Olphins
The Olphins are a scaled, finned people of Eslura. They kept to Treenode, their swamp town, farming their own land and leaving the rest of Eslura to go about its business, until the War of Shadows, in which they turned on Eslura and fought for Obellius Kalaar.[1] Every Olphin who survived the war was sentenced to the prison island Morgaedion.[2] Seely's research later established that they had been driven to it by an enchanted stone and were innocent of the crimes they were punished for.[3]
Eslura speaks of them as a race. Obellius, presenting the elderly Alyria to the people of Zybersia, calls her "the so-called leader of the Olphin race"; Seely speaks of the Olphin race in laying out his conclusion; Alpin Loomin calls them a hostile, savage race.[4][3]
Appearance
Scales cover an Olphin's body, webbing runs between the fingers and the toes, small fins grow on the arms and the legs, and larger fins sprout from the sides of the face where a human's ears would be.[5][2][6] They have gills and pointed teeth.[7]
Fin colour differs from one Olphin to the next. Barnaby Britto's are green, Tabitha Glowdish's purple and Alyria's blue, and one of the prisoners found at Morgaedion has navy fins.[2][3][4][8] Mavis, who is missing a fin, says most Olphins have both of theirs.[8]
Most of it can be hidden. Barnaby covers his scales, his webbing and the fins on his limbs with a cloak and gloves, but the fins on his cheeks give him away, so he wraps a scarf around his gills and rests the cloth just under his glasses.[2] He goes barefoot by choice, disliking the way shoes sit on his webbing, and has never swum in the sea, though he has dreamt of letting the water filter in and out of his gills.[2][9]
No record gives an Olphin's height, build or lifespan.
Society
Treenode belonged to them. Pemadee calls it the town Barnaby's people once governed, and the Olphins are described as a reclusive race who farmed there and left the rest of Eslura alone.[10][1] Outsiders thought little of it, a swampy home full of spitting peepmuks that Barnaby knows many could not imagine choosing to live in.[9]
The fairy-winged flying toads of Treenode have latched onto the Olphin people for as long as anyone records, and the bestiary appendix says nobody knows why the toads chose them, unless it is a likeness between the two.[11] A toad bonds with one Olphin one time and never again. Mavis says every Olphin had one, and that the toads left when Obellius put the Olphins under, because they no longer recognised the people they had bonded to.[12][8] Barnaby's toad Mauz is still with him.[12]
The Olphins held a seat on The Council. Alyria says she served on the Sacred Council as the representative for the Olphins before Zybersia fell.[4]
Whether Olphins count as Eslurians is not settled. Alpin Loomin counts Barnaby in when he speaks of "Eslurians like us", grouping an Olphin, a mouse and a gopher together against the Nelazgians.[13] Tab, in The Way Shadows Live, calls Fawn the first Eslurian who ever gave her a chance to be something other than just the Olphin, which places herself outside the word rather than inside it.[7]
History
Origin
Where the Olphins came from is not recorded. The creation story Eslura tells accounts for two peoples and neither is theirs: Aezaros made a settlement of five with the Eyearke Stone, and Nelazgus stole the stone and made the Nelazgians.[14][15] Nothing else is recorded of the Olphins before Obellius.
The War of Shadows
Two accounts of what the Olphins did survive, and they do not agree about why.
