The Undertow

Description

The Dead Water has twelve waters. The last of them, the Black Below, is the abyss: near black, two hundred blocks deeper than the rest, and nothing alive in it but one thing. Down there there's only the sound of the ocean.

Its head is a long armoured skull with heavy brows over nine pale glowing eyes down each side (two of them great and milky), horns sweeping back off it, broken bone spikes down its back and flanks, a torn crimson crest, and six long jointed feelers trailing under it. Its mouth is a ring of lips round a hole going down into it, with six long jaws round that, fanged all down their insides, their edges serrated and a hook at each tip. They shut to a point like a closed flower, and open out to show three rings of teeth grinding round against one another down its throat, and a sick red light at the bottom. Its body is lit with rows of cold lights. It never breaks a block: it goes through rock like water.

It stalks you

Stay deep in the Black Below and something notices, a rumble from below ("Something vast is keeping pace with you, out in the dark."). It rises out of the dark and stalks you, out where you aren't looking, keeping pace. You can't see thirty blocks down there, but you can see its eyes: a cluster of pale cold points out in the black, two great ones among them, that turn as you turn, keep on you, blink, and slide by under you when it makes a pass. Up close its head's own eyes follow you too.

It learns you

The longer it watches, the closer and lower it keeps. Run for the surface a few times and it learns to wait right under where you'll come back down. Carry a light for a while and it learns to keep out of it. It tells you, in the dark, as it learns:

• "It has learned how you move."
• "It saw you run for the surface. It will be waiting under you."
• "It has learned your light. It keeps out of it."
• "It knows you now."

What it learns, it keeps.

It eats when it's hungry

Its hunger grows while it's out, and stays between its comings ("It is hungry."). Only when it's starving does it roar and come for you. Before that, if a whale is near, it eats the whale instead.

Lost whales (Hymnbacks) wander into the Black Below now and then, singing in the dark. A hungry Undertow hunts them: it swings round, lunges, takes the whale crossways in its jaws and chews, the whale thrashing and crying, blood clouding the water, the rings of teeth in its throat grinding, then swallows it whole. Fed ("It has fed. For now."), it goes back to watching you. A whale near when it's starving can save you.

When it comes

• Roar: it shakes the sea. A submarine's glass cracks and its power dies; your ears ring.
• Circle and lunge: it circles, then comes straight in, jaws opening like a flower, and swallows you whole, a submarine and all. Nothing comes back out ("... was swallowed by the Undertow").
• Breach: run for the surface and it comes up after you, straight up out of the sea, hundreds of blocks into the sky with the length of it pouring up out of the water after it, arcs over and crashes back down in a column of water. The waves run out over the sea and throw everything floating about, and smash boats. It can take you on the way up.

It goes back down into the depths only when you leave the Black Below.

How to survive it

• Don't stay deep in the Black Below. Get in, get what you came for, get out sideways into another water.
• Watch for its eyes in the black. If they're turning with you, it's there.
• Change how you move. It learns the surface run and a carried light.
• Hymnbacks are your friends down there: a fed Undertow goes back to watching.

The spawn egg

The Undertow Spawn Egg (creative) hatches one that stalks you, its eyes on you, now and then turning its head to roar with its jaws wide, and hunts and eats any whale near (hatch a Hymnback or two and watch). It never eats you. It's gone after ten minutes, or once you go far away.

The Static Leviathan

Grey-blue plated hide, a blunt skull with little red eyes clustered down it, and fangs where its baleen was, hanging outside its jaw even when it's shut, with tusks and teeth in its lower jaw. Down its back a row of thin masts, a red light blinking at each one's tip one after another like the lights on a radio mast at night, and bone spines between them. Its ribs show through the rotted-away hide of its flanks; lamp-organs pulse down them.

It roams the deepest water of the Overworld's oceans (the Trench, and the Hadal Dark now and then; see the deep oceans). In the Dead Water, deep down, now and then one comes up out of the dark after you, except in the Black Below, which is the Undertow's.

• Song: a numbers station, slowed down and sung through a throat the size of a room, on the Remote's frequency. Everything near goes dark and slow while it sings.
• Charge: it slows, turns, its throat dropping open, then charges. Whatever it hits, it hits like a ship.
• Swallow: sometimes it takes you in. You're in its throat in the dark, being crushed, until you hurt it enough from in there to make it spit you out, or it does anyway.

Its Signal Organ is what mends the Broken Remote in Chapter Eight ("Mend it: this, a Static Leviathan's Signal Organ, a copper ingot."). Doing it earns Back On Air.

The Mouth of the Floor

Something lies buried in the sea floor, with nothing of it showing but a ring of rocks (the tips of its jaws, crusted over like the floor) and, if you look close, a few yellow eyes in the silt between them. Pass over it and the floor shudders, and it comes up: eight jaws open out of the sand round a throat going down into the dark, with hooked teeth all down them, serrated edges and a fang at each tip, two rings of teeth round its throat and twelve yellow eyes round its rim. Four hooked tongues coiled down its throat rise and writhe as it opens. The water rushes in, and you with it, and it snaps shut and holds on, grinding, its tongues coiled round you. Then it spits out what's left and sinks back into the floor.

• It takes a submarine in its jaws too, and crushes it.
• It can only be hurt while it's up. Hurt it hard enough while it holds you and it lets go.
• A submarine's sonar shows where one lies.