Great Silver Turtle
The Tale
The Great Silver Turtle is a tale common amongst the sailors of Arjuf, about some great turtle-shaped behemoth with the shell of a tortoise and the head of a dragon, which swims the waters of the Southern Inner Sea in search of ships to devour.... whenever the Imperial Navy seeks to destroy the beast, it vanishes beneath the waves.
Another tale entirely is traded amongst the Spun Wrap stalls along the waterfront of the docks at Arjuf, of a fat merchant in high-collared robes who comes to watch over the ships coming and going from the port, bemoaning the lack of variety in the meat of his wraps.
The Truth
The Great Silver Turtle is not a Behemoth, nor is it some monstrous creature or demon. Perhaps it is something of both: it is the Lunar Exalt Mubeeos Dak.
Dak is an elder Lunar, a staunch proponent of the Stewards taking an active role in social engineering within Creation’s societies, though he has some disagreements with his fellows over the proper course of the Thousand Streams River, believing that the larger a society the more fragile it becomes, and the more impossible to keep from corruption and weakness. The key to building a society that will preserve Creation unaided is not to build such expansive polities but to perfect the building blocks: if each village, each family, is self-sufficient and strong, then the larger states and tribes arising from them can rise and fall, succeed and fail, while the structure below them remains firm.
In the First Age, Dak was the charismatic young spouse of a Solar Exalt of the Twilight caste, and something of an artificer in his own right. Dak was considered a socialite, his primary concern aiding the people of Creation by creating devices that they could use easily without needing to truly understand them: he was supportive of I AM, though not influential enough to prevent the turn against the system within the Solar Deliberative that arrived as the Usurpation neared. He was most famed for being the creator of Infinite Resplendence Amulets and a number of Transperfect Domestic Tools, feeding off the Ambient Essence Pillar infrastructure established by the Solars. The coming of the Usurpation saw the system supporting his work collapse, and Dak fled the Isle for the wilderness with his fellow Chosen of Luna.
In the Age of Sorrows, far more than his peers, Dak has found himself concerned with the population of the Blessed Isle. The collapse of the Dragonblooded state is inevitable, whether precipitated directly by invasion or simply the result of their own weakness and corruption. The collapse into chaos of the populace beneath them would, as the fall of the Solar Exalted and Shogunate before, see loss of stability and strength across Creation. So Dak has quietly concerned himself with working amongst the peasantry of the Blessed Isle, ensuring that villages know to rely on themselves and not their Terrestrial overlords to aid them in event of danger. It is difficult work, for the Dragonblooded and the Sidereal Exalted keep close eye on the Isle in search of Anathema, but Dak has been in no hurry. The spread of the Three Harmonies Society mutual aid network across the southern Blessed Isle owes no small debt to his efforts. Some Lunars whisper that his approach is not planned with a clear head, but rather marred by guilt from his choices in the First Age.
The return of the Solar Exalted and impending civil war in the Realm has caused some consternation for Dak: his plans are complex and long-term, there has not been time to bring them anywhere near readiness. The inevitable has become the immediate.
The Great Silver Turtle is a side project of Mubeeos Dak, directed primarily towards his peer Leviathan. The Turtle appears only occasionally in the waters off Arjuf, destroying ships of the Realm’s Merchant Marine… Dak targets vessels carrying cargos belonging to Dynasts or patricians who are attempting to expand their holdings into peasant lands (usually drugs, wines, or luxury crops), the losses forcing them to suspend their expansion plans. He does not, however, risk doing this on a significant scale lest he draw Exalted attentions, and occasionally will catch a ship filled with sugarcane or beef for personal reasons… he has abandoned the strict diet he extolled in the First Age, and finds such cargoes absolutely delicious.
At gatherings of the Silver Pact, where his giant turtle form is well known to his peers amongst the Lunar Exalted, he answers questions on his unsubtle attacks on Realm ships by declaring that the Dragonblooded slew his Hearth-Cat in the First Age and he can never forgive them… if the Great Orca resents being parodied by the Silver Turtle, he has shown no sign.
