The harbor's green color is the first thing and the last thing. Arriving by sea, a visitor sees the standard grey-blue of the Sulu Sea and then, in the harbor's sheltered waters, the shift to a deep jade tone that has no obvious explanation. The effect is most pronounced on clear days in the low winter light, when the harbor surface holds the color like dye in a bowl.

The town itself is built for cold: low rooflines, deep eaves, walls of fitted stone with insulating frames of bundled tundra grass packed between the outer and inner courses. The architecture is practical in the way that extreme climates produce — the aesthetic decisions were made by necessity and then embraced as tradition once the necessity became familiar. The buildings that line the harbor front have doors facing away from the sea wind, which means that entering them involves a right-angle walk from the street.

The Ice Monks' monastery sits on the harbor's eastern shore, its stone walls extending into the water where the submersion pool is fed by the Sulu Sea. The monastery is not unwelcoming — the monks receive visitors and are willing to explain their practices to interested people — but it is isolated enough in its physical placement and its purpose that it feels like a thing adjacent to the town rather than part of it.

The smell is cold water, sea wind, rendered whale fat, and the faint aromatic note from the monastery that might be the herb compound in the monks' brew.

Chamodo occupies a natural harbor indent on the Sulu Sea's northwestern coast, where the tundra reaches the water and the land flattens into the low, wind-exposed coastline that characterizes this stretch of northeastern Shoing. The harbor's shelter from the Sulu's main currents is what made settlement here possible; the green water is unexplained in the formal scientific sense and has been generating competing theories for as long as there have been literate people in Chamodo to write them down.

The tundra inland is productive in ways that most southerners do not expect — the short summer produces a specific flora that the monks use in their brew and that the Damballa temple practitioners gather for mortuary and preservation purposes. In summer, the migratory bird populations that move through are large enough to sustain a secondary hunting economy. The winter reduces activity to the harbor, the whale operations, and the monastery.

The Sulu Sea in this region produces whale populations that the fishing families have been harvesting for generations. The management of those populations — sustainable enough to have continued for this long — is partly practical and partly incorporated into the Damballa faith's understanding of what the sea expects from those who take from it.

Chamodo's population is predominantly human, with a Half-Orc community that has been in the town for several generations and that disproportionately staffs the whaling operations. The physical demands of deep-sea whaling in Sulu's cold waters favor constitution over speed, and the Half-Orc families who arrived here three generations ago found a context in which their strengths were valued straightforwardly.

The monastery's monks are drawn from across Shoing — the Embrace practice attracts people with specific psychological characteristics that do not track to regional origin. The monk population is genuinely cosmopolitan in the way that demanding spiritual communities sometimes are.

The winter months see the population contract; some fishing families maintain summer-only households and winter further south. The permanent year-round population is smaller than the peak figure.

Whaling is the economic foundation. Every downstream product — rendered oil for lamps and preservation, dried and salted meat for the northern trade routes, bone materials worked by the town's craftspeople — flows from the whale operations that the fishing families and the Half-Orc crews manage in the Sulu's deeper waters. The oil trade is the most economically significant element; Chamodo's whale oil reaches markets as far south as the central Shoing coast.

The Ice Monks' brew is not a major commercial product by volume, but it commands prices that make its contribution to the local economy meaningful. The supply is genuinely limited — the monks produce what they produce and do not produce more to meet demand — and the scarcity is not managed artificially. The herbs used are available only in the local tundra season.

Chamodo eats what the sea produces, primarily — whale, deep-sea fish, shellfish, and the preserved forms of all of these that make the winter months manageable. The preservation tradition here is sophisticated, a consequence of isolation: the smoked, salted, and dried fish and whale meat that Chamodo produces for its own use is, by most accounts from visitors, excellent.

The brew from the monastery is available in the town's taverns at the monastery's fixed price and in limited quantity. It is clear in color and cold in temperature regardless of how it has been stored, which is itself a source of the speculation that surrounds it. Whether it has the rejuvenating properties attributed to it in the popular accounts is not something anyone has been able to confirm or deny in a way that has settled the question.

Summer brings fresh tundra herbs into the cooking and the one fermented drink produced locally — a tundra-herb beer that is an acquired taste with passionate advocates.

