Tideborn Faith

The Drowned Queen¶

Thalyss rules the deep. Her crown is kelp and bone, her throne is black sand far beneath the reach of the sun, and she is not a figure for the sea. She is the sea, in the way a person is their body. Storms are her breath. Shipwrecks are her laughter. Neither is aimed at anyone.

That last point is the whole temperament of the faith. Thalyss is not cruel. She is enormous, and awake, and in a mood. The Seaborn bring her pearls, salt and the blood of the drowned, and what they are doing is not begging for mercy. They are improving her mood, the way you would carry something to a powerful neighbour whose house stands upstream of yours.

The Second Tide¶

Then there is the doctrine that turns a sailors' religion into something the landbound find hard to sit with.

The sea is not finished. That is the claim. There was a first tide, the one that made the shore, and there will be a second, and when it comes every hold and hall and charter and mountain goes under it, and the faithful rise into palaces beneath the waves. It is not an allegory for death. It is not the end of the world. It is a date, and the refusal of any Tidecaller to name it does not make it less of a date.

So a Seaborn is, in the strict theological sense, camping. He will build well, pay his due, mend the seawall properly and mean every part of it. He simply holds that the wall, the harbour and your continent are temporary arrangements.

It is meant kindly. That is the unnerving part.

Two ways to hold it¶

The faith looks like two different religions depending on whether you meet it on a ship or on a shore, and the two have never quite fallen out about it.

The Naahri hold the patient reading. They live in the margin the water takes back twice a day, they have never once assumed the ground would still be there in the morning, and the Second Tide is only the last and largest instance of a thing that happens to them constantly. They wait for it the way you wait for a season.

The human sailors of Vuskar hold the working reading. Thalyss is not someone to wait for, she is someone to sail on, and drowning is a professional risk rather than a tragedy, because the Queen keeps what she takes and there are worse places to be kept. Vuskan verse is full of men who went over the side and are spoken of afterward in the present tense.

Living beside it¶

Tidecallers are the best pilots and navigators money can hire, and they are unbribable on exactly one point: they will not lie about water. A Tidecaller who says the channel is bad has ended the discussion.

A Seaborn quarter in an inland colony is a quiet, well-behaved, slowly organising disagreement with your entire enterprise. They will not riot. They will keep their Tidecall and their Deepwake, they will be perfectly civil, and they are quite certain the argument will be settled on their behalf by the water.