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.