Bakasura
The Maw
"…Crunchy." · "…I'm still hungry."
Look
- Size: colossal. A maw as wide as a barn door, and when angry, wide enough to take a ship's bow.
- Shape: mostly mouth: a black-and-amber mass rising out of Smurjan's shadow or out of water, rows of teeth like broken pillars, and small mournful eyes high above it all, much too small and much too sad for the rest of him.
- Texture: wet black hide with amber veins that glow faintly when he's digesting something magical.
- Voice: slow, deep, very few words. Each balloon is huge, round and nearly empty. "…Bitter." (eating the Arbiter's letters, ch. 46) · "…Worst… thing… I've… ever… eaten…" (a Nightmare, ch. 50) · "…heh. …heh. …house." (the worst joke, ch. 62).
Power
He eats things. Boulders, boarding ramps, nets, Ledger-chains, Nightmares, verdicts. What he eats is gone: digested and turned into hunger. People he eats don't die; they become voices inside the Trinity. Over the centuries: the seventeen. In ch. 15, the eighteenth: Marka, who held his jaws open with her bare arms so the children could get out.
- He tastes what things are: a decision tastes bitter, a scream tastes like the worst thing he's ever eaten, a boulder is crunchy.
- Hunger is the danger: starved, he breaks loose and eats friend and foe (Saga II, Arc 5).
HADOM, the heartbeat
- Tempo: 1. The slowest soul alive. He does one thing per heartbeat.
- Heartbeat technique: THE WHOLE BITE. Whatever fits inside his jaws in one heartbeat is gone, completely, however big or powerful. There's no half-bite and no spitting out (except things that taste wrong). Nothing else in the saga deletes by eating.
- Burn cost: every Whole Bite makes him hungrier. Big meals now mean a dangerous hunger later.
Techniques
| Technique | What it does | First shown |
|---|---|---|
| Crunch | Eats a boulder, a ramp, a net (and burps out the knots) | Ch. 9 · ch. 45 |
| The Door-Shut | Snaps his jaws shut on a cave mouth or a gate, sealing it | Ch. 9 |
| Taste-Test | Bites something to learn what it really is (a verdict, a Nightmare, a lie) | Ch. 46 |
| Springboard | Rises from water so a crewmate can vault off his teeth | Ch. 41 (Vigolas, in the Arena) |
| The Whole Bite | See 4 | Saga II, Arc 5 (named) |
| Unswallow | At the Ascension, he gives the consumed back, with bodies. Marka first. | Ch. 416 ("…Marka first.": sixteen consumed + Marka as lights into Röta's soil, grown bodies by her Long Rot-Beat; Torbjörn, lost to salt-fire, does not come back) |
The price
Hunger. And grief: he carries everyone he has eaten, and his small sad eyes know it. Salt-fire burns him for good. Old Torbjörn, the ferryman and the gentlest of the seventeen, gives himself up to hold Bakasura's hunger shut in Saga II Arc 5, and is lost forever.
Relationships
- Smurjan: the host who keeps him fed and keeps him in.
- Kali: pats his teeth.
- Marka: the woman who held his jaws open. Every time Drekk looks at him, Bakasura's eyes go to the floor.
- Drekk: the man whose captain he ate. The worst and most important relationship on the ship.