Overview
The Call-Carry Deep One is the clannish, certain voice of the Black Tide Vaults, a pale, gill-bellied deep-kin of the pressure vaults who carries the call and keeps the high vaults, the vault's clannish, shy, and most certain voice. It stands just under 1.78 m tall, wet and patient, with the kind of certainty that comes from a life measured in kept calls rather than years. Where the Pressure-Sense deep one senses the pressure, the Call-Carry deep one of the vault carries the call, and it has been carrying the first call in the first vault for a very long time.
Habitat
The Call-Carry Deep One keeps to the high vaults of the Black Tide Vaults, deep-sea pressure vaults where the wall is a promise and the pull is a treaty. Its dwellings are chambers of black stone and kept pressure, their floors dissolving and re-forming with the drip, their faces catching the black shimmer of the vault on the inside and the shelter of the stone on the outside. It favors the higher vaults where the call runs widest and the carrying is widest, the places where a call can be carried without the deep's own motion breaking it.
Appearance
A Call-Carry Deep One is about 1.78 m tall, wet and patient, with wet grey-green skin that reads as cold in the black vault-light. Its ribs carry the sea-black gill-bands, a deliberate mark worn as a record of the long art of the carrying, and its hands end in the pale hooks of the deep, the color of the vault's own stone at low drip. Its eyes are pale deep-white, washed out and bright beneath the brow, and they hold still in a way that no other eye in the vault does — they are reading the call.
Behaviour
The Call-Carry Deep One is clannish, shy, and profoundly territorial, a creature of long calls and long attention who rarely surprises and rarely is surprised. It waits before it carries, often for hours, waiting on a chamber or a surface-folk or a call until it understands the shape of the pull, 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 Call-Carry deep one is a debt the deep will keep long after the carrier has gone.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The Call-Carry deep one is no open-water fighter and carries no blade, for its power is the carry and the vault itself, not force. Its primary defense is the vault, for it knows every chamber of the high deep and can lead a pursuer through the Black Tide Vaults until the pursuit loses its nerve and its footing in the black stone. Should it be forced to act, a Call-Carry deep one is quick and precise, 5 m/s through the black stone and low, and it fights to unmake a threat rather than to wound it, dimming a light, holding a chamber, or carrying until the threat is spent.
Magic Alignment
The Call-Carry deep one is attuned to the long word of the deep, for the word is the carrying and the carrying is the whole of its power, and a deep one that has a vault and a gill and a call does not need a spell that is not its own. Its primary domain is divination, and its named powers are the pressure-sense, the dark-sight, and the call-carry, and it is not attuned to any art that is not the deep's own, and the not being attuned is the whole of its way of being free.
Society
The Call-Carry Deep Ones keep to the Black Tide Vaults in clannish, shy vaults of twenty to sixty, bound by the calls they carry rather than by blood or by place, led by the Call-Keeper. There is no elder beyond the Call-Keeper, for a deep one 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. Decisions are made in the chamber, by a company of pale-eyed carriers that has already decided and is only agreeing, and once made they are kept, for a deep one that breaks a carrying is a deep one that has broken the whole of what it is.
Culture & Lore
The culture of the Call-Carry Deep One is a culture of the kept call, a whole way of life organized around the idea that a word that is clannish and shy is the only honest word in the deep. They keep no records, for a deep one that has carried a call does not need a record, the carrying is the record, and the carrying is clannish and shy and does not fade. Their stories are slow and quick, told in the chamber at the low drip, and they are stories of calls carried and pulls kept and the clannish, shy difference between them, told in a voice that is gilled and means every carrying.
Home
The Black Tide Vaults are the Call-Carry deep one's home and its carrying, deep-sea pressure vaults where the wall is a promise and the pull is a treaty, where the deep one carries its calls and keeps its clannish, shy words. It is a strange and quick place, one that stands as if it were a very old animal holding its breath, and the Call-Carry deep one has learned to live in that stone rather than against it. The black shimmer of the vault that runs across the high chambers is the deep's own, a cold light that the deep one has come to read as the color of a kept call.
Relations
The Call-Carry Deep One keeps a long, careful truce with the other creatures of the Black Tide Vaults, a truce of kept calls that has held for a long time and is the oldest and most fragile thing in the black stone. To the black shimmer of the high vaults the Call-Carry deep one is a clannish, shy, and absolutely territorial presence, a pale-eyed carrier that is at home in the chambers and on the call, and the shimmer has learned to glow wide and let the carries pass, for a deep one that has carried you has decided you are a promise and not a lesson.
In the Story
In the story of the deep, the Call-Carry Deep One is the clannish, shy edge of the tale, the place where the calls are kept and a pull is carried and a carrying is read. It is the figure that carries a new call at the low drip and holds the vault very clannish and very shy, and the figure that, when the truce with the pressure-sensing deep one grows thin, is the one that remembers what the truce cost and keeps the old carry clannish and shy and absolutely territorial.