Monsters of the Deep

The open sea has its own bestiary, none of it comforting. The most frequently lethal are the so-called shivarks: colossal sharks reaching eighty feet or more in length, with slate-grey backs and pale bellies that vanish in both deep and shallow waters. Their jaws are a double crescent of jagged teeth that regrow constantly, and their eyes show no more malice than a millstone, only appetite. They trail ships for days, drawn by waste and bilge, and are notorious for striking the moment a storm or damaged hull slows a vessel. Next in line are the harkuut, giant squid of such size that the largest recorded specimen measured nearly three hundred feet from beak to the tip of its longest tentacles. Their eyes are the size of shields, adapted to the blackness of the deep. A harkuut rarely attacks a sound vessel, but a lone ship becalmed over deep trenches may find its hull tested by exploratory coils, followed by a sudden crush from below. Rarest and most feared of all are the great sea-snakes: wingless, legless cousins to dragons, armored in overlapping blue scales and stretching up to one hundred and fifty feet in length. Their jaws conceal a specialized organ that compresses seawater and expels it in a focused, high-pressure jet capable of punching planks from a hull or sweeping a man from the deck like a toy. Fortunately for sailors, sea-snakes are territorial and uncommon; unfortunately, when one chooses your ship as an intruder, few things afloat can match its capacity for destruction.