Shoalback
Geban Sea pod giant
The Shoalback is a massive filter feeder that travels in pods along the southeastern coast of Ngorrhal and through the northern Geban Sea. It is the sea creature the Central Pass Ngorrhali learned to hunt en masse, and the resource that made them the most advanced of the four passes.
It is broad and slow, with a ridged grey back that rides just beneath the surface while it feeds. It strains drifting fauna through plates in its mouth. Pods of ten to forty travel together, with adults on the outside and calves kept within.
It does not hunt anything larger than what it filters from the water. An adult will ram to defend a calf, and a pod in panic can overturn small boats. Northern Sea Phantoms follow the pods to take calves and weakened adults.
The Central Pass built paths through the mountains to the southeastern coast and hunted Shoalbacks in numbers, which gave them food, oil, and bone that no other pass could match. When the Northeastern Pass destroyed the Central Pass in the Ngorrhali Unification Wars, the hunt ended with them, and it has never resumed on that scale.
