When the founders of the five villages arrived on the shores of the Keening Sea, they found it teeming with enormous and awful worms that could swallow a man whole. Furthermore, they were known as the waker worms for the fact that, no matter how thoroughly they were destroyed, they would always wake and rise again at the moment of nightfall. Luckily, the Thringman Ban the Clever (future founder of Banshot) discovered that the waker worms could be permanently laid to rest if their bodies were buried under running water.
For the first few generations of the villages, it was accepted that the dead waker worms lay beneath the estuary, and once or twice a foolish fishermen even dredged one of the worms up. This eventually led to a dispute between the men of Pontgate and Banshot over who had responsibility for the slaying of such beasts. To avert further conflict, the councilors of Midton exhorted the swift sailors of Sepool to dredge up the waker worms during the day and deposit them further upriver before night fell. This worked for several years, until the people of upstream Blindsnake began to complain that their water was tainted by the blood of the worms. So the worms were relocated again, to their current resting-place where they can no longer contaminate the five villages’ water supply (in the Pit of the Waker Worms, 25.19).
Connection
- Henry Yaboon (26.20.08), a man of power in Blind Midshotgatepool has taken the Waker Worm as his sigil.
- Drinking water tainted by the Pit of the Waker Worms (25.19) gives people a strange relationship with death.
Hooks
- Have any of the waker worms escaped over the years?
- Any other tales of Ban the Clever, or his four companions?