Fina

Swarm: Unknown
First mentioned: [B1.C15]
Relation: Shirka to Yu.
Lives: Undertellems, a Barnstream settlement.

THE ESTATE AND THE HABITAT

Tria resides in the director's estate of the Barnstream Human Habitat situated in Undertellems.

She had built her wealth and reputation on the backs of humans. She had acquired and repurposed the Barnstream habitat, breeding generations of them for efficiency. She had trained them, optimising their labour to expand the river system and cultivate the garanger, a hardy, nutrient-rich fish bred to thrive in her controlled waterways. When the Shaira had drained the rivers during the crisis years of 616 to 619, Tria’s artificial channels, sealed within the protected habitat, had endured. She had single-handedly kept the north-eastern region from starving. And for that, she had been rewarded with immeasurable riches and an unassailable reputation. Her name stood for wealth and power.

MANAGING HUMANS

“'You have the most control when no one recognises your wing in it'”   [B1.C15]

If Tria intervened in their affairs, she generally did so without ever revealing herself. Instead, she manipulates them, for example by enforcing collaboration amongst warfaring factions by releasing beasts into the habitat [B1.C15]. Likewise, she sees injuries as lessons, "left to heal or to kill. Humans bled, or drowned, or birthed themselves into graves. It was part of what she called natural selection. [...] Instead of intervening, Tria observed how her humans dealt with their injured, and evaluated which of them endured and which were discarded." [B1.C18]

She sees humans as primitive and inherently aggressive creatures incapable of thriving in idleness.
"They required constant threat — a persistent edge of danger to tether their chaos, be it an actual physical threat or an imagined one."   [B1.C15]

POLITICAL POWER

Due to her wealth and standing, Tria is an influential individual. In settlement politics, she takes a clear standing against bormen, who started overtaking individual settlements in 625, that were built from the harshest of grounds by tairan.

"'Give them generations,' she had said, 'and even a cesspit becomes tolerable. And once that happens, the vermin come crawling in. Cadgers, opportunists, parasites. First, the place makes the people. Then the people make the place. And eventually, you witness those arriving that want the place but not the people. That is when the inviting become the invaded.'”   [B1.C15]

In [B1.C18], Yu notes that "Where the borman took over, all of it went to shits. They did not maintain the established organisation of things, because they were either too savage to uphold order or too stupid to actually understand civilised administration in the first place. No structures lasted. No archives held." In that context, he remembers that Tria had said:

"Maintenance is in a peoples’ culture, not in their nature," [...] "It is the choice to live a more strenuous and restrained present, in exchange for a safer tomorrow. It is in the culture of those who live for the generations that come after them, not for their own selfish, momentary pleasures." [...] "Disorder is a weapon. A way to disrupt and dispute and destroy the trail of tairan heritage and, with it, their rightful claims to these lands. To let bormen take over is to set back a cultured society three hundred years. It is a passive war."

ADMIRED AND HATED

As Yu notes, Tria is recognised to different degrees, both admired and hated by the different peoples of the Barnstreams:

"Of course, normal people recognised Tria and Yu as well — the tairan, the nepter, and the other fina. But their attention had social texture, the ordinary friction of common awareness. They looked out of admiration or at least acknowledgement for Tria as a political figure, and because Yu was weird and a cripple. Some recognised them with obvious gestures, others with words, others with but a curious glance. The bormen, however, were different. Their attention was a physical thing. They always gave Tria their collective and uninterrupted hostility until she was out of sight, and longer still. It was like being followed by a sound too low to hear but too heavy to ignore, a pressure that nested under the ribs and then bred fear. To Yu, their bodies spoke of nothing but aggression sharpened by patience, of stillness before slaughter."   [B1.C19]

REFUSING REPARATION RIGHTS

Opposing bormen, Tria eventually abolished the Reparation Rights for bormen, which grated one human to each settlemengt borman. She further made it illegal for bormen to purchase humans. Commenting on the atrocities done to these humans, she had said,

"If humans draw such cruelty out of our midst, if their presence alone degrades our civility so easily, even now, then their war on us has not yet ended."   [B1.C18]

RELATION TO YU

“'Oh, grow up,' she sneered.
'How can I?' he shot back, the rawness of his frustration laid bare. 'You’re sending me there to fucking die!'
'The guild still stands, doesn’t it? They’ve lasted this long. They won’t collapse, even under the weight of your melodrama.'"   [B1.C15]

First, she tried to turn him into an educated scholar or skilled trade, as Yu reveals in [B1.C19]:

"Tria had hired him a private tutor. Though, she had never meant for Yu to become one of those petty market merchants who scraped a living by running around everywhere and bartering their thisses for thats. She had wanted an administrator, someone who directed things on a grander scale, a numbers guy who could shape trade between entire settlements rather than haggle over rope and fish. Still, to handle the big things between settlement authorities, you had to understand how it all worked on the smaller scales. You had to know what people wanted and how they weighed worth against this want. You had to see how they handled petty trades and cheated private bargains.
Tria did the big things, and she walked and talked like she owned the scales."

By now, it seems that she is just happy to be rid of him. According to Yu, "she was ambition incarnate, all sharp edges and unyielding drive, and he had never fit into the grand design of a career in power she had carved out for herself" [B1.C15].