The Sceribius-Ichthyosarius

[Allanon Creel]

During a time before the established Holy War of the desert, before the unification of the warbands to form the nation of Axony, even before the great Aer Empire tamed and civilized the world, the Sceribius ruled the seas, the most fearsome, powerful and intelligent species the world had issued forth. They travelled in different group from other species, not in schools or alone, but in pairs, leaving the young find another or die off. These leviathans had a different eating habit to say the least, eating only twice a year, at the beginning of winter and of summer. Yet on those day the oceans would turn red and remain so until the tides and currents had finally managed to revert the waters to their original colours. They were brutes who, in their pairs could dominate any other predators of the seas, and should they have ever came across other pairs, the strongest of each pair would battle, with the winner and its partner tearing apart the loser's mate and claiming the territory controlled by the defeated pair. The life cycle of the Sceribius would start with a pregnant female laying eggs where she'd been raised, either in furious rapids, under the crashing waters of waterfalls, or at the deepest and darkest parts of the oceans. The eggs would hatch, then the hatchlings, on average the size of a grown ogre, would eat their eggshells, then rest for a small time. After roughly 2 days of dormancy the young feed upon smaller fish, mammals and essentially anything else they can, for the next year. At about a year's time the fish have exponentially slowed in their growth, already nearly the size they would remain for another 99 years, attaining the size of a galleon. An important fact to keep in mind is though they experience growth spurts every century, leading to their full size at about 500 years of age, creeping close to, or even slightly over 350ft.

The problem for the Sceribius became that the prey evolved into smaller, faster species over time, the bulky and slow behemoths could not sustain themselves on the two days they felt hunger consume them, so almost all either adapted to creatures such as the scylla, hydra and drake or died off. Yet a small amount stayed as they were, surviving first off their descendants, then as creatures grew in size over many millennia, these too became prey for the endangered monarchs of the waters. Jumping to the present, the sole area in which they may be glimpsed is the sanctuary of the Teblaanistaag, wherein their numbers are maintained and kept in check.

- Sceribius young