Overview
The Bone-Carry Dregmaw is the quick, certain hand of the Sharkbone Warrens, a shark-skinned, gilled judge of the bone city who carries the warren's bones and keeps the low warrens, the warren's quick, clannish, and most certain hand. It stands over two meters tall, watchful and patient, with the kind of certainty that comes from a life measured in kept carries rather than years. Where the Tide-Sense dregmaw feel the tide, the Bone-Carry dregmaw of the warren carry the bone, and they have been carrying the first bone in the first chamber for a very long time.
Habitat
The Bone-Carry Dregmaw keeps to the low warrens of the Sharkbone Warrens, a range of grown bone where the warren is a promise and the feed is a treaty. Its dwellings are chambers of grown rib-cage and court, walls cool and entrances low, guarded by the blade-wall, their faces catching the grey-blue shimmer of the bone on the inside and the shelter of the warren on the outside. It favors the lower warrens where the bone runs widest and the carrying is widest, the places where a load can be carried without the warren's own motion breaking it.
Appearance
A Bone-Carry Dregmaw stands about 2.26 m tall, long and watchful, with blue-grey shark-skin that reads as cold in the grey-blue bone-light. Its jaw carries the bone-white band, a deliberate mark worn as a record of the long art of the carrying, and its belly is dark abyss, the color of the deep's own glow at low tide. Its eyes are pale grey-blue, bright and certain beneath the brow, and they hold still in a way that no other eye in the warren does. It wears a patchwork of hide and scale in muted grey and blue and carries a single bone-shard at its belt, set with a single carry-loop at the brow, the loop of a carrier.
Behaviour
The Bone-Carry Dregmaw is quick, clannish, and profoundly certain, a creature of long carries and long attention who rarely surprises and rarely is surprised. It waits before it carries, often for hours, waiting on a chamber or a person or a feed until it understands the shape of the bone, and only then does it carry, and then with an exactness that feels rehearsed over years. It is not unkind, but it is not easily moved, and a debt named by a Bone-Carry dregmaw is a debt the warren will keep long after the carrier has gone.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The Bone-Carry dregmaw is no open-water fighter and carries no blade, for its power is the carry and the bone itself, not force. Its primary defense is the bone, for it knows every corner of the low warrens and can lead a pursuer through the Sharkbone Warrens until the pursuit loses its nerve and its footing on the bone. Should it be forced to act, a Bone-Carry dregmaw is quick and precise, 6 m/s through the bone corridors and low, and it fights to unmake a threat rather than to wound it, cutting a rib, dimming a light, or carrying a chamber until the threat is spent.
Magic Alignment
The Bone-Carry dregmaw is attuned to the long word of the feed, for the feed is the carrying and the carrying is the whole of its power, and a dregmaw that has a warren and a bone and a carry does not need a spell that is not its own. It is not attuned to any art that is not the feed, and it is not bound by any word that is not its own, and the not being bound is the whole of its way of being free. Its one signature thing is the carrying, which is not a magic but is a thing that the dregmaw of the warren have carried for a very long time, and the carrying is the bone, and the bone is the whole of its power.
Society
The Bone-Carry Dregmaw live in the Sharkbone Warrens in clannish, quick warrens of forty to a hundred and fifty, bound by the carries they keep together rather than by blood or by place, and the eldest keeper among them is honored as the Tide-Judge. There is no elder and no ruler beyond the Tide-Judge, for a dregmaw that has carried the most and kept the most is simply the one the others listen to, and the listening is a carry and the carry is the whole of their society.
Culture & Lore
The culture of the Bone-Carry Dregmaw is a culture of the kept carry, a whole way of life organized around the idea that a word that is quick and clannish is the only honest word in the warren. They keep no records, for a dregmaw that has kept a carry does not need a record, the carrying is the record, and the carrying is quick and clannish and does not fade. Their stories are slow and quick, told at the feed at the low tide, and they are stories of carries kept and bones carried and the quick, clannish difference between them, told in a voice that is gilled and means every carrying.
Home
The Sharkbone Warrens is the Bone-Carry dregmaw's home and its carrying, a range of grown bone where the warren is a promise and the feed is a treaty, where the dregmaw carry their bones and their quick, clannish words. It is a strange and quick place, one that stands as if it were a very old animal holding its breath, and the Bone-Carry dregmaw has learned to live inside that bone rather than against it. The grey-blue shimmer of the bone that runs up through the low warrens is the warren's own, a cold glow that the dregmaw have come to read as the color of a kept carry.
Relations
The Bone-Carry Dregmaw keeps a long, careful truce with the other creatures of the Sharkbone Warrens, a truce of kept carries that has held for a long time and is the oldest and most fragile thing in the bone. To the grey-blue shimmer of the low warrens the Bone-Carry dregmaw is a quick, clannish, and absolutely certain presence, a grey-eyed carrier that is at home in the chambers and in the feed, and the shimmer has learned to glow wide and let the carries pass, for a dregmaw that has carried you has decided you are a promise and not a lesson.
In the Story
In the story of the warren, the Bone-Carry Dregmaw is the quick, clannish edge of the tale, the place where the carries are kept and a bone is felt and a carrying is read. It is the figure that carries a new bone at the low water and holds the warren very quick and very certain, and the figure that, when the truce with the tide-sensing dregmaw grows thin, is the one that remembers what the truce cost and keeps the old carry quick and clannish and absolutely certain.