“The Maw Between the Waves”

As told by Euthymios, Elder Theurge of the Children of Gaia, Keeper of the Silent Shore Sept, Island of Crete, 1552 A.D.

Scylla = Kaiju

Come, little one, sit close to the fire, and hush the howling wind with your ears wide open, for tonight I will speak of the Devourer of Sailors, the Shadow That Waits Beneath the Waves. I speak of Scylla—not a tale for the faint of heart, but a truth from the old world that the spirits still whisper when the moon is low and the sea sighs with hunger.

When Gaia shaped the world, her hands were gentle, and her tears gave us the seas. But the Wyrm, cunning even then, spat into her waters. Where it spat, something twisted bloomed, not born of rage like the Black Spiral Dancers, nor of hunger like the Wyrm’s corrupted kin, but something alone. Something that never knew the caress of the moon or the bond of pack.

Her name is Scylla.

Before she became the monster, she was said to be a spirit-born child—half-dream, half-flesh. She swam the deep trenches near Thrinakia, and when the moonlight touched her waters, the dolphins sang to her. But mortals, always afraid of what they do not understand, gave her no name of honor, only monster.

She lived too near the places where the Weaver wove her snares of logic, and too near the mouths of the Wyrm’s deep pits. When a shipwrecked theurge of our Tribe once touched her mind through a dream, he screamed himself mad before he could tell us all. But I saw the echoes of that dream—and it was not madness. It was sorrow.

Scylla is not merely a beast, not some snake of Poseidon's wrath. She is kin to us in the way that shadows are kin to flame. A half-cousin of the sea and sky, but where we run as wolves and fight in the light, she dwells in the silence between heartbeats. Her form is dreadful, her upper body carries the twisted semblance of a woman, but her head… ahh, her head is the stuff of old nightmares and ancient blood.

A skull like a draconic wolf, lined with fangs longer than your forearm. Her eyes are pale green, pupil-less, seeing past flesh into intention. She walks the seafloor on limbs like a great crocodile, but when she rises, towering from the sea, back arched, fins flared like spears, she commands fear like a Jarl commands a moot.

And her tail. By Gaia’s breath, that tail. Like the ancient Leviathans of the Umbra, it could level ships with a slap or crush an Ahroun in Crinos between two curling coils.

She hunts not for pleasure. She hunts because she is lonely.

Ships pass near her cliffs and hear the songs, not siren songs, no. These are sobs. Low, vibrating notes in the water, the sound of sorrow so deep it bends minds. Those who get too close are drawn in. She does not always devour them right away. Some she holds, cradles in her long arms until the breath leaves their lungs. Others, she swallows whole, seeking warmth where she finds none.

I saw her once.

It was many moons ago when I led a rite of cleansing on a sea cave the local kinfolk feared. We had barely begun the chant when the waves froze not into ice, but into stillness, as though the ocean itself dared not breathe. Then from the black water, she rose.

Not fully, just the head and shoulders, and even that blocked out the stars. Her fins shimmered like dusk-colored steel, barnacles and kelp clinging to her frame like funeral garlands.

She looked at me.

Not as prey.

As kin.

She did not attack. Instead, she let out a low groan—a sound older than any language we speak—and vanished below, the water boiling in her wake. That night, I wept. Not out of fear, but because I knew her pain. To be born too strange for the sky, too wild for the shore, and too old for mercy.

So remember, young one: not all monsters are Wyrm-tainted. Some are Gaia’s forgotten dreams, cast adrift and twisted by our fear, left to fester in the deep.

If ever you see still water in a storm, or hear sorrow in the crashing surf, leave an offering. A shell. A bone. A song.

Scylla remembers kindness.

And the sea always remembers blood.