After the surge on his second morning back, the shadow sank again. It surfaced beyond the reef a few times that day, while people climbed to higher ground. It didn’t enter the channel until after midnight. By then the guards had pulled what crossbows they could save to the harbor mouth.
The channel between the cliffs was two hundred paces wide. Torchlight reached the black foam below. It smelled of broken coral and the rot brought up from the trench.
A wall of water rose ten paces as the creature surfaced. Two pale gold eyes showed first. Each was the size of a ship’s water cask, with a square pupil that reflected the fires on the wall.
Then came the mantle. Eighty feet of dark violet flesh rose above the channel. Barnacles, old worm tubes, and lumps of star-iron crusted its skin.
The Eight-Tentacled Abyssal Kraken Patriarch. A beast at the peak of Tier Three, weighing more than two hundred tons. Its qi had the weight of early Golden Core.
Water poured over the lower docks. Crates of dried fish floated away. Rowboats spun in the surge. Eighty mercenaries and guild guards stood on the stone pier with their weapons in their hands.
