocuous fish peaceably grazing in the seaweed there is a cruising shark-shadow in the colder depths. The Water are at one with the great web of life that fills their home, and that means they are at one with its dangers, its wildness, the swift death it can bring. The Water have become bold and cunning hunters, and fierce fighters against the predators who hunt them in turn. Underestimating them is a mistake that few enemies will live to regret.

Physique
Perhaps of all the elements, the water has demanded the greatest changes of the humans who made their home in it. Superficially the Water appear far less changed than, for example, the hulking Craggers of Earth or the snarling, heat-wizened Fire, but their attunement to the water has remade them at a deeper level. They are an aquatic race, utterly at home in water, able to see and sense its temperatures and currents. They can perceive events for kilometres around them through sound, pressure and scent and their songs of triumph, warning or loss carry to and fro across the oceans. All Water are born swimmers in the most literal sense, although their unity with the water means they barely need to swim as such. They can move through the water at a paddling pace with nothing but the smallest effort of thought, and when they choose to exert themselves a concentration of will and a small flick of their body can send them speeding through the water as fast as the swiftest of sea creatures. Even at speed the Water can switch direction in a hearbeat, and they are supernaturally resistant to the chills and pressures of the great ocean depths. The Water have paid for these advantages within their Element, though, for disadvantages outside of it. The Water can travel on land perfectly well, and do so to sun themselves on rocks or beaches, to travel over land between rivers or lakes, or of course to make war. But after two or three days without being able to immerse themselves the strain of separation will begin to tell. Their skins will dry and crack, their senses dim, their muscles cramp, their wits dull and their tempers fray. Such a separation is terrifying to them, akin to the experience of starvation or sleep deprivation but going even deeper, and Water expeditions that must travel across land make scrupulous plans to ensure they can reach water, or travel with an Elementalist who can conjure enough to keep them alive.

Still, the Water’s bond is not yet as complete as they would like. Just as the Fire have not been able to completely shrug off the need to drink, and all but the most puissant of Air still need solid ground on which to rest, the Water cannot breathe their element. Like dolphins or whales, they must rise to the surface every so often and take in air, although also like the great cetaceans a deep fill of clean air will serve them for days. Rising to the surface to fill their lungs with clean, bracing air is often part of the ceremony that packs of Water will use to launch a great hunt. The hunters will come bulleting up from below, breaching the surface and hurtling into the air, emptying their lungs with great shouts and refilling them with long whooping breaths, brandishing weapons, twisting and somersaulting in the air before they fall back, stretch out and dive beneath the waves once again.

The Water are a powerfully-built people, routinely growing over six feet in height when they stand upright; even though they do not swim in the way a simple human would, they still grow into the sleek, brawny physiques that our own world identifies with champion swimmers. The skin of the Water is often the rich brown of sun-darkened human skin, but can be the black of the deepest ocean trenches, the subtle silver-grey of fish scales, or the blue-green of the water itself. Some Water even sport dazzling multicoloured markings like reef-fish or seasnakes. They are almost hairless, the better to speed through the water, although some have crests of long silky hair growing over their heads and down their backs, in as many and varied colours as their skins. Their eyes are large and dark and their teeth bright white and strong. While their appearances have little regional variation, there is a tendency for the Water of the deep-swimming clans to have harsher, more aquiline features and more sombre colouring, while those from the shallows and rivers have gentler aspects and readier smiles.

Children are born in the water, often in a litter of two or three, and are adroit swimmers within hours of birth. Their parents, and later their extended families, will guide the children in their early years, teaching them the ways of the shallows and gradually introducing them to the creatures and Elementals with which they share their home. By their early teens the child will be able to speak with almost all water creatures, able to hunt and sing and recite their lineage, ready to prove themselves on their first true hunts and begin to join their song-family.

Culture and temperament
The most important thing to understand about the Water is that they do not have, and have never sought, the dominance and privilege the other Peoples claim over their Elements. That they are just another life form among many, part of a vast living garden, is not a philosophical argument or a religious conviction, but their simple day-to-day reality. There is no quality the Water can see in themselves - intelligence, speech, Elemental power, the capacity for nobility or joy - that is not evident in so many other creatures of the Water. Confining the society of their clans to humans would strike them as bizarre and arbitrary. This is the foundation for the two defining institutions of a Water’s life: the blood-family and the song-family.

