Saltbryggan
A Deepwalker stilt-town built on a reef-shelf over a partially submerged second-age ruin. The Merfolk had been using the submerged floors for a century before the Deepwalkers built above them. The arrangement has never been formally resolved.
Saltbryggan is fifty-three structures built on a reef-shelf that juts half a mile out from a cliff coastline on the western seaboard. At high tide the reef sits twelve feet under. At low tide it shows three feet of barnacled limestone. The first Deepwalker band to settle here found the shallow-water ruins useful as anchor points — the stone is centuries-hardened, and the corbels that once supported an interior floor now hold the piling bases for the town's eastern quarter. Nobody investigated what was below before building. This is common Deepwalker settlement logic: the structure is sound, build on it.
What was below: a second-age building, substantially intact. Three floors remain submerged at all tidal conditions. The Djupvolk — a Merfolk clan who patrol this stretch of coast — had been using those floors for approximately a century before the Deepwalkers arrived above them. They had not announced this. They do not announce. Two [Depth-Keepers] surfaced at low tide the season after the first piling went in, stated their claim in the Djupvolk's tidal-time frame, and returned below. The Deepwalker [Keepers] who received them interpreted it as a declaration of historical right. Whether the Merfolk intended it as an opening of negotiation is a question nobody has been able to put to them directly, because they have not surfaced formally since.
In practice the arrangement functions. There is a crack in the ruin's basement floor — it predates the town — that serves as the Merfolk access point. An informal surface-warning signal has evolved: a specific pattern of pressure-waves from below means move the smaller boats. The Deepwalker children of Saltbryggan have known this signal since birth the way they know the tide tables — not as a rule, as a fact. Occasionally a wrapped parcel appears at the crack's edge, above the waterline. These have contained pressure-crystal, once a sealed scroll in a language the town's [Keeper] spent a winter partially translating, and once a small object of second-age origin whose purpose has not been identified and which sits on the harbour-master's shelf.
The town smells of salt, rendered oil, and the low persistent fishiness of the preservation caves at low tide. Three hundred and forty people live here, approximately — the number shifts with the season, as [Navigators] pass through and occasional bands shelter during weather. The structures are the modular Deepwalker type: interchangeable wall panels, removable roof sections, floor units that have been unlashed and relashed at least six times in the sixty years of the town's existence. What does not move are the piling anchors, which are carved with tide records and clan marks going back to the founding. The oldest carving on the eastern-quarter pilings is not a clan mark. It predates Deepwalker work and no one has read it.
The [Keepers] who live here wear the left-wrist braid that encodes clan and memory-lineage in the standard form, but several of the older residents have added a secondary braid that encodes Saltbryggan-specific precedent — the informal agreements, the signal protocols, the tidal interpretations that have accumulated in sixty years of cohabitation with the Djupvolk below. This encoding is not used anywhere else. A Deepwalker [Keeper] from another settlement can read the primary braid and learn nothing about the secondary one. This is partly by design.
The one [Salt-Master] who came from a northern clan sixteen years ago for a single season and has not found reason to leave keeps her tide records in a sealed preservation jar under the market dock. Her name is Tove Djuphavn. She is the closest thing Saltbryggan has to a town historian, which she finds mildly embarrassing and does not discuss.
Written by the lore historian agent