Chamodo's social life runs along two parallel tracks that cross more than might be expected. The fishing and whaling community — practical, physically demanding, organized around the rhythms of the Sulu's seasons — and the monastery community — contemplative, demanding in a different register, organized around the practice of the Embrace — coexist in a relationship that is genuinely respectful on both sides.

The whaling families have incorporated the Embrace's winter solstice ceremony into their own seasonal observances, not because anyone required it but because the ceremony's acknowledgment of cold, endurance, and the sea's power resonates with what the whaling work requires of people. The monks attend the departures of the whale expeditions. The exchange is informal and not formal.

The presence of the Damballa faith — with its frank engagement with death as a process requiring respect and management — gives Chamodo a more direct relationship with mortality than most towns of comparable size. People here speak about death and the dead without the social deflection that characterizes communities where death is less omnipresent in the daily work.

On the winter solstice, the Ice Water Monks lead the community in the ceremony that is the public version of their Embrace practice. The monks process to the harbor — not to the monastery pool but to the open harbor water — and enter it fully, remaining submerged for a duration that has never been publicly timed but is understood to be beyond ordinary physical tolerance. The ceremony involves the Damballa priests as witnesses and participants in a parallel observance focused on those who died at sea during the year. The combination makes it genuinely affecting in a way that blends the two religious traditions organically.

When the ice breaks enough for the first whale expedition to launch, the harbor community marks it with a pre-dawn ceremony that involves the Damballa priests, the Half-Orc crew leaders, and Prefect Jiang in a formal acknowledgment of what the expedition requires of those who undertake it. The ceremony is not religious in a structured sense — it is practical, acknowledging specific dangers, specific competencies, and the specific relationship between the town and the sea. It has the character of a very serious conversation conducted with care.

The musical tradition in Chamodo is vocal and unaccompanied in its most serious forms — choral singing developed in communities where carrying instruments in cold, wet conditions is impractical. The choral traditions of the whaling crews are the most developed element; the specific harmonics that the whale crews use for coordination at sea have been refined over generations into a form that serves both functional and ceremonial purposes.

The monks' ceremonial recitation is distinct from the secular choral tradition and is not shared outside the monastery context, which has generated the predictable body of rumor about what it involves.

Damballa governs the physical aspects of death, and in a community where death by sea is not a hypothetical, this faith is the most immediate and practically relevant that could be on offer. The Damballa priests manage the mortuary functions that the whaling deaths and fishing accidents generate every year — the preparation, the acknowledgment, and the ongoing relationship with those who have died in the water. The temple is the second most significant building in Chamodo after the monastery, and the priests are among the most respected people in the town.

Thulgard — the hearth guardian, the protector of inhabited warmth in an environment that makes inhabited warmth non-trivial — is present in most Chamodo households as a domestic practice rather than a temple religion. Small Thulgard shrines in the warming rooms of private homes are universal. The formal Thulgard temple that exists in some settlements does not exist in Chamodo; the faith here is personal and domestic.

Qvalnx — the deity that emerged unnoticed from the void's chaos — has a small following in Chamodo whose existence is known about without being known about fully. They are not identified. They do not advertise. The occasional unusual behavior in the harbor's green water, which predates the settlement and which the monks offer to explain but don't quite, has been generating interest from people with a specific attraction to the unknown for as long as the town has existed.

The harbor was a whale camp before it was a settlement — seasonally occupied by the fishing families whose territory the Sulu Sea coast constituted. Permanent habitation followed the discovery that the harbor's green waters produced unusual year-round stability in catch quality and in the preservation of stored goods kept near it. The explanation for this was not identified, which did not prevent people from taking practical advantage of it.

The traditional account is specific: a young fisherman named Lioran was pulled into the harbor's green depths by a current, encountered an ancient sea spirit, and emerged transformed with a mandate to establish the order. The historical record is consistent with the traditional account in outline while being silent on the sea spirit element. Lioran's founding documents — which the monastery holds and which have been read by a small number of people outside the order — describe the encounter in terms that the monks consider accurate and that the Damballa priests consider metaphorical. Both positions exist simultaneously in Chamodo without either camp pressing for resolution.

