Scolopendra

Story so far

Scolopendra is history to the Were-Castors, not a monster they ever saw. She slept deep beneath the world until, by one account, the High Elves came down into the dwarf city on the Ninth Floor to harvest soul gems and stirred her; the Cookbook's version that Carl knows blames the Semeru dwarves for digging too deep, a reverse Tower of Babel that gave him the idea to flood that floor in the first place.

What she did when she woke is Scolopendra's Nine-Tier Attack — a cloud that rolled across the region carrying transfiguration, spores, a rage spell and worse. Holger's theory is that the attack was not creativity but reflection: Scolopendra firing back everything that had ever been fired at her, all at once, like a damage reflect with a very long charge time — which would explain why Imogen's transfiguration spell, said to have failed against the centipede, was among the tiers. The bush elves were devastated; the city across the river lost most of its animals to death or transformation; the survivors nearly starved. Only the royal court in the elven castle came through unscathed, shielded by something the elves had stolen on their way out of the deep.

Appearance

A centipede of enormous size, spoken of as both a worm and a giant centipede; nobody in this conversation describes her from sight, only from what her waking did.

Role

Historical catastrophe of this region — the sleeping horror whose waking reshaped the ecology and the politics that the crawlers are now walking through.

Relationships

Earlier in this series

Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings:

• The Gate of the Feral GodsBook 4