Sapient Profile: Leviathans

Leviathans are both the largest and oldest of the sapients of the World of Magic, in terms of both time and age. While they are theoretically immortal, their culture encourages choosing to die after a few centuries, though a few choose to live on. Since they grow as they age, and are already blue whale sized at 150, elder leviathans are the largest animal known to ever exist.

Their life history is comparable to that of sauropods; females gather in certain reefs to lay dozens of eggs before departing to more open waters. For the first few decades, leviathans are highly intelligent but non-sapient, and stick around their home reefs until they're old enough to be too big for predators, at which point they begin to develop their self awareness.

Leviathan culture is poorly understood by the other sapients, mostly because adults rarely divulge information to the land dwellers due to some unknown grievance from thousands of years ago. It is known that, every decade or so, adults from across the globe converge on a single point deep in an oceanic trench. Why and what's there is unknown to all but a few land immortals, who aren't keen to reveal their secrets.

They communicate mostly through telepathy, which they also use to more easily control both the large entourage of commensals around them and trick their baitfish prey. Each individual has a unique pattern; depicted here is the legendary Varishnitaya, or the High Wave Goddess, a female who is unique in semi-regularly communicating with land sapients. She is known to save wayward sailors lost at sea, and played a key role in connecting Earth and Temere through her saving of Johnny Vulkanis, a ship technician who somehow ended up stranded in the World of Magic and managed to make his way back, forever changing the history of two worlds.