Kraken (/ˈkrɑːkən/)

Pushing the theory of deep-sea gigantism to its absolute limit and existing to spite the square-cube law, it seems that, for once, the old tales of fishermen did not exaggerate the size of this enormous sea beast. The largest known organism in existence by a long shot, the anatomy of the Kraken shares many similarities to the common octopus, only scaled up to gargantuan proportions and with structural differences that allow for such a monstrous size.

It has a closed circulatory system with veins big enough for a human to walk through. It has three hearts; a main heart and two auxiliary hearts that pump blood to the gills. The skin consists of a thin outer epidermis with mucous cells and sensory cells, and a connective tissue dermis consisting largely of collagen fibers and various cells allowing color change. Opsins in the skin respond to different wavelengths of light and help the Kraken choose a coloration that camouflages itself; the chromatophores in the skin can respond to light independently of the eyes.

The main deviations are in the number of appendages. The Kraken has eight large arms scaled to an equal ratio to those of a common octopus. Lacking skeletal support, the arms work as muscular hydrostats and contain longitudinal, transverse, and circular muscles around a central axial nerve. They can extend and contract, twist to left or right, bend at any place in any direction, or be held rigid. The interior surfaces of the arms are covered with circular, adhesive suckers. The suckers allow the Kraken to anchor itself or to manipulate objects and are responsible for giving the Kraken's brain information about an object's touch and taste. Underneath, around its beak are sixteen feeding tentacles, that although much smaller, are each as thick around as a semi-truck. These feeding tentacles are most often what is seen of the Kraken as it attacks ships. Equipped with a greater number of nerves and suckers than the larger set of arms, these tentacles have a greater sensitivity to touch and taste as they probe ships for edible material.

Because of the sheer weight of its bulk, the Kraken cannot lift its body's mass out of the water. Although its back will breach the surface when resting at sea level.

While capable of inhabiting any part of the ocean, the Kraken seems to prefer residing in the colder waters of the Norwegian, Greenland, and the North Sea within the Abyssal and Hadal zones. The Kraken rest at the bottom of the sea surrounded by enormous schools of fish drawn in by the scraps left from the Kraken's previous meals. Evidence of the Kraken's nesting site includes the abundance of destroyed vessels often arranged in strange patterns. Sometimes, however, the Kraken does not rest at the sea bottom, but rather at the surface. Due to its large size, sailors in the olden days often mistook it for an island and attempted to land. But as they lit a cooking fire, the enraged beast would quickly submerge. Drowning those on its back. Those who remained on the boat were not safe either, for they would be sucked down by the inevitable whirlpool created by the massive amount of water displaced by the Kraken's mass as it descended back to the depths.

The Kraken is not an idle hunter. Not only does it feed on every known species of marine animal and sea monster known to both men and the gods, but it also has a taste for humans as well. It seems that the ancient legends and modern media did not exaggerate the Kraken's preference for targeting ships. It will grab sailing ships in its massive tentacles and crush them like kindling. Or accounting for its large size, can swallow entire fishing fleets whole.

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

- Lord Alfred Tennyson, The Kraken

 

The Kraken spends most of its time sleeping on the seafloor. Because of the enormous caloric intake required for such a large creature as itself to survive, this lethargy is necessary for maintaining energy homeostasis. While Kraken attacks come without warning, there are signs of its approach that may save your life. The first warning sign is the sudden evacuation of all marine life within the radius of the Kraken’s ascent up the water collum. The second which has been made possible only thanks to the advent of sonar technology is the appearance of the Kraken as a large “blip.” The Kraken may appear at random intervals on the sonar in different directions around the ship as it sinks and floats up to various depths several times. This “spy hopping” behavior is generally not part of the Kraken’s hunting strategy and is instead one of curiosity. Spyhopping is controlled and slow and can last for minutes at a time if the Kraken is sufficiently inquisitive about whatever it is viewing. If one is lucky, the Kraken may lose interest in your ship and swim back to the depths. If the Kraken decides that a ship looks edible, it will position itself with its ventral side facing upwards and its eight massive arms spread out like the petals of a monstrous flower in bloom. It will grasp the bottom of the ship’s hull with its smaller feeding tentacles. Completely halting the ship’s movement in the water. Those on board will feel a violent tremor pass through the ship as if it has just run aground. The Kraken’s tentacles will slowly rise out of the water like massive pythons. Their suckers probe the side of the hull of the ship, feeling for any kind of weakness that they can exploit. The tentacles writhe violently above the deck. Grabbing and crushing crewmen, cargo, or anything not nailed down in their grasp. Their main objective is to wrap themselves around the ship and squeeze until the hull is crushed in their grasp and pull it under the waves into the Kraken’s mouth. While they can do this remarkably fast, Kraken attacks are often long and drawn out as the feeding tentacles explore for food. If the feeding tentacles sustain too much damage for the Kraken’s liking, the Kraken will use its larger arms instead. Many times larger than any ship ever made by man, just one of these appendages can crush a ship like an ant beneath your shoe. Witnesses to these events regarding the use of the Kraken’s larger arms have reported feelings of overwhelming dread and insignificance when compared to the Kraken’s main arms.

Although the apex predator of all oceanic habitats, the Kraken does partake in battles with other super giant sea monsters. Such as the World Serpent, Jormangander, the monstrous son of Loki. Whose length encompasses the entire width of the Earth and rests his head in the same Northern waters of Scandinavia. He may have the Kraken beat when it comes to body length, but not total mass. Another competitor is the Leviathan, the disgraced primordial sea monster created by Yahweh when complex life was first seeded on our planet. He normally stays within the Mediterranean Sea but has been known to swim into the Atlantic on rare occasions. While none of the three are capable of killing each other, they're known to clash violently over food and territory until one submits and flees.

