Naahri

Where the land gives way¶

Twice a day the ground the Naahri live on stops being ground.

Shoreline, estuary, tidal flat: the margin that is neither one thing nor the other, drowned and uncovered and drowned again on a schedule older than any kingdom. Every other people in Valdrin builds on the assumption that the land will still be there in the morning. The Naahri have never had that luxury, and it has made them the calmest people in the world.

They are amphibious, unhurried, and they know the water the way a dwarf knows a seam of ore. They build carefully, take only what shore and surf provide, and decide slowly, as a whole, rather than as individuals. Outsiders read this as passivity. It carried them intact through everything the mainland peoples ever aimed at them, and then through two centuries of everything that arrived by sail, which is more than most of those ambitions managed.

Communes, and what a border is not¶

Naahri live in shore communes of a few hundred, each tied to one estuary or one stretch of flats, each deciding its own business at its own pace.

The Tidebound are the largest grouping of those communes and the only one that keeps anything a foreign clerk would recognise as a government. What makes a commune Tidebound is that it has been sending to the councils at Saltreach lately, and what makes it not Tidebound is that it has stopped, and neither act is announced or resented. There is no Tidebound border on any map because there is nothing to draw: the faction is a list of communities currently in correspondence.

Foreign powers find this maddening and treat Saltreach as a capital regardless. Saltreach has never corrected them.

The Drowned Queen and the Second Tide¶

Most Naahri follow the Tideborn Faith. Thalyss rules the deep, crowned in kelp and bone, throned on black sand far beneath the sun. Storms are her breath. Shipwrecks are her laughter, and the Seaborn offer her pearls, salt, and the blood of the drowned to keep her in a better mood than that.

Then there is the Second Tide.

The faithful hold that the sea is not finished. That one day all land will sink, every hold and hall and charter of it, and the faithful will rise into palaces beneath the waves. It is not a distant abstraction to them. It is the plan.

Which means that a Naahri settler in your colony is, in the strictest theological sense, a temporary resident. He will work hard, pay his due, mend the seawall properly and mean it. He simply does not expect the seawall, or your colony, or your continent, to be a permanent feature of the world.

It is meant kindly. That is the unnerving part.

It has also, at least once, saved a colony and cost it a harbour. See Harken's Landing.

In your settlement¶

Naahri thrive in any coastal posting and stay steady, deft and resourceful inland. They tolerate most peoples reasonably well, which makes them the mortar in a mixed settlement: not the stone, but the thing that keeps the stones from grinding each other apart.

Their faith is the complication. A Tideborn population in a colony whose altar belongs to another god is not a riot risk. It is a patient, polite, entirely unmoved disagreement that becomes better organised with every moon, conducted by people who are quite certain that they will be proved right by the water itself, and who have no particular need to hurry the argument along.