Issuthra, the Drowned Crown

A primordial Hessk matriarch-serpent grown vast in the flooded dark beneath the Drowned Shrine — the living ancestress the scaled folk descend from, and the slow hymn the Kneeling Drowned mistake for the shrine's own.

When the valley drowned, most things that breathed the green water were born of the Mirrenmere. Issuthra was already old in it. The Hessk name her the first coil — the mother every clutch traces back to — and whether that is lineage or legend, she is real enough: a serpent long as a barge, crowned in a fan of frilled scale that flares 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.