Far beyond the Whale-Road, in the outer seas, lives a creature most sailors only ever see as light: the Lantern Leviathan, which Skeldr navigators call "the drowned town."
Appearance
A Lantern Leviathan is vast and soft-bodied, longer than a whole fleet of longships. Its body is long and ringed like a sea-worm's, made of rounded, overlapping segments of dark, wet skin. Along its back run rows of round, glowing lights, each set in its own ring of flesh like a lamp behind a window, burning a warm gold. Below the waterline its flanks are translucent, pale green-gray and veined with light, so that the sea around it seems to glow from beneath.
When it rises toward the surface on a calm, starry night, it may lie alongside a ship for a long time, its lights stretching away toward the horizon in a gentle curve. From any distance, that curve looks exactly like the lamplit windows of a coastal town.
Behaviour
The leviathan feeds in the deep and rises only on still, starry nights. It has never been known to attack a ship, even when it surfaces close enough to touch. Its danger lies elsewhere: ships have followed its lights toward a harbor that was never there and been lost on open water, far from any land.
Navigators' lore
Because of this, Skeldr navigators teach every young pilot the same lesson: check every unexpected shore against the stars. A coast that appears where no coast should be is to be doubted until the sky agrees with it. Older pilots tell of crews who argued over the lights all night and were saved only by the one person who kept looking up.
Some coastal tales say the leviathan carries the lights of towns the sea has taken, that every window on its back once belonged to a house that is now under the waves. Others insist the lights are simply its own. No one has been able to settle the question, and few have wanted to row close enough to try.
The Lantern Leviathan and the Tidewyrm are both said to keep the oldest roads of the deep.