The Open-Run Concords

Overview

The Open-Run Concords are the first major Thaluren open-run civilization, risen from redirected return after the closure of The First Nesting Confluence. They live within and around The Returning Concord.

They do not reject sacred return. They hold that it must stay living enough to move when a fixed water would destroy the clutches it claims to protect.

How It Holds Together

The Concords are the Thaluren who climb other rivers. Their elders hold sway over alternate channels, lesser sanctuaries, newly accepted tributaries, and the waters a run flees to when its own river fails, and over the question of whether a run that climbs them is still the same people. Not every water that keeps clutches alive is rightful. A run must be vouched for, remembered, tested, and taken back into the shared memory before it counts in full.

The Concords keep the count of which clutches lived through redirection, which waters proved false, and which hurried passages grew trustworthy enough to become ordinary return.

Daily Life

An Open-Run household spends its year as any sea household of the Tidebound Reaches does; see the region's Ordinary Life. What sets it apart is living in a water whose place is never settled. The judgement that decides it, held after every season at The Second Channel, is told in that site's Medieval Present.

A redirected family. A sea household whose run-line once climbed to the confluence now brings its clutches to an alternate water. Its members give their hatch water with its debt attached: hatched at the Second Channel, owing the confluence. The oldest of them may have no memory of the old water beyond its name, and the youngest have never seen either. Each return season the household sends one of its own, in turn, with the run's elders to the Naming Reach to name the confluence aloud. It is a long journey upriver for a sea people, and being chosen to go is a family honour and a family burden at once.

Medieval Role

The Concords keep redirected return sworn and living, and every run that cannot go home depends on what they accept.

• A sea settlement may ask the Concords to vouch for an emergency passage when its usual river runs low, and have to defend that passage at the next judgement.
• A Redirection Assembly may adopt a lesser sanctuary on Open-Run word, and the Concords then owe it the same yearly judgement the Second Channel faces.
• A Kavari bank council may close its nursery-water to a run the Concords have accepted, and the Concords must find the run another water rather than try to force a way past Kavari who hold the banks.
• A Gnome gauge-keeper of the Gaugeward Leagues may be asked to measure an alternate channel's depth and timing, and find the measurement cited at the judgement as proof of a run's survival.
• A redirected run may find an old sanctuary abandoned by some earlier line nobody remembers, its gravel still ringed with offering shell-work, and spend the next judgement arguing whether finding it gives them the water or gives the dead line a claim on them.
• A run caught in a strange estuary may have to fight its way out of a netting crew's boats, and the escorts who cut the nets are honoured at the Kelpshade before the young are counted.
• A pair of water-scouts may follow a rumour of a clean river far up the coast, past the last waters any run has climbed, and come back with a new sanctuary or not at all.

The Concords' heroes are finders, and every accepted water carries one's name. Most remembered is the scout who climbed a nameless river through a whole dry summer, lay in its last pool guarding a test clutch against egg-takers until the rains came, and brought the first young of a new water down to the sea; redirected families still say she lay in the last pool of anyone who will not give up. Then there is the run that turned aside from a blighted mouth on its own elders' word and lived, while the line that would not turn is remembered only by the Keepers.

History

The Concords began in the blight told in The Closure of the First Nesting Confluence (c. 178,000-c. 162,000 BR), which proved that the oldest named spawning water could no longer safely receive ordinary return. Without them, redirection could have stayed a reluctant exception managed by crisis assemblies. With them it became a question every generation must answer again: how a new water is accepted, how a clutch keeps its lineage after redirection, when a hurried passage becomes a lasting one, and how far a people can wander before it stops recognizing itself.

Their first major test was The Second-Channel Feud (c. 160,000-c. 156,000 BR). There they won provisional acceptance for the Second Channel without erasing the old confluence's claim. The Gravel Oath Accord (c. 153,000-c. 148,000 BR) then taught Open-Run elders that living redirection must also answer resident dwelling-water claims when an alternate water is already inhabited.

Tensions

Whether the Second Channel has carried its debt long enough, and what this season's thin count means, belong to the channel's Tensions. Wider ones:

• Endless quarantine. Open-Run elders press to have a suspect water reopened after seasons without a sign of blight.
• Prestige-bound refusal. An old run-line refuses an alternate water that would save its clutches because its pride rests on the water it used to climb to.
• Raiders at the holding pools. Outlaw swimmers have twice slipped into an Open-Run holding pool to steal clutches and sell them back to their own line.
• The lost scouts. Two water-scouts sent up a far river have not returned, and a Kavari bank council downstream will not say whether it has seen them.
• The netting boats. A Gnome crew outside any League harbour has been netting resting runs in a far estuary and selling the shell-work it strips from them.
• Many waters, one people. Each accepted alternate water adds its own run-line and its own record.