Editing Awnshegh (section)

==[[Hydra| The Hydra]]==
For a thousand years or more, the Hydra has been the terror of the Harrowmarsh.  It was once an ordinary crocodile, and no one's a hundred percent certain what the fuck created it, only that every time it kills and consumes a Blooded hero who showed up to try to destroy it, that hero's head sprouts out of its neck in a hideous mane of tendrils, many of them semi-aware and miserable in their current state.  It's also covered in stunted, vestigial arms and limbs. The Hydra is animalistic, like many beast awnshegh, but the nature of its bloodform has also imbued it with a certain amount of horrible intelligence: pretty dumb for a human being, but goddamn smart for an evil animal.  It's also grown in size and stature, such that it's 21' tall, and while ironically lacking Regeneration, it's got Invulnerability with no listed means of destruction (though severing the heads is a good guess), the power to detect life and cripple it with fear, and it can make horrible bite attacks with its extra heads to pin for the death roll with the crocodile jaw, on top of all the other stuff it can do just by being a big fuck-off apex ambush predator in its (un)natural habitat.

Its holding is a huge brackish swamp, populated entirely by even-more-desperate criminals than anywhere else with literally nowhere else to go, and the hydrakin, disgorged through asexual reproduction from boils on its body when it consumes particularly powerful prey.  Some of these hydrakin actually breed true, including the caracdir, ''Birthright'''s equivalent to [[lizardfolk]].  Not all hydrakin are as malevolent as their progenitor (the caracdir are, much like most other settings' lizardfolk, a neutral people who keep to themselves and don't bother others without cause), but there're so goddamn many of them in many varieties that the dangerous ones are pretty goddamn dangerous.  The Hydra itself may or may not have a secret network/cult that works for it, or it may just sleep in its waterlogged tower.  Either way, between its dangerous size and abilities and its natural weapons, no one's seen it in a long time because no one tends to see it and live.

Props to the many scholars, by the by, who have over time managed to decypher the identities of many of its heads through hard work and scholarship with minimal direct information.