Society
The blood-family is exactly that, the extended family of humans who are related to that Water by actual birth. Water have a high birth rate and their blood-families are sprawling and numerous, the most basic unit of Water society. Several large blood-families, usually interconnected, will tend to make up one of the great Water clans. Blood-families have their own traditions and reputations, and when their children are old enough they will learn, from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, the stories of their lineage. A certain blood-family might be known as bold hunters, another as fierce warriors with many stories of forays onto land. Others might have particular gifts in song and diplomacy, or navigation, or Elemental power. Some clans consider such traditions binding, and each young Water will be under great pressure to take up a role for which their blood-family is famous. In others the traditions are more open, living things, and a new generation finding their own callings can steer a family in new directions.

The blood-family is what a Water is born into, but the song-family is what the Water makes for her or himself. As the Water grow older and learn to speak and sing they begin to converse with not just their blood-family and clan but the water-creatures around them. They will learn the proper courtesies to pay when greeting the greater Elementals, and the strange languages of the deep-swimming leviathans. They will listen to the chatter of minnow schools, the lazy lullabyes of anemones and the querulous arguments of the crustacean packs. They will exchange jokes and insults with the bright and curious sea-snakes, learn the cryptic verses of the octopi and the war-shouts of the great orcas. Song-families come together around a young Water as they begin to forge alliances and lay down loyalties, with both other Water not of their blood-family and with friends and companions from many different species. To the extent that humans are leaders in the Motherworld’s waters, it is here: song-families are almost unique to the Water, and although other creatures will join them and respect them few of them form song-families for themselves.

The majority of Water remain with the clans that encompass a number of linked blood-families. The smallest clans might have only four or five families and perhaps a hundred Water; larger clans might encompass families in the dozens and Water in the thousands. The very largest and most famous clans are more analogous to nation-states, their chieftains ruling like princes over courts of clan elders, intelligent song-allied water creatures and powerful Elementals. The clans maintain bonds through intermarriage, through the songs and calls they constantly send through the water, and through an active diplomatic network: the role of envoy is a highly respected one among the Water, and a reputation for courtliness and hospitality to ambassadors is something that clans prize and work hard for.

Some clans anchor themselves to a particular place in the Water, often a lake, a bay or a position on the seabed but sometimes at a convergence of currents far out in the ocean. Some are semi-nomadic, roaming within a marked territory; some have no territory at all but roam across all the waters of the Motherworld as the whim takes them. As a rule it is the smaller clans who are more mobile, and the larger which will identify themselves with a territory.

War-Making
The Water live cheek by jowl with danger from the time they are very young, and by the time they are old enough to join a war- or hunting-party a young Water will be more than prepared for lethal combat. However, for all the toughness and bravery of individual Water, they tend to have little in the way of an organised military like the highly regimented Fire battalions or the disciplined martial houses of the Air.

Song-warrior is the name that the Water give to those whose main role in war is as a leader and marshal. Song-warriors are quick-witted and charismatic, adept at befriending all the sentient species of the Motherworld’s rivers and oceans, and able to create strong networks of alliances and friendships as they travel. Such work is greatly admired and honoured by the Water, and comes into its own most of all when the threat of war arises. The most militant of song-warriors, the ones who will not only call on their allies to fight but who will personally lead them to war, are known as the Deep Callers, and the enemies of the Water know to tread carefully when a powerful Deep Caller opposes them, since they will soon find themselves opposed by nearly every living thing in the waters where they will be fighting.

