A BREEDING SHRINE is a warm shallow basin where the Olvir spawn under lamplight.
Suspended above the water hang the clutch-jars: each holds one generation at a different stage, lit from within so the elders may watch them turn.
Only the Olvir build these.
The fleet arrived with no temples and no dead to bury. What it had instead was the spawning rite, the one ceremony that could not be left behind: a species that lays in open water must agree on where.
Human observers took a long while to grasp that the shrine is not a place of worship but a place of consent. The lamps are not offerings. They are the register.