Daer's Creature

Daer's Creature is a deep water organism of Kela with twenty-two limbs, each moved and controlled independently of the others, and eight eyes set in pairs across four faces, so that it has no front and no side it cannot see. Most of its reach is limb. The body itself is compact, and much of its nervous system runs out through the limbs, which is how each one can act on its own. It carries the name of Prince Varethis'Daer Venar, who found it.

Daer came across it by chance during field research in the Kelan deep in the Era of Late Conquest, before he had brought the first Engineered children to term without mortal defects. He and his teams worked in places no researcher should have gone, and they went without security. He built nothing from the creature and claimed no significance in it. The name came afterward, from people who needed something to call it and had nothing better than the name of the man who found it.

It is intelligent. Groups work through problems together, communicating in structured frequencies, and they solve obstacles faster together than any one of them does alone. Every attempt to contain one has failed. It learns how a trap or enclosure works and then defeats it, and no specimen has ever been taken alive.

It shows no aggression toward humans and will pass divers and submersibles without interest. Toward every other animal it meets it behaves as an apex predator, and it is most aggressive of all toward the Northern Sea Phantom, which it attacks wherever the two meet.