The Abyssal · 3 dimmings
Nyx Ossa
An Ossuary knife, dressed like a dock hand. She counts the fallen gods.
"That's the third this dimming."
I · The Abyssal Syndicates
The Deep Dwellers
Rung
The Floor
35 to 40 km up
People
200,000
Everything in the world eventually falls to the Floor, and the Abyssal are waiting for it. They are the people who open gods. They take everyone's money, sell everyone's secrets, and have never paid Crown prices for anything.
- Where
- The feet of the great ranges, on terraces above the deep, among violet fungal forests and the grave-moorings where caught gods hang and are taken apart.
- Body
- Compact, dense, pale, slow. They breathe air at ten atmospheres, and the nitrogen keeps them in a mild, permanent dream they call the Floor-dream and do not know they are in. Come up to the Drift and it lifts: for the first time in their lives they are quick, and they hate it.
- Rule
- Several Syndicates, each run by a Lamplighter who holds the oil and therefore the light. The Ossuary is the largest. They have no laws, only prices.
- Make
- Everything a fallen god gives: oil, hide, bladders, and bone grown with iron, carved into blades. And information.
- Lack
- Light, cloth, and anything from above.
- Food
- Fungal forests that never stop growing in the warm dark, and whale fat and liver, the food that stands in for a sun. Oil goes to families before it goes to lamps.
- Believe
- The ground rings. The dark is spreading, and the dark is theirs.
II · Their place
Where they live
III · How they dress
Dress
Like dock workers and miners: plain, layered, patched, in black, charcoal and brown. A hide tunic, a short felt cowl, wrapped boots, fingerless gloves, a slit eye-shade of bone on a cord. A bone-handled knife at the belt like a tool, and the second one where you won't see it.
The point is that you can't tell who they are.
IV · The people who open gods
The catch
A dying god sinks for hours or days. The Abyssal board it from bladder-craft and bleed it until it hangs, moor it to a range-foot and take it apart over weeks: fat, hide, bone. When the bare skeleton is cut loose it drops into the deep, and the ground rings. They call it the sound. It ends a harvest.
V · Of this nation
Their people
The Abyssal · 7 dimmings
The Lamplighter of the Ossuary
He holds the oil, and so the light. He never leaves the Floor.