Maldene has plenty of oceans, naturally enough for a world several times larger than Earth.  But for a world this large, and as filled with magic as Maldene is, one might suspect more than a few dangers in the way of creatures.  But now add in the fact that it has three moons and, well, youm can well imagine what that does for the weather.

To note just a couple of the more dangerous creatures of the sea (ones which actually appear in the books), let’s start with the following.

That is not a pair of creatures, but a single creature with two heads.  Both at one end, of course, while the tail end goes off into an octopus-like mass of eight tentacles.  And as you can see, an Octaswit is also rather large.  Large enough to take on the sleem pictured  (I should also mention here that a sleem is a rather large ship; large and wide enough to regularly cross those finicky equatorial seas).   Note that there are other types of swits, like the visiswit:  only one head, twined tail with stingers, large enough to swallow a man whole, and really really fast; but they’re usually land-based (and a few other places), so moving on.

A metodane (you can call it a heat-shark, if you like) is the single most dangerous creature in the sea that’s not a Treblor.  They metabolize water, breaking it apart into the oxygen they need, and hydrogen which they store.  What do they do with the hydrogen?  Three words: underwater breath weapon.  As if their sheer size wasn’t bad enough.  And did I mention that they tend to travel in packs.  They can be from a hundred feet to close to a thousand feet in length, and they travel in packs.  Fortunately they are very rare.

Getting to the sorts of storm conditions that three moons can get you, a Funnel Storm is the absolute worst of them all.  Imagine a cross between a tornado and a hurricane, where the winds blow you straight into that central funnel, which then blows you right up that lightning-charged funnel to the top of the atmosphere to then spit you out a dozen miles away, to fall back down and start blowing in towards the center again.

Okay, so it’s also part cement-mixer.

And to give you an idea of scale, that tiny ship you see in there is a sleem; the central funnel of these things can get up to a mile across, with the whole recirculating storm complex ten miles around that, for an average size, though they have been known to get bigger, on occasion.

Mainly you’ll just find these things around Maldene’s equator where the winds blow straight up (don’t worry, they come straight down at the poles), which is one reason why you really want to be sailing in a sleem if you plan on crossing the Equator.  This also means that you can find funnel storms in the deserts in such places as it nears the Equator (like the Great Desert on My-Thov), in which case it’s much like trying to walk around in a sand-blaster.

Well, that’s all the peek you’re getting for now.  Just remember to be very careful of who you travel with, and in what, the next time you plan on sailing the wide seas of Maldene.