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."

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 trader. 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].