Kraken

Content note. This entry describes the kraken voice and the kraken ink, both of which can be used on someone who has not agreed to it, and both of which are pleasant to be on the receiving end of. The Voice and The ink are the sections to skip.

Overview

A kraken is a creature of deep water carrying two things nothing else here carries in quite the same combination: a voice that takes hold of a mind, and an ink that rewrites a body.

They live in the watery parts of the Veil and share that water with leviathans. The two are not kin and have never been; they simply live in the same ocean.

There are no kraken breeds. What varies, varies by individual.

Physical traits

The head and torso are distinct and read as one piece — a body with a front, a top and a shape to it, sitting above the tentacles rather than dissolving into them. Krakens run from around seven feet to around fourteen, and where any of them falls in that range is their own.

The skin is faintly rubbery, giving slightly under a hand and returning to itself immediately. Colouring comes down to the individual.

Horns rise from the head and curve as they go, splitting and rejoining the way the roots of an uprooted tree do — thick where they leave the skull, thinning and dividing as they travel, and carrying the same knotted, doubled-back geometry all the way out.

The face is cephalopod through the eyes and the structure around them. The mouth and jaw are closer to draconic, and it is the jaw that gives the voice its range.

The tentacles

Tentacle count varies by individual and typically runs past ten.

Each one is covered along its length in large suction cups, and every cup bends and flexes independently of the others. That is the detail that makes the tentacles genuinely dextrous: the grip adjusts continuously across the whole surface touching something, holding a shape by matching it rather than by squeezing it. The tentacles end in powerful claws, and those are capable of fine work as readily as heavy work.

Krakens have no arms and no hands, and want none. The tentacles do all of it — carrying, gripping, making, greeting, and everything else a hand would be for.

The voice

A kraken’s voice channels magical hypnosis, the same extra force a kitsune puts out as foxfire and a lamia delivers through the gaze. What differs is the channel, and here the channel is sound.

It is used at will. A kraken speaking ordinarily is speaking ordinarily, and the hypnosis is something they reach for when they want it rather than something present in every word they say.

It works in water and out of it equally. It reaches whoever can hear it, and someone who cannot hear is untouched by it — the same way foxfire passes over someone who cannot see.

Resisting it is mostly futile unless the person resisting is exceptionally strong-willed, and it is unfailingly pleasant to be under.

The ink

Kraken ink alters living things, and it is an extra force. It runs along the ground the body affinity covers and then keeps going well past it — a body affinity governs speed, strength, endurance, density and healing, and the ink rewrites what a creature is.

Any biological trait is within reach. Shape, size, covering, structure, sex, senses — the ink takes hold of whatever it touches and remakes it, and the change is completely painless. It is frequently a good deal better than painless.

Species is within reach as well, with one limit. A kraken can make someone into a creature of another species outright, and the innate magic of that species stays behind unless a member of it is present for the kraken to draw a little power from. Given that, the magic comes along with the body. Without it, the person is that species in every physical respect and carries none of what the species fixes.

The mind stays the person’s own. The ink reaches far enough to build the instincts that come with a body — the reflexes and drives that belong to what someone now is — and it goes no further than that. Personality survives intact. So does memory. Whoever comes out of a transformation is the same person who went into it, in a body that has changed underneath them.

Delivery

Contact is what does the work, and a kraken can release the ink into the water and let it find someone. Distance costs it: the longer the ink takes to arrive, the less of it arrives, and the shallower the change it can make.

A kraken intending a complete transformation holds the person in their tentacles while it happens. That keeps the ink arriving continuously and keeps the change from stopping partway through, and it is the ordinary way a kraken gives someone a new form as a gift.

Undoing

A change stands once it is made. What another kraken can do is make a second change — taking someone who has been transformed and transforming them again, into what they were before.

The result is the same shape they started with, reached forward rather than backward. Any kraken can do it, including the one who made the first change.

Consent

The ink asks nothing of the person it reaches, and neither does the voice. A kraken can use either as a gift, freely offered and freely accepted, and a kraken can use either to hold something still that would rather not be held. Both are pleasant either way, and neither is gated on agreement.

Which of those any kraken actually does is a decision made by the person making it.

Ageing

Krakens grow, and at some point they stop, and when that happens depends on the individual.

After that they simply keep going. A kraken does not die of old age.

Magic

Two things are fixed: the voice and the ink. Both are extra forces, and every kraken carries both.

How strongly is another matter and belongs to the individual. Everything past those two is individual as well — whatever else a kraken is tied to magically is theirs alone.

Shared instincts

Krakens share the body plan, the ink, the voice and the ageing pattern. That is the list.

They do not share a temperament, and the word arrives carrying a very specific one — vast, cold, and rising from the dark to pull something under. That is a description of a story. A kraken may be playful, or reserved, or delighted by company, or perfectly happy alone, and how any of them carries themselves is their own.

Where the name comes from

Kraken is the definite form of the Norwegian krake, a word for something crooked, stunted or twisted. The oldest sustained description of the creature behind it is the Old Norwegian Konungs skuggsjá — the King’s Mirror, written around 1250 — which gives it as the hafgufa, “sea-steam”: a creature so large that sailors took it for an island, feeding by lying with its mouth open and letting whatever came drift in.

The version everyone inherited came from Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, whose Natural History of Norway of 1752 described the kraken at length and in earnest — a mile and a half across, mistaken for land, its arms tall enough to take the mast of a ship. Linnaeus had listed a Microcosmus among the molluscs in the first edition of Systema Naturae in 1735 and dropped it from later ones. Tennyson’s sonnet of 1830 put it to sleep “far, far beneath in the abysmal sea”, waiting to rise once and die. Behind all of it, most likely, is the giant squid — Architeuthis, real, deep, and rarely seen alive.

What we take is the shape: the tentacles, the cups, the horns, and the water. What we leave behind is everything the tradition built on top of that. Ours are not the size of islands, do not sink ships, and are not waiting in the dark for the end of the world. A kraken here is a person of a size to stand in a room with you.

Field notes

Individual colouring, tentacle count, size, horn shape, how strongly a kraken carries either force and what they actually do with the ink all belong on each member’s own page.