Issuthra, the Drowned Crown

A primordial deep-serpent grown vast in the flooded dark beneath the Drowned Shrine — an ancient creature the Kneeling Drowned mistake for the shrine's keeper, not an ancestor of the Hessk.

When the valley drowned, most things that breathed the green water were born of the Mirrenmere. Issuthra was already old beneath it. The Hessk name her the first coil, not as kin but as a warning carried from their earliest years below the earth: a serpent long as a barge, crowned in a fan of frilled scale the colour of bruised jade, lairing in the lowest flooded vault below the Drowned Shrine where the silt-pike will not go. She does not strike with fang alone. She rears and spits a venom that hangs in the water like smoke, and the toxin keeps working long after she has slid back into the dark. The Kneeling Drowned were meant to tend the shrine itself; instead they kneel to her, mistaking the water's pressure and her slow-moving mass for something divine. Sumeh Tideless has knelt longest of all. Issuthra does not correct them. A queen is owed her worshippers, however they came to her.