Midnight Monsters
also known as midnight monster, midnight essence monster, midnight essence monsters
Ship-sized creatures spawned from midnight spores under the Sorceress's direction. By Huck's rat informant's account, she has rigged the Midnight Sea to keep them continuously fed by the rains, so they roam the sea in numbers and swarm any ship that comes near. Tress's own small experimental midnight creation that watched Crow is of a kind with these — but at the scale of a hundred ship-sized variants attacking at once. STD:Tress:Ch 45
Known facts
- are-midnight-spore-creatures-bonded-to-the-sorceressTress concludes from her cabin experiments that the monsters roaming the Midnight Sea are exactly the same kind of creature she has just summoned at the table — midnight spores looking for a host (or really a buyer) of their water-bond — except that they are bonded en masse to the Sorceress. She briefly wonders aloud how the Sorceress feeds so many.STD:Tress:Ch 54
- sorceress-creates-in-batches-with-autonomyPer the narrator, the Sorceress cannot actively direct each of her midnight creatures individually — too much sea to cover, and the water cost of running all of them at once would dehydrate and kill even her. She makes them in batches, issues a standing set of orders, and grants each just enough self-awareness to make decisions in the field. That autonomy is the weakness an outside sprouter could in principle exploit, which is why she has built complex internal mechanisms into each creature to recognise and reject foreign attempts at control.STD:Tress:Ch 57
Events
- STD:Tress:Ch 57 A midnight creature resembling an eel half as long as the Crow's Song circles the launch, rebuffs Tress's mental attempt to seize it, rears to strike — and then obeys Huck's claim of free passage and turns to ferry them to the Sorceress's island.
- STD:Tress:Ch 58 Three midnight creatures — one wrapping Tress immobile, two pushing the silver-lined launch — guide the boat through the hidden reefs to the Sorceress's island. The wrapping one has reshaped itself from eel-form into a heap resembling verdant vines, and takes care not to touch the silver line in the hull.
- STD:Tress:Ch 58 Reshaped into a many-legged centipede form with tentacle feet, the carrying creature cannot follow over the silver threshold; it shoves Tress through the door of the tower, tosses her cups after her, and remains outside.
- STD:Tress:Ch 61 Three slither up onto the deck, parley with Fort in the Luhel bond's sign-language, accept his trade, and become his escorts for the run to the island.
Backreferences
- summarySTD:Tress:Ch 45
- factThe Sorceress
- summarySTD:Tress:Ch 54
- factMidnight Monsters
- summarySTD:Tress:Ch 57
- factTress
- factCharlie
- factMidnight Monsters
- summarySTD:Tress:Ch 58
- factCharlie
- factThe Sorceress
- summarySTD:Tress:Ch 59
- summarySTD:Tress:Ch 61
- factFort