Beast of Lyquokk Strait



A large, unnamed sea monster inhabited Lyquokk Strait on the western coast of the Howling Fjord until it was killed by the tuskarr Taruka, who subsequently became known as "Beastkiller".

Appearance
The creature was at least six times longer and three times as wide as Taruka's tiny sailboat and moved as quickly as said boat when submerged. It was covered in shimmering blue-black scales which were impenetrable like armor. Its head was framed by barbed fins and possessed elongated, toothy jaws, as well as a blowhole through which it blew sprays of water and which stuck out from its head like a volcano-shaped carbuncle. Its huge, forward-facing eyes resembled those of a seagull, red-rimmed and yellow, but with vertical slits for pupils. Its body ended in a tapered, finned, eel-like tail. Taruka noted that after she'd killed it, the creature floated much higher on the surface than a normal dead fish, leading her to conclude that it had a lot of air inside its body.

Death
The old fisher Harooka told Taruka not to sail through Lyquokk Strait on her way to Kamagua, saying "There is death there. Avoid it". However, Taruka became suspicious that the other fishers were trying to keep her away from a prime fishing spot and thus headed into the strait on the day of her voyage. When she was about halfway up the strait, she saw the beast's shadow approach and only just managed to get her father's spear free before the creature moved under her boat and lifted it out of the water. The boat capsized, but she jumped up and grabbed onto the creature's scales. When the monster dived headfirst into the water again, she slid down its back towards its neck and managed to plunge the spear into its eye and brain, killing it.

The creature disappeared in the deep, its dive already in motion, depositing Taruka in the water. She found and climbed onto her upturned boat and was at a loss for what to do until the beast's corpse bobbed back up to the surface. Taruka realized that the creature's buoyancy meant that it could work as a makeshift vessel. She tied her boat to the creature's tail, stepped the mast in its blowhole, fastened the forestay to its upper jaw (which she noted resembled a ship's bowsprit) and wound the backstay around the tail. The butt of her spear, which was still lodged in the creature's head, function as a peg for one of the shrouds, and she pried up loose scales to turn them into cleats for the other shrouds. When she hoisted the mainsail of her new vessel, she found that it did move with the wind (albeit slowly) and that it could be roughly steered by carefully trimming the sail and moving her old boat from one side of the tail to another. The dead beast attracted many scavengers, and Taruka used her net to catch enough fish to keep her fed on the three-day voyage north to Kamagua, where she entered the harbor in triumph as all the other tuskarr gathered to witness her strange vessel/catch. She singled out the catch master Kattik in the crowd and jovially asked him how many knots her latest catch was worth.