A generation when the whale population showed signs of stress produced a community negotiation between the whaling families, the Ice Monks, and the Damballa temple about sustainable take levels. The compact that resulted — limiting the annual harvest and establishing the rotational exclusion zones that the crews have observed since — is credited with the recovery of the population and the current health of the fishery. The Half-Orc crews were the primary advocates for the most conservative limits, which their families cite as the origin point of the community's trust in them.

Jiang was appointed by the Prefecture of Green Harbor as the administrative head of Chamodo, replacing a predecessor whose relationship with the monastery had become openly hostile. Jiang's approach — treating the monks as a resource rather than a rival authority — resolved the institutional tension and has produced a working relationship that benefits both. His judgment on matters the monks have expertise in is to ask them first.

Chamodo is stable and specific — a community that has organized itself well around the particular demands of its location and that has achieved the kind of equilibrium that results from long acquaintance with consequences. Prefect Jiang's primary concern is the maintenance of this equilibrium through his eventual succession, which requires finding someone with the specific combination of administrative competence and comfort with the monastery's presence that his tenure has demonstrated is necessary.

The Prefecture governs through the prefect's office, which handles harbor administration, the whale compact enforcement, and the external trade relationships that connect Chamodo to the broader Shoing commercial network. The Ice Monks operate under their own internal governance, which the Prefecture does not interfere with. The Damballa temple handles the mortuary and ceremonial functions that fall within its domain.

The three-party arrangement — prefecture, monastery, temple — works because Prefect Jiang has made it work and because all three parties have enough autonomy that none feels required to compete for territory. What happens when Jiang is replaced is the current open question.

Human, Male — fifties

Jiang is a deliberate man who has learned to treat the monastery as a colleague rather than a subordinate or a superior, which is harder than it sounds. His administrative function — harbor logistics, trade regulation, the whale compact's enforcement — he manages with quiet competence. His relationship with Abbot Soren and with the Damballa head priest Inari is characterized by a specific kind of mutual respect that takes years to build and cannot be imposed.

He is aware that the Green Harbor Prefecture views Chamodo as a remote posting of limited political significance and that this perception has given him the freedom to govern as he thinks best rather than as the Prefecture's political winds require. He has used this freedom well and does not advertise that he has it.

Human, Male — sixties — the monastery

Soren has led the monastery for twenty years and is the fourth Abbot since the founding order's direct disciples. He does not match the physical asceticism that the Embrace practice implies — he is not particularly imposing and runs the monastery with an administrative attention that its external observers tend not to expect. What he does in the submersion practice, and what it costs him, is not visible from the outside.

His relationship with Jiang is the most significant inter-institutional relationship in Chamodo and is the reason the town's three-party governance works. He has opinions about Jiang's likely successors and has shared them once, obliquely, in a form that Jiang recognized and has been thinking about since.

Human, Female — forties — the Damballa temple

Inari came to the Damballa priesthood through the mortuary practice rather than through the theological study that some paths to the position involve. She has prepared several hundred dead for transition and has the specific combination of gentleness and matter-of-factness that this work requires. Her theological position on the monastery's practice — specifically, what the sea spirit's encounter with Lioran was and what it means — is that she does not need to have a position, which Abbot Soren has told her is the most sophisticated response to the question he has heard.

Human, Female — thirties — the harbor watch and militia
Elara commands Chamodo's defense with a focus on the specific threats the town faces: piracy on the Sulu routes, occasional conflicts with competing fishing interests, and the weather-related emergencies that isolated northern settlements face regularly. She is not building for a threat that has not materialized; she is maintaining readiness for the threats that recur. Her relationship with the Half-Orc whaling crews — who constitute the most physically capable contingent in any emergency response — is founded on mutual respect and practical cooperation.

Human, Male — fifties — the harbor and the Sulu Sea
Jorin is the most experienced expedition leader on the Sulu and the primary keeper of the navigational and behavioral knowledge about the whale populations that the compact requires. He trained under his father and his father's teacher, and the accumulated depth of that inheritance is visible in how he reads the sea's conditions — he makes decisions that appear intuitive to observers who do not have access to the seventy years of knowledge he is drawing on.