Tot'lawan

In the ocean south of Luban, near the Dreaded Coast, a species of large marine creature lives: the tót’lawan. They have an oblong body with a diameter of 20 feet and a length of 200 feet. Their skin is semi-opaque, with red to blue hues. They have a set of outer limbs, like tentacles, at what is supposed to be the tail. A row of eyes lines the body. Other organs have never been seen.
Because it lives under water, not much is known about its behaviour.
When the creature dies, its biochemical texture changes. The body gets filled with gasses, which make the creature to drift to the surface of the ocean, and then rise up in the sky. The huge creatures will rise to approximately 300 feet over the oceans surface, where they will drift on the wind.
The chemical processes make that the dead body starts glowing. A purple light is radiated and can be seen from far away. The light and the smell of the decaying body attract insects. The insects attract in their turn all kinds of birds. The glowing corpse is the centre of it all. After a while, the corpse is so filled with gasses, it explodes. In the explosion, most of the birds die and they will fall into the water, where they are devoured by the still living companions of the creature.
It can take a few stonds before these creatures explode. In stormy weather, the corpses might drift over the land and explode there. It is said the remains of the creature are poisonous and the gasses very dangerous. The land under the place where the explosion was can’t be used for a few years - nothing will grow on it and animals are afraid to go there.
Parts of exploded tót’lawan are too small (if any) to learn more of the biology of these creatures. Sometimes the eyes are found; they are sold as strong amulets on the Luban markets.

Dead tot'lawan over the water

Some scientists have thought the creatures might come from another dimension, but their bulky bodies are too large to have entered Airtha through a portal, others claim. Instead, their seeds might have come to Airtha carried by a thing from the sky -akin to one of these that has destroyed the Trigohaima peninsula- that has dropped in the ocean.
The very thought that there might be life in the sky is of course ridiculous; the sky belongs to the dead, which is why the creatures rise up to it after they have died.
The Lubanians believe the [asita]tót’lawan are messengers from their gods, who communicate through the light they radiate. Some barógal claim to understand the Tót’lawan, they have studied the visible and invisible rays, the latter with Dernian lenses. It is not known if the creatures have something to do with the Dernian Rays that can be found throughout Daleth.

The tót’lawan do not only radiate when they are already dead. They communicate with light pulses. These lights can be seen in the ocean. According to the Lubanian fishermen from the Iblawak Bay, seeing these lights is not good. The creatures can destroy a ship easily, by grabbing it with their limbs or just by overswimming it. Using light on the water of the Dreaded Coast is not advised, it might attract the tót’lawan. More so, it is known the more or less pulsing light of the lighthouses along the Luban coast have attracted tót’lawan in the past. A few of these lighthouses have been destroyed by the creatures, so the legends have it. They just crushed the structures with their huge bodies, apparently in a kind of mating ritual.

There are numerous horror stories of ships being wrecked by the tót’lawan, sailors who just survived such an attack, of fleets of corpses drifting over the Dreaded Coast. There are stories in which the creature has been identified, but stories of Dalethian sailors who had never heard of the tót’lawan tell of strange, spooky lights in the air or under water, and suddenly disappearing ships, among other weird events.

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