Jaull-fish

Jaull-fish are gargantuan leviathans of the deepest ocean trenches beyond Bilgewater, counted among the largest living creatures in Runeterra. So vast are these behemoths that they are sometimes mistaken for islands, and they surface only rarely from the crushing dark where they dwell. When one breaches, it opens a razor-toothed maw wide enough to swallow a man whole, and pods of the creatures move together through the black water below. For the hunters of Bilgewater, the jaull-fish is the most prized sea monster of all. Inside its cavernous gullet grow sacs of sapphilite, and the glowing blue oil rendered from them is coveted across Runeterra for sorcerous distillations. A single small flask can be worth a ship and its full crew ten times over. Harvesting it is lethal work: in the traditional manner of the Serpent Isles, harpooners hurl themselves at the beast to sink tow-hooks by hand, then cut into it while it still lives. One such hunt ended the mortal life of the harpooner Pyke, the finest killer of jaull-fish a golden kraken could hire. Diving into the maw of a jaull far older and larger than any he had faced, he set to work as a deep vibration stirred in its gullet and an entire pod rose to ram the ship's hull. His untested captain lost his nerve and cut Pyke's lifeline, and the last thing the harpooner saw was the horror on his crewmates' faces as the jaws snapped shut and swallowed him alive. Pyke did not die. Trapped in the beast's mouth in the deepest fathoms, crushed by the titanic pressure, he opened his eyes to thousands of watching blue lights and the echoes of something ancient and mysterious pressing into his mind. He rose from the sea transformed, an undead revenant known as the Bloodharbor Ripper, carrying a bone-carved dagger and a list of names that never grows shorter. Through him, the jaull-fish became the instrument of Bilgewater's oldest fear: that the deep remembers every wrong done to it, and one day comes to collect.