It arrived inside a crate marked as coral cargo, on a Drusalan merchant ship unloading at the wharf like a dozen others that week – one of five deliveries logged from Kalitzim through Marakoff Mercantile, all addressed to Lord Morden’s warehouse. A dockworker’s routine check of the crate’s ballast sand was all it took. As the sand drained out, a hidden plate released, a coral portal set into the crate’s lid opened, and the thing simply arrived – full size, already burning. The sudden weight snapped the crane clean off balance; it dropped through the dock floor and turned, without hesitation, straight for the warehouse flying Lord Morden’s crest.
What came out was heavier than anything that size had a right to be, armoured plate over something that moved and burned more like a furnace than a machine – seams glowing with veins of molten light down its limbs with every step, a right fist that ignited into open flame on command, twin coal-red eyes fixed on the warehouse ahead of it. Its footfalls alone were enough to crack the dock stone. Whoever built it wanted fire as much as force, and it delivered both without slowing down.
FILE NOTES
It burned a path across the wharfside crates on its way in, and the warehouse door being locked against it – on the port mage’s own order, to keep the soldiers inside safe – only meant it started punching a hole through the wall instead, with men still trapped on the other side. Captain Joren was cut down covering the retreat; the wharf guard lost a quarter of its strength before the garrison could even arrive. Frost, a Tol Kerrate knight who happened to be nearby, moved in alone to draw its attention off the building, and came away from it with a scar across his cheek he still carries. Between his delaying action, the military ship Nightingale finally landing a solid catapult hit, and the Agents pulling trapped soldiers and dockworkers out through the smoke and collapsing second floor under Kemercannon cover, the warehouse held – barely.
Once it had taken enough damage, it broke off entirely – vaulted the crates, ran the length of the wharf back the way it came, and leapt straight up into the very same crate still hanging from the broken crane, gone the instant it cleared the lid. What the Agents found inside afterward was a mirror-black disc of coral, cracked in an X where it had been broken from the other side. Looked at too directly, more than one witness swore they saw a single huge eye staring back through the glass, gone again the moment it blinked.
“It was conjured out of flame. It grew out of the flame, stepped back, and incinerated the ground before it.”
Dockhand’s account, wharfside
STATUS: Filed under The Unknown as a species/threat record, not an individual. Traced to a Marakoff Mercantile shipment out of Kalitzim – one of five identical deliveries logged to Lord Morden alone. Nobody at Section 18 has yet worked out where the other four crates went, or whether their coral mirrors have cracked yet.