human enclave

The Surfaceborne

A small ascetic order of humans who refused to descend, kept to a remaining island chain, and tend the drowned coast as relic.

The only human polity in the archive that did not descend. I have tried to write the entry without the small narrative pull toward making them picturesque, which is the trap any community of two thousand on a few islands invites. They tend the drowned coast. They do not ask us to understand why.

The Surfaceborne are a community of perhaps two thousand. They live above water, on a string of low islands that have not yet gone under. They do not visit the anchorages, and they do not refuse visitors who can find them. The survey has, over time, concluded that they are an order in the religious sense, though they themselves do not use the word.

What they tend

They tend the drowned coast — specifically the Lipless Reach and, by a longer association, the Reliquary at Pell, a flooded cathedral at recreational-diving depth. Tending here means snorkelled visitation, recreational-tier dives where conditions allow, and a slow practice of recording — by memory, by sketch, occasionally by photograph — what is gradually being claimed.

What they do not do

They do not descend below technical-diving depth. They do not take Conservancy contracts. They do not own equipment that would let them. They have, on the rare occasions the question has been put to them, said that the limit is not theological — it is sufficient.

Relationship to the rest of the archive

Largely silent. The Surfaceborne and the Pelagine have no protocol; there is, at the depths the Surfaceborne keep, no Pelagine to meet. The survey treats them as a polity of the surface, which is a category the archive otherwise does not need.

When asked, they have said the limit is not theological — it is sufficient. I have written that sentence down in three separate entries and have not yet found a way to add to it.