Overview
The Tide-Sense Dregmaw is the cannibal, certain fang of the Sharkbone Warrens, a shark-skinned, gilled judge of the bone city who feels the tide and keeps the feed, the warren's cannibal, clannish, and most certain fang. It stands over two meters tall, watchful and patient, with the kind of certainty that comes from a life measured in kept tides rather than years. Where the nagas of the spire see the word, the Tide-Sense dregmaw of the warren feel the tide, and they have been feeling the first tide in the first bone for a very long time.
Habitat
The Tide-Sense Dregmaw keeps to the deep chambers 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 deeper warrens where the tide runs oldest and the feeling is oldest, the places where a feed can be kept without the warren's own motion breaking it.
Appearance
A Tide-Sense Dregmaw stands about 2.13 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 feeling, 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 tide-loop at the brow, the loop of a keeper.
Behaviour
The Tide-Sense Dregmaw is cannibal, clannish, and profoundly certain, a creature of long tides and long attention who rarely surprises and rarely is surprised. It feels before it acts, often for hours, feeling on a chamber or a person or a feed until it understands the shape of the tide, and only then does it act, 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 Tide-Sense dregmaw is a debt the warren will keep long after the keeper has gone.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The Tide-Sense dregmaw is no open-water fighter and carries no blade, for its power is the tide and the bone itself, not force. Its primary defense is the bone, for it knows every corner of the deep 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 Tide-Sense dregmaw is precise and patient, 5 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 holding a chamber until the threat is spent.
Magic Alignment
The Tide-Sense dregmaw is attuned to the long word of the feed, for the feed is the feeling and the feeling is the whole of its power, and a dregmaw that has a warren and a bone and a tide 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 feeling, which is not a magic but is a thing that the dregmaw of the warren have felt for a very long time, and the feeling is the tide, and the tide is the whole of its power.
Society
The Tide-Sense Dregmaw live in the Sharkbone Warrens in cannibal, clannish warrens of forty to a hundred and fifty, bound by the tides 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 felt the most and kept the most is simply the one the others listen to, and the listening is a tide and the tide is the whole of their society.
Culture & Lore
The culture of the Tide-Sense Dregmaw is a culture of the kept tide, a whole way of life organized around the idea that a word that is cannibal and clannish is the only honest word in the warren. They keep no records, for a dregmaw that has kept a tide does not need a record, the feeling is the record, and the feeling is cannibal and clannish and does not fade. Their stories are slow and patient, told at the feed at the low tide, and they are stories of tides kept and feeds felt and the cannibal, clannish difference between them, told in a voice that is gilled and means every feeling.
Home
The Sharkbone Warrens is the Tide-Sense dregmaw's home and its feeling, a range of grown bone where the warren is a promise and the feed is a treaty, where the dregmaw keep their tides and their cannibal, clannish words. It is a strange and patient place, one that stands as if it were a very old animal holding its breath, and the Tide-Sense dregmaw has learned to live inside that bone rather than against it. The grey-blue shimmer of the bone that runs up through the deep chambers is the warren's own, a cold glow that the dregmaw have come to read as the color of a kept tide.
Relations
The Tide-Sense Dregmaw keeps a long, careful truce with the other creatures of the Sharkbone Warrens, a truce of kept tides 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 deep chambers the Tide-Sense dregmaw is a cannibal, clannish, and absolutely certain presence, a grey-eyed keeper that is at home in the chambers and in the feed, and the shimmer has learned to glow wide and let the feelings pass, for a dregmaw that has kept you has decided you are a promise and not a lesson.
In the Story
In the story of the warren, the Tide-Sense Dregmaw is the cannibal, clannish edge of the tale, the place where the tides are kept and a feed is felt and a feeling is read. It is the figure that keeps a new tide at the low water and holds the bone very cannibal and very certain, and the figure that, when the truce with the bone-carrying dregmaw grows thin, is the one that remembers what the truce cost and keeps the old tide cannibal and clannish and absolutely certain.