Deepwater Eel

Deepwater Eel belongs to guardian spirit in the Landorya bestiary. Its usual habitat is Deepwater Eels inhabit the lowest, most lightless galleries of The Aquifer Halls and the vast subterranean reservoirs beneath the Underglow Springs, surfacing perhaps once in a generation.. The Naiads regard Deepwater Eels as the living custodians of their civilization's oldest memories, and the Echo Sages of the Naiads consider a successful communion with one the ap… Key abilities include Aquifer memory, stores centuries of water-memory within their bodies, accessible to Echo Sages through deep resonance, Pressure manipulation, can seal or open underground aquifer passages by coiling within them, and Runic emanation, passively radiates ancient Aqua-Essence that purifies surrounding water over time.

An enormous, ancient eel of indeterminate length, witnesses describe them anywhere from twenty to over a hundred feet, with skin the color of deep slate that seems to absorb rather than reflect light. Along their entire body, faint runes of a script no living Naiad can fully read pulse like slow embers, and their eyes are a solid, featureless white that glows dimly in absolute darkness.

Deepwater Eels are ancient, inscrutable, and profoundly still in their intentions, they do not respond to fear or aggression, only to the resonance of deep water-memory. Echo Sages who have communed with them describe the experience as receiving a message written in a language one almost remembers.

The Archives of the Deep contain fragmentary transcriptions of seventeen recorded communions with Deepwater Eels, the oldest dating to the founding of the Aqua-Consortium itself, each one a partial and cryptic warning about a future water-crisis that, in hindsight, the Naiads eventually faced. Some Echo Sages believe the Eels are not creatures at all, but the rivers' own consciousness given flesh, older than the Naiad race by epochs. The Nereids of the salt seas reportedly have no equivalent entity, a fact that Naiad theologians interpret as evidence that the freshwater veins of Landorya carry a different and more ancient kind of memory than the ocean. A Naiad proverb states: the Eel remembers what the river has forgotten and what the spring has not yet learned.

The Naiads regard Deepwater Eels as the living custodians of their civilization's oldest memories, and the Echo Sages of the Naiads consider a successful communion with one the apex of their craft. They are the silent wardens of The Aquifer Halls and the subterranean veins that make the entire Aqua-Consortium possible.