The version Eslura repeats is Alpin's. He says they lived secluded from the rest of the world, betrayed the Sacred Rulers and sided with Obellius while he claimed to be restoring Nelazgus's land, and that there was not a single drop of good in their blood.[3]
Nedifar, who was there, remembers something else. The Olphins took civilians and handed them over to Obellius without a word and without any sign of caring what became of them, and their eyes lacked life. It looked to him as though they were in a trance, sleepwalking.[4]
Seely, a Knower of Many Things exiled from Galecrest for asking the question, could not believe a people so peaceful had turned to hatred and greed, and found the answer in a stone. He demonstrated it on Barnaby, who dropped to the floor, shook, stood up with his eyes emptied of everything that made him himself, obeyed an order, and afterwards remembered none of it. His conclusion is that Obellius struck a deal with Nelazgus, as others of Veskadoth had before him, and took from it the power to control the Olphin race.[3] The two Olphin Stones Pemadee recovered from Treenode are the evidence.[10]
Imprisonment
The Olphins who lived through the war were removed from Treenode and shipped to Morgaedion, leaving the town in ruins.[10][3] Barnaby counts the sentence as falling nearly fourteen years before the events of Sacred: Eslura's Calling.[2] Ofie, one of the Morgaedion prisoners, says she would not forget the name of any of the four Rulers who pushed to have her people locked away for crimes they had not committed.[8]
Two Olphins are known to have stayed out of it. Pemadee found the infant Barnaby at Treenode on the same trip that turned up the stones, and made a contract with Lumikki Otsby allowing him to keep the boy so long as he never left the bookshop.[10] Tab escaped imprisonment and hid in the alleys of Varaar, where nobody knew she was alive.[10]
Life outside the prison was not much better. Vorath, a word for people who slept in the streets with the rats and the trash, was applied to Olphins after the war, and Tab wore it as a badge.[7] A sign reading Olphin Present hung on the door of Tide Tale Alley Books as a warning to customers.[2] A boy on the beach at Ovallia tore up Barnaby's only postcard from his parents and told him the Eslurian Opera House was no place for an Olphin.[16] Pemadee warned him night after night that the Sacred Guard wanted nothing more than to send an Olphin like him to Morgaedion.[16]
Freedom
Seely laid his findings before Alistair Archibald and Nordwelg at the High Moon Festival. Nordwelg asked whether he had gone completely mad; Alistair said the research should not be dismissed, and that if it held there was no reason the Olphins should be imprisoned any longer. He would not make a plan without the Council.[17]
Between the two novels the Olphins were found innocent and released. Barnaby, walking into Morgaedion later, thinks of it as early days in their freedom in Eslura and worries that people have not caught up with the news.[18] Alpin's warning at the Festival was that Barnaby still had the whole of Eslura to win over before his kind would be accepted in the streets again.[17]
Under Obellius
Olphins were living in Zybersia among its citizens when the city fell. Nedifar, watching from the platform beside Obellius's stolen throne, saw them corralled into the town square with everyone else, the life back in their eyes, holding each other and crying.[4]
Obellius demanded their leader. Alyria came forward on a cattail-shaped cane, was dragged up the steps and thrown down in front of him, and stood up again. She told him that his stone had been broken in the war and that he could no longer control them. He answered that he did not need the stone, and burned a hole through her fin with his staff until her friend Hali knelt and the rest of the crowd knelt with her.[4]
The Olphins still held at Morgaedion fared worse. The Nelazgians raided the island and forced them into their army.[8] A group of them hid inside the walls of the prison instead and were still there when Barnaby arrived, gaunt, missing limbs and fins, living by the light of about a dozen lanterns behind barricades of broken furniture and torn cloth. They are covered at The Olphin Survivors.[8]
Known members
Others are named but have no article. Ofie, the elder of the survivors at Morgaedion, walks with a cane and speaks for the camp. Monagan is the only one of them who leaves the walls to find food, and his wife is expecting a child.[8]
Behind the scenes
The pronunciation guide at the back of both novels gives Olphin as Ole-fin and lists it under species. A Sacred Tale Collection has its own guide, which files the same word under other.[19][20]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Collection, "The Heart of the Kella".
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Book 1, Ch. 3.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Book 1, Ch. 17.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Book 2, Ch. 1.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 1.
- ↑ Book 1, Ch. 26.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Collection, "The Way Shadows Live".
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 Book 2, Ch. 21.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Book 2, Ch. 6.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 Book 1, Ch. 11.
- ↑ Book 1, "The Many Creatures of Eslura".
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Book 2, Ch. 20.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 14.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 24.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 25.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Book 1, Ch. 9.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 Book 1, Ch. 24.
- ↑ Book 2, Ch. 18.
- ↑ Book 1.
- ↑ Collection.