The Immortal Naturalist's Guide to Cryptic Creatures: The Land Whale

This post is part of the Immortal Naturalist's Guide series. The explanation for that series can be found in this post.

    The lizard folk of the Dragon's Maw live in fear of a creature known only as the Land Whale. While lizard folk accounts are almost never taken seriously by the rest of the world, their tales of this predator the size of an elephant ought to be taken seriously. In order to keep such a large bulk fed, the Land Whale must spend almost all of its waking time hunting the local pygmy camels and giant pelicans. This voracious appetite means that any people who find themselves in the path of the Land Whale are also on the menu. I was able observe through a lot of invisibility potions and leaving out bait. I was then able to follow the creature to its nest, hidden away at the top of a rugged hill and built up from the feathers and fur of all of the beast's recent meals. While the creature will try to sneak up on prey, it is so large that even the trees and bushes of its home cannot hide it for long, forcing the Land Whale to pursue prey over longer distances than it would like.

    How such a creature came to be in the first place is, I believe, the result of a magical experiment. In addition to giving it legs legs, whoever created the Land Whale also made it virtually immortal and highly aggressive to all other living things. The Land Whale's creator, however, seems to be long gone because I have not once witnessed anyone visiting the beast or heard tales of any such thing ever happening. As far as the local lizard folk are concerned, the Land Whale has always been and always will be, leaving the creature's origins a complete mystery. Oddly enough, the beast seems to be fearful of the sound of bells, a fact that I never needed to use, but which some travelers may find useful.

    One thing I can be sure of, however, is that the Land Whale was created with one goal in mind, hypnotic ambergris. Unlike marine whales which rarely produce usable amounts of ambergris, the Land Whale will excrete around five pounds of ambergris every year during the Fall Equinox. Finding and collecting this substance is a dangerous, stinky job given the required proximity to such a violent creature, and one must properly process the substance before it can be used. However, if someone ages the ambergris properly, it can be used to hypnotize others and control their actions. I have not had any opportunities to test the limits of these hypnotic suggestions, but I believe that it is quite powerful. In the wrong hands, such a powerful substance could be quite dangerous.