Of the Nueraines and Their CraftsIn the vast, cold deeps of the sea there is an empire of coral cities, seven hundred it is said, each one grown like an immense garden of anemones and kelp, with volcanic plumes of sulphur feeding yet stranger forms of life. Strung like pearls on the bottom of the sea, the sprawling cities stretched around the world in a meandering series of reefs. From these mazes of pink and white coral towers and colonnades, the Nueraines, the Children of the Sea, hunt the titanic beasts that swim in the murky depths, and shape the flesh of living things to make all they need. The art of shaping life the Nueraines learned from the sea itself, in the earliest days of the world, when they listened to the Song of Creation and heard the waves of the sea crash in time to the echo of the voice of the Father of All, Iaretar. Diving into the waves, three Nueraines swam to the bottom of the endless void, their minds boiling over with the knowledge they had gleaned from the waves. One picked up a sea anemone clinging to a small rock and began shaping its living essence, pulling and drawing its flesh, coaxing it to grow, and training the cells of its tissues to new tasks. When she was done, she attached the reshaped anemone to her waist and placed the rock it once been attached to inside of it. "Behold!" she announced, "I have made of this anemone a pocket; I shall wear it on my own flesh to carry what I may.". The second Nueraine reached down, seized a crab, and began shaping it, making it grow to immense size and sculpting its hard shell. Soon it had grown vast, and its back was like unto a bowl, rimmed with a high ridge and flattened on the bottom, where its once rough, hard armour was now soft and smooth. "Lo," he said, "I have made a chariot of a crab. This shall carry us whither we shall go in all our array and tire not." He sat upon the creature's leathery back and smiled.. The third Nueraine looked about her, soon spotting a tiny stingray swimming high above them. "How like a bird it is; fly in the sea it does," she said as she swam up to it. She moulded the life within the little ray, stretching out its supple fins, blending away its primitive instincts and crude organs to make a harmless parasite of it. Attaching it to her spine, she waved its fins as though they were her own. She jetted through the water, swimming faster than ever before, and veered up in the flick of and eye. Bursting forth out of the waves, she soared high up into the air like a great swan. She felt the sun beat down on her skin, rode the wind as if it was a huge wave, and then dove back into the sea. "Swim in the air did I!" she keened, "For I have made wings of a stingray!". Thereafter the Nueraines all cast off their implements of stone, steel, and lifeless wood, evermore making all that they needed of the life around them, from their garments to their tools, weapons, and furnishings, to their towers and palaces. |