Maresha Rootkeeper

The Hessk floodgate engineer and engineer-priest serving as Vel-Sathra's First Sounding, elected after keeping three terraces alive through the Black Rise.

Maresha is a rose-pink Hessk elf with dark hair bound close for work and the plain, ordinary face of her people. Nothing visible marks her as able to breathe the Rootwater. She earned her title during the Black Rise, when she opened a sacrificial spillway, drowned her own workshop, and kept three residential terraces dry. The Depth Moot chose her First Sounding afterward. She speaks in measurements and locations, hears every foreign-quarter Speaker before her own guild, and considers a city legitimate only while its least powerful resident can reach dry shelter before a flood.