Aquian

The Aquians are the tide’s oldest children, shaped of the brine itself, when the first waves licked Gaiatia’s stone and would not let go. They are a people who never needed to climb from the sea because the sea was already empire enough, their homeland of Naumos beneath The Laughing Sea, is a place of coral pyramids etched with glass hieroglyphs, reef obelisks crowned with moonlight, and basalt leviathans carved into eel, shark, and whale that stand eternal on the seabed. Their citadels glow with bioluminescence, their tombs are labyrinths that sing when currents pass, and their history is written not in parchment but in reefstone and glass tablets meant to last as long as the ocean itself. For the Aquians, time is not measured by kings, dynasties, or calendars, but by the patience of tides and the breath of trenches. They are a race both beautiful and haunting. Scaled in turquoise and jade, their skins ripple with patterns like shifting tides, their glossy black eyes reflecting the abyss, and their movements as deliberate as ritual. Every gesture is prayer, every silence covenant. They are artisans beyond measure, growing coral into palatial arches, pouring molten glass into prisms that bend light and magick, stringing jewelry from pearl and bone with as much care as a priest sets an altar. Their arms in war mirror their art, tridents, reef-forged sickle blades, helms wrought from conch and pearl, and scale-mail that glitters with glass and gold. On land these seem ornamental, but in water they become the most graceful of weapons. Their wealth lies deep, in pearl vaults and mineral veins pressed into trenches where no surface-born diver can endure. Their armies are the ocean itself, whales as siege beasts, jellyfish clouds as living mines, sharks and eels as vanguard.   Even when the goddess Xaethra let loose her armies of Devils across the world of old that let loose The Great Schism at its end, Naumos only watched from the abyss. In modern times, Aquians have become inseparable from the distant islands of Tarmahc, woven into its ruin and its commerce alike. They dive where no Humans, Ursi, or Serpentine can, scouting drowned vaults and receding ridges for relics of its sunken former nations of Alandrior or Omendahl. They walk the broken ports as glass-jewelers, their trinkets luminous as fish scales, their songs drifting through night. They are sailors’ contradiction, the only people who cannot be enslaved, yet whispered to be sellers of slaves themselves. Shackles cannot bind what must breathe saltwater; even if taken in chains, the first glimpse of sea would see them vanish below forever. Yet tales abound of castaways who thought themselves rescued by a passing Aquian, only to be led ashore and sold to serpent-lords for as many gems as could be hung upon the Aquian’s throat. To surface folk, they are both saviors and betrayers, shimmering enigmas who drift between reverence and fear. Naumos endures even as Tarmahc lies shattered. The Aquians themselves say the ocean is older than every nation and will bury every crown. To endure is to obey the sea, and the sea does not take sides. It drags all things down eventually. In this truth, the Aquians have found eternity, and in their eternity, they have become both the most patient artisans and the most patient predators the world has ever known.