The Coral Mantis
You fear the storms above? You are a fool. Storms are mercy. Storms are loud. True terror is the Click. It is a dragon's malice compressed into a mantis's strike. One blow to boil the sea. One blow to shatter the floor of the world. When you hear it, do not pray for rescue. Pray you die before you hit the bottom of the sky.
The Keel-breaker
He is a singularity of evolution,
a mythic chimera forged from three apex lineages.
a mythic chimera forged from three apex lineages.
From the Sea Turtle, he inherits an impenetrable fortress of a shell, now a living, jagged reef that mimics the sea floor. From the Praying Mantis, he possesses the terrifying, loaded-spring limbs capable of striking with such velocity that they boil the surrounding water and shatter iron hulls. And buried deep within lies the hateful, brooding intelligence of a Drake, stripping him of animal instinct and replacing it with a dragon’s cunning.
The Origins of the Mantis
The Myth of the Gilded Wing
They say he was once Ignis, a Sun-Drake of such blinding magnificence that he refused to fly beneath the clouds, believing the ocean unworthy of his shadow. His vanity offended the Old Depth, the deity of the crushing dark water. As punishment, the deity did not kill him but stripped him of his grace. His golden scales were cursed to become rough, scabrous barnacles; his fire was quenched and replaced with the crushing pressure of the deep; and his majestic wings were ripped away, leaving only the buzzing, vestigial nubs of an insect. He was transformed from a lord of the sky into a scavenger of the reef, forced to crawl where he once refused to look.The Myth of the Silent Stitcher
Others claim he is no fallen god, but a mistake of mortal hands. There was an arcane biologist, a woman whose name has been scrubbed from history, who sought to create the perfect guardian for the sky-ocean's edge. In a laboratory hidden inside a drifting thunderhead, she stitched together the resilience of the turtle, the predatory speed of the mantis, and the cunning of the dragon. But she was so obsessed with the physiology of her creation that she neglected its mind.She never saw the strike coming.
It didn't kill her with malice; it simply tested its new power, snapping her spine as easily as a twig, and continued its work, utterly indifferent to the creator lying broken at its feet.
The Myth of the War-Eater
The oldest tales suggest he made himself. They speak of a simple, highly intelligent crustacean that was born small and soft in a world of giants. Refusing to die, he learned a forbidden blood-magic: the art of the Graft. Every foe he defeated, he did not just eat; he took. He took the shell of the great turtle for his back. He took the striking arms of the giant shrimp for his weapons. He took the sensory clusters of the deep-dwellers. Layer by layer, battle by battle, he carved away his own weakness and replaced it with the stolen strength of his enemies, until there was nothing left of the original creature but a hunger that could never be sated.The Prophecy of the Broken Chain
Whichever tale you believe, the ending is the only part that matters to a sailor. The Coral Mantis grew too strong, too heavy, and too full of hate for the upper currents. He was cast down, bound by chains of pressurized water in the deepest, blackest trench of the infinite sea, where the light of the sun has never touched. He sits there now, brooding in the dark, motionless as a stone. But the chains are rusting. It is written that on the day the final link snaps, he will not just rise. He will strike the water with a force that shatters the world's surface tension forever. He will swallow the great oceans whole, draining the sky until it is dry, and then, with the terrible patience of the reef, he will eat the world.
Coral Mantis by Lou
His Lair:
Located on the absolute bottom of the High Seas, resting precariously on the "surface tension" that separates the infinite ocean from the open sky below. To reach the lair, one must dive past the light zone, past the twilight zone, into the crushing dark where the water becomes heavy as oil. Here, the ocean floor is not rock. It is a thin, shimmering membrane of surface tension, the translucent barrier that holds the sea up. Through this "floor," you can see the terrifying drop of the empty sky and clouds miles below. Suspended in this darkness is a massive, floating graveyard. It is a tangle of ancient iron chains, shattered hulls of airships that sank too deep, and petrified whale bones, all fused together by aggressively growing, jagged coral.
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