Most of what lives in the Mistsea is small, indifferent to ships, and beautiful only on second look. The following are the creatures every crossing crew will see at least once.
Mistfarers. Small, six-finned, the size of a dog, schooling in groups of twenty to a hundred. They are translucent at the wingtips and carry their own faint glow. Sailors consider them lucky — a school passing close to the hull means good wind ahead, more often than not. They eat small drift-life and are eaten by almost everything larger. Galley cooks in a few harbours will accept them in trade; the meat is sweet and unsuitable for any preparation that involves heat. Ate raw, with vinegar.
Fogwalkers. Long-bodied, four-winged, shaped roughly like an eel that learned to glide. They run from elbow-length to twice a man’s height. They are not aggressive, but they are curious, and a fogwalker that decides to follow a ship may follow it for days. The cabin-boy traditions of the Quiet Reach include a small offering — bread, usually — left out on the windward rail for any fogwalker that has stayed three nights running. The offering is supposed to be acknowledgment, not bribery. Whether the fogwalker cares is a matter of opinion.
Sky-eels. Smaller than fogwalkers, faster, and far less curious. They travel in pairs and they hunt. A sky-eel will not attack a sloop, but it will take an unwary crewman off the rail if circumstances allow. Crews crossing known sky-eel waters keep watch in pairs at night and tie down anything loose.
Lampers. Slow, soft-bodied, drifting jellyfish-things the size of a barrel, with a single luminous organ they pulse when distressed. They cluster in the dead-air pockets between cluster-groups. Striking one releases an oily film that takes days to clean from a hull. Most navigators chart the known lamper-fields and route around them.
Drift-spores. Not quite alive. Small, palely glowing motes that aggregate in slow clouds at certain altitudes and certain times of year. They are beautiful, harmless, and the standard explanation given to children when they ask what is making the lights ahead. They are also, occasionally, not drift-spores at all, and the experienced navigator looks twice.
Cloudwhales. Rare. Most sailors will go a career without seeing one. They are vast — the largest reliably reported was three hundred feet from head to fluke — and they are slow, gentle, and deep. They travel in the lower currents of the Veiled Waters and surface for reasons no one understands. Seeing a cloudwhale at close range is considered an event of significant personal weight; some sailors will not speak of it at all, and some carry a small carved-bone token from the day they saw one for the rest of their lives.
Things that should not be on this list. Every sailor with three years on the Mistsea has seen something they cannot identify. Most of what they have seen is one of the above creatures in poor light. Some of it is not. The trade has a long tradition of not naming what one has seen, on the grounds that naming a thing is the first step toward it noticing you. Whether this is wisdom or superstition is left to the reader.
“Saw a cloudwhale this season, off the leeward run from Ironvale. Boy of nineteen on his first crossing. Cried like he’d lost something. Couldn’t tell me what.”
— ship’s log entry, the Halfweather*, 410 AU*