THE LORE · THE MIRRENMERE
The Hessk
An ancient elven lineage that moved into the waters and caverns below the drowned valley eons ago, until the deep became as natural to them as the open 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.
Eons before the valley drowned, the elven forebears of the Hessk left the surface for the waters and caverns beneath it. The deep changed what their bodies could endure, but not their outward form: they remain handsome, long-eared elves with ordinary smooth skin, dark hair, pale sea-green eyes, and the warm rose-pink complexion by which surface folk know them. They have no scales, gills, fins, webbing, or other fishlike features. Where settled folk drown, the Hessk walk the silt; the change that lets them breathe below is hidden inside them, as unremarkable to a Hessk as breathing air. Rot and fever slide off them as water slides off stone. They made Sresh-Dar their free-port — the word was theirs before it was the city's — and crew the salvage hulls and pearl-dives the dry-landers cannot. The drowned shrines are merely cold and dark to them, full of things worth taking and the Lady of the Long Water's own keeping besides. Land-folk distrust the unhurried 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 Old Reckonings place the Hessk at Earth→Water; Hessk history instead remembers an ancient elven lineage moving below water and earth and adapting inwardly while retaining ordinary rose-pink elven anatomy.
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 →