Because of the sheer volume of fish that accompanies the Kraken to feed on scraps of its food, daring fishermen in the old days often risked the danger in order to haul in an enormous catch.   The Organization has managed to successfully house many beings of gargantuan size in the Trench before, but even they realized the impossibility of trying to contain something so impossibly large as the Kraken. Turns out they didn’t have to. Through a combination of science and magical artifacts, they constructed a device in the Trench that attracted the Kraken to the same patch of sea while preventing it from attacking the facility. They may not have contained the Kraken per se, but what they did was more beneficial to them. They had turned it into a guard dog. Before, the Trench relied on missile systems to deal with vessels that violated its seas, but those had the potential to give away the Trench’s location if the missile trails were ever spotted by one of the thousands of satellites orbiting Earth. But a sea monster, one that attacks suddenly and leaves no survivors? That would work just fine. Even though the Organization has abandoned the Trench to rot under the Supernatural’s control, the Kraken still retains its role as a guard dog. But instead of keeping ships away, it now keeps anything from leaving. Even if by some miracle, the Supernaturals find a way to break down the multitude of physical and magical barriers containing them within the Trench, they will still have to find a way to cross the Greenland Sea without being attacked by the Kraken.

The Kraken has one of the highest brain-to-body mass ratios of all invertebrates; this is greater than that of many vertebrates. The Kraken has the same jumping genes that are active in the human brain, implying an evolutionary convergence at a molecular level. The nervous system is complex, only part of which is localized in its brain, which is contained in a cartilaginous capsule. The Kraken’s nervous system is what is known as distributed intelligence as the remaining two-thirds of the Kraken's neurons are in the nerve cords of its arms; these are capable of complex reflex actions without input from the brain. Unlike vertebrates, the complex motor skills of the Kraken are not organized in its brains via internal somatotopic maps of its body. Like an octopus, the Kraken displays high intelligence, exhibiting complex problem-solving and emotional behaviors. During an initial attempt by Organization to contain the Kraken, it was able to figure out that the Organization's submarines were tracking it by sonar and infrared signature. It then slowed down its metabolic functions to the point where its vitals gave almost no signal of life. Resting motionless on the seafloor, the sonar of the Organization subs mistook it for an underwater mountain range and the subs passed by. Only for the Kraken to rear up behind them and suck the ships with all hands aboard into its maw. Essentially the Kraken tricked the Organization by playing dead. There used to be much debate among Organization scientists studying the Kraken as to whether it was sapient or not. As the beast had been observed numerous times engaging in behaviors that suggests it is self-aware.

The eyes and the brain of the Kraken are the largest of any known organism, both natural and supernatural. The Kraken's eyes do not help it see further, but instead amplify light sources -such as the biolumeniesnce of deep sea creatures.

Incredibly sensitive to light change, even when at the bottom of the ocean where barely any light reaches, the chromatophores in the skin can respond to light independently of the eyes and can subconsciously rouse the Kraken from its sleep when something large enough to be considered prey passes over it.

Like the black abyss in which it resides, the Kraken and its origins are a mystery. The beast was known to ancient coastal Norse, Swedes, Anglos, Saxtons, and Germanic peoples. Who named it after the Old Norse word kraki meaning "crooked" due to its resemblance to an uprooted tree. After hundreds of years of coexisting with the creature, these seafaring people had learned to observe behavioral patterns in local sealife to avoid most attacks.

The Kraken became somewhat known to the Romans during both invasions of Britain in 54 BC and 43 AD. Where it attacked some of their naval fleets attempting to cross the English Channel. To the invading Romans, it became known as magnum brachium maris or "Great Arm of the Sea" and is believed to have been a factor in why the Romans rarely used their naval forces during the conquest of Britain.

As the only current representative of its species, it would be tempting to suggest that the Kraken is the last of its kind. However, the absence of other members of the species and their possible ancestors, both as corpses or representatives in the fossil record, suggests that the Kraken is one of the more direct and spontaneous creations of the gods. While associated with Scandinavia and its gods, none of the members of the pantheon, not the Aesir, Vanir, and not even the Jotnar, claim to have created the dreadful sea beast. The Vanir god of the sea, Njord, theorized that the Kraken could be related to two ancient and extinct sea monsters, the Lyngbakr (Balaenoptera viridis) and the Hafgufa (Caligo oceanum). Despite the high probability against such a relation existing, the Lyngbakr has more in common with modern-day cetaceans, specifically members of the order Mysticeti, than it does with mollusks like the Kraken. Hafgufa, meanwhile, is more of a mystery, as its final resting place has never been discovered. As Njord told questioning Organization scientists, the Hafgufa has been dead even longer than the Lyngbakr. While he neglected to provide a description of the creature, Organization scientists and scholars have theorized that Hafgufa was also a cetacean based on medieval descriptions of the creature and its habits of trap-feeding.

A remote sub was sent to collect a sample from the ancient corpse of the Lyngbakr. Which currently resides in the East Greenland Rift Basin at a depth of 3,900 meters below sea level. The massive, 13km corpse, which had been ravaged by decomposition and scavengers over the course of the nearly 8 centuries since the creature's expiration, was still intact enough to determine that the cause of the creature's death was strangulation followed by a broken neck. While the probe was able to collect a biological sample from the body, contact was lost around a depth of 3,056 meters. The cause was determined to be a structural failure in the sub's ballast tanks.