Coral Sculptor
Coral Sculptors are Orga Engineers specialized in modifying coral species into fast growing variants and particular shapes. Master coralists are responsible for building the coral living structures which all Haimarchists inhabit.
The coralist ambled up along the hairpin cliffside path, steps slow and unsteady, marked by a heavy step on the right leg and followed by an awkward twist to coax the left along. Half-hunched, they held their cloak together against the warm wind, and perservered until they reached the top of the path.
Taking in the dark, rolling sea, they let the wind blow their hood back to reveal a face half-fossilized into semiporous stone and laden with lichens and flowers. It was a scar of war, a signature of his own making scrawled onto his body by the rampant explosion of one of his spore bombs. It was an infestation which had claimed most of his right side, claiming an arm, a leg, and most of his torso as well.
He wasn't a frontliner anymore. Those days were behind him. Instead, he chose to grow instead of destroy.
As he pondered the horizon, withered fingers brushed along wood and stone ribs, seeking a gap and plucking a handfull of mossy spores from it. He extended his hand, and the spores fluttered out from them in a spiral to land in a ring along the ground, unmoved by the wind.
The mossy tendrils of the spores interlaced as the coralist's hand began stirring in circles. They grew into each other, then outwards in spokes, and around again, and outward again, and upwards, until a lattice like a cross-section of a nautilus had formed. The chambers closed in, and became a foundation.
The coralist sat in the shade of the tower growing slowly behind him, pulling on a pipe and glancing up to make sure the growth was uniform, smooth, and even. The hard structure glistened like a great shell, slick with the mist of a late morning mist.
By the afternoon, the peak of the building was so high it hurt the neck to crane and look at, and a rootlike lattice of white, bony, shell had grown from the base and down along the cliff. The Coralist circled the foot of the building, pressing drawing bacteria onto the surface which slowly ate through to become windows. A garden of flowers rose from all around the base, days from blooming but already well-established.
The sunset etched itself across the corrugated surface of the spiralling shell as a Leviathan—long of body and many of hand and eye—descended from the clouds and opened its belly to permit a crew of researchers from within.
The researchers gave the Coralist a wide berth as he sat upon the steps smoking his pipe, with only one having the courage to embrace the coralist in gratitude.
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