Devourers

Overview

The devourers are the squid-like beings of Thaluren ocean memory that break the routes. The same memory that keeps the sacred deep-witnesses places them in the open water past the farthest runs and speaks of them, too, as an ocean people. Where the deep-witnesses are honoured, the devourers are feared, and the fear is practical: a current road where a devourer has been sensed is not trusted until a later run has come through it whole.

Appearance

Few in memory claim to have seen one, and those who did saw parts. The tellings agree on arms: many and long, pale as drowned rope in some accounts and dark as deep water in others, moving apart and together in the grey with no body ever quite in view. Some speak of a great eye, flat and unblinking, turned on a run from below. None gives the whole shape, and the Thaluren take that as part of what a devourer is.

Mostly a devourer is known by what it does to the water. The tellings speak of a road that goes cold from beneath, a current that slackens or turns where it has always run true, shoals that scatter from water they never leave, and a silence in which nothing calls.

Habitat and Range

Thaluren memory places the devourers in the Unrun Sea, past the outer routes of the Tidebound Reaches. The outermost current roads are where they are sensed, and the Outer-Route runs, which come in last and least predictably from the far edge of the known sea, carry most of the tales. No devourer is remembered in the shoal worlds, the Kelpshade, or the estuaries.

Behaviour and Temperament

A devourer, as memory tells it, does not hunt a run so much as unmake its way. It breaks a current road, and the run on that road is scattered across open water, arrives late at the mouth, or does not arrive. Whether it means to, whether it feeds on what it scatters, or whether the breaking is only what its passage does to the sea, the tellings do not agree. Its temper is nowhere described as rage; the fear is of something patient and indifferent below the road.

Uses and Dangers

The devourers give nothing. Their cost is the road. A run that does not come home is not a run, and a road that cannot be trusted is closed in practice until a later run has come through whole, whatever anyone swears. A lost Outer-Route run is often laid to a devourer in memory, though storms off the same water also break current roads and scatter runs, and the Thaluren seldom say which it was.

Lore and Belief

The Thaluren read the larger sea through the pairing of witness and devourer: what watches the deep and leaves the roads alone, and what breaks them. The pairing shapes how they think of the water beyond the last run, and why few of them go to look.

A sensing is told along the run-line that met it and passed to other lines before the next season, so that runs bound for the same road hear of it in time. By Thaluren custom such an account counts for nothing, yet no line will ignore it: the road is distrusted all the same. Some say a devourer can be outwaited, others that it returns to a road it has broken, and both are told as if they were known.

Where It Appears

• Thaluren
• The Unrun Sea
• The Tidebound Reaches