Where the Kendrel keep to light and beauty, the Cendoriln keep to the crushing dark of the deep trenches. Their scales are darker, deep purples and blacks and midnight blues, with bioluminescent patterns they can control at will. The "nasty" reputation they've earned comes from their willingness to do what other Kendor won't: engage in violence when necessary, though they still prefer manipulation and fear to direct confrontation.
The Cendoriln's hidden fortresses lie in underwater caves and thermal vents, places where even other aquatic races fear to venture. They are master secret-keepers and blackmailers, trading in information that could topple kingdoms. Their courtship rituals involve elaborate displays of bioluminescence and tests of mental fortitude rather than the Kendrel's focus on beauty and charm.
The making
The Cendoriln are Kendor, named for the warm shallows like all their kind, and like all their kind they die where the deep runs cold. Their founders went down anyway. They were a faction that dealt in what the courts wanted buried, and to keep those secrets and themselves out of any rival's reach they followed the vent-warmed currents into the trench-dark and had a working cut into their line so the dark would never give them up. The working bound living light beneath their skin, theirs to raise or smother at will, and blacked their scales to deep purple and midnight blue to sheathe it. It held, and the line has come down unchanged ever since. Everything a Cendoriln is now follows from that one choice: a body that is light kept hidden, shown only when the showing is chosen. Their courtships test nerve through bioluminescence, their trade is what they reveal weighed against what they keep dark, and they hold themselves the purest Kendor of all on the grounds that they alone chose what they would become.
Diaspora: Unlike the other subraces, Cendoriln have spread far beyond the Kendrel Kingdoms. Populations exist in the Riptear Sea, deep Aboyinzu, and scattered thermal vent systems throughout the world's oceans. These diaspora communities maintain no contact with surface nations and often refuse communication even with the Kendrel Kingdoms, considering themselves purer practitioners of Kendor tradition—uncorrupted by surface influence. The Riptear Cendoriln are particularly isolationist, and their existence is known only through rare Pelaendor encounters.
One holding sits beneath the Emerald Coast, in the deepest galleries of the Crystal Caverns, where Cendoriln claims predate New Chimea's harvest by centuries. The surface nations cut force-crystals out of the leyline intersection faster than the caverns can regrow them, and the Cendoriln there answer with quiet sabotage: fouling safe routes, mismarking sound crystals, slowing a harvest that is grinding the coast toward collapse. They keep no envoys above the water; what warning the courts receive arrives through Pelaendor wanderers.
Aspects
- Secrets are currency
- I thrive where others fear to swim