Deep Callers will always forge strong treaties with water-creatures who are able to operate on land, since these will make the most versatile wartime allies. Their most common battle companions, so common as to be a Deep Caller trademark, are the giant crustaceans whose armoured bodies and razor-sharp pincers make them formidable opponents and sometimes even steeds. A Deep Caller who has prowled the Motherworld’s rivers and lakes will often be able to rouse tribes of lethal reptiles from the inland waters, leading formations of giant Caimans whose lunge is swift enough to catch an Air warrior and whose jaws can crack even the tough bones of the Earth. The most senior Callers may even be able to successfully petition the aid of the giant Frogs, massive creatures who live solitary lives on the shores of the Water domains. Giant Frogs are intelligent and wise, famously unwilling to suffer fools, but when they accompany a Caller to war they bring physical might, potent venom and Elemental skill to bear on their enemies.

Wave-warriors have developed fighting techniques from their Element, using their own attunement with it or crafting weapons that increase that attunement and make a weapon of it. Most Water Elementalists will have mastered the fighting disciplines of these warriors early in their careers and build their later Elemental arts upon them. Wave Warriors who hunger for breathless close-quarter battle will learn the complex manoeuvres of the Wave Dancer hunter-duellists, fighting with the Water’s traditional hunting tools of the long spear and the heavy knife. Wave Dancers all have at least a measure of active magical attunement, and can bring the water to bear in battle, firing bursts of it from their hands to knock an opponent off-balance, conjuring streams or jets to give them momentary bursts of speed across ground or propel them into the air, and even absorbing blows, bullets or blades by actually transmuting their bodies into water for a fraction of a moment when an enemy attack manages to hit home. Wave-warriors whose temperament leads them to strike at a distance will join the ranks of the Tsunami artillerists, training and bonding with the monstrous tsunami cannons that the Water’s most skilled magical artisans craft for them. The cannons conjure and send out a great blast of water, powerful enough in itself to batter an enemy senseless or worse. Once it is flowing from the cannon the water joins to the will of the Tsunami warrior who fired it, seizing enemies with a life and strength of its own and drowning them in its stream or smashing them to pieces against whatever is nearby. Wave-warriors develop the closest ties with the Water Elementals and will often have Elemental allies; in particular they will mentor and lead little troops of Elemental water-sprites whose giggling voices and mischievous nature belie the threat they pose to unware enemies with their water-bombs and wickedly sharpened fishbone knives.

Totem-warriors are the front-line soldiers of the Water, and the kind that the other Peoples will most often encounter. Totem-warriors have devoted themselves to swimming and singing with the savage predatory beasts of the seas and rivers, learning their ways and fighting-forms to the extent that a magical bond develops between them. Totem-warriors can actually take on some of the aspects of their totem, sometimes through ritually-crafted weapons and sometimes manifesting them in their bodies. Although Totem-warriors tend to group around certain beasts and will form loose brotherhoods and lodges according to totem, each one will have an individual set of chants, songs and oaths they use to bring their totem’s powers onto themselves before battle. Totem-warriors tend to come from the larger clans, since their abilities lend themselves to battle rather than hunting and it is the biggest clans who can afford to have their sons and daughters do this in any number.

Snake-totem warriors pattern their bodies and fighting forms after the flicker-quick black-and-yellow seasnakes and draw the snakes’ essences into their deadly serpent staves. These staves are wrapped in snakeskins and tipped with snake-skulls: in the water they are deadly, envenomed, self-guiding spears and on land the warriors whirl, strike and parry with them almost too fast to follow. The power of the totem brings the staff to partial life, increasing its speed still further, adding venom to its strike and allowing it to direct itself to its target. Piranha-totem warriors wear mantles of tough fish-scales and swing heavy, lethal clubs inset with clusters of teeth taken from their deadly namesake river fish. When the club strikes the teeth animate and gouge out pieces of the target’s flesh, gnashing and rattling as they strip armour and clothing and flense the enemy’s flesh down to the bone. Caiman-totem warriors are among the greatest of the Water’s warriors, draw their power from the monstrous river reptiles that can clip a human in two with a casual twitch of their jaws. Armoured in heavy wrappings of scaly reptile-hide, the Caimans tear into their enemies with the ugly but murderous Barnacle Swords or don heavy, clawed gauntlets and grapple and crush their enemy to death the same way their namesakes drag their prey into death-rolls.

​