Kraken: the sea beast of the Island of Creation

The Kraken was a giant meat-eating monster of the sea, a mass of armored tentacles and fanged hunger drawn from the deepest waters of the world. The most infamous of the breed rose within the temple halls of the Island of Creation, where she fell upon Kratos moments after his duel with the Last Spartan and came closer to crushing the life from him than nearly any foe of his Greek wars. Yet the creature was no Greek beast alone. In the Norse realms the Kraken was known as well, and in the dwarven country of Svartalfheim a hatchling of the kind lived tamely as the pet of the dwarf Durlin.

A horror of the deep#

The Kraken of the Island of Creation was depicted mainly as a giant octopus-like creature, though she was a far more ferocious thing than any natural animal. Her head bore two large eyes and a massive, fanged mouth, with small spines or gills running along its sides, and oozing sores marked her forehead. Only four of her tentacles ever showed above the water. Two of them curled around the great pillars of her lair and bore the weight of her body, while the other two served her in battle, sheathed in a heavy, spiked black armor like an exoskeleton that turned them into bludgeons as much as limbs.

Her appetite matched her size. She struck with slams of her giant tentacles, spat slime from her mouth to foul the ground before her, and when she caught a living thing in her coils she was almost strong enough to kill it by pressure alone. Even Kratos, who had broken gods and Titanspawn with his bare hands, came within moments of being squeezed to death in her grip.

The ambush after the Last Spartan#

The Kraken revealed herself at the worst of hours. Deep in the temple precincts of the Island of Creation, on the road toward the palace of the Sisters of Fate, Kratos had just fought and killed the Last Spartan, only to discover in the dying man his own countryman and learn of the ruin that had befallen Sparta. It was over that grief that the monster rose, falling upon the Ghost of Sparta with her armored tentacles before he had time to mourn.

The beast wrapped Kratos in her grasp and began to crush him, and his strength alone could not break her hold. As death closed in, a vision came to him of Gaia, the great Titan who had guided his journey, speaking to him in the borrowed shape of his wife Lysandra. She told him to take the loss of his city and his people and turn it into fuel for his rage, for he was needed still to lead the Titans into battle. Her words woke something fiercer in the Spartan. With that deeper fury of the Titans burning in him, Kratos tore himself free of the Kraken's death grip in the last moment before it closed.

Death upon the bridge#

Freed from her coils, Kratos turned the battle against the beast with grim practicality. The temple floor held a pressure platform, and he weighed it down with the body of his fallen comrade, the Last Spartan, so that its mechanism opened one of the air vents that ran through the temple. Riding the rushing air upon the Icarus Wings he had torn from Icarus himself, Kratos gained the height to strike at the Kraken's face directly.

Wounded and enraged, the monster slammed her spiked tentacles into the walls and floor, and each time she did, Kratos climbed the embedded limb and cut into it, severing the tentacles from her body one by one. After she had lost two of them, the beast answered with spite, snatching up the Last Spartan's corpse and devouring it. The desecration did not save her. In the end Kratos dislodged the Kraken from the platform where she clung and drove an extendable bridge through her open mouth, impaling her upon it. The dead beast's bulk itself completed his road, and across that path Kratos went on to reach the Phoenix and continue his ascent toward the Sisters of Fate.

A beast apart from the Fates#

The Kraken remained one of the stranger guardians of the Island of Creation, for she seemed to serve no one. Nearly every other power Kratos faced upon the island had some bond to the Sisters of Fate. Theseus kept the Steeds of Time as the Sisters' horsekeeper, while Alrik the Barbarian King, Euryale, Perseus, Icarus, and the Last Spartan had each come seeking the Fates in hope of changing a destiny. The Kraken shared no such purpose that anyone ever learned. What woke her, why she rose when she did, and whether any will beyond her own hunger set her against Kratos were questions that went unanswered, and her origins remained unknown.

Her end was equally beyond record. Kratos left her corpse impaled in the temple, but when he later seized the power of the Fates and turned time itself against Zeus, the histories of many of his victims became uncertain, and the Kraken's fate after that unraveling was never told.

Krakens of the Norse realms#

Though the beast of the Island of Creation died in Greece, her kind endured far to the north. Years later, in the dwarven domain of Svartalfheim, the dwarf Durlin, an official of the city of Nidavellir and once a rebel who had stood with Faye against the Aesir, kept a small sea creature as a pet and companion. He called it Dinner. When Kratos encountered the little animal, he identified it as a baby Kraken, a hatchling of the same monstrous breed he had fought upon the island long ago. Small, tame, and apparently harmless in the dwarf's care, Dinner was proof that the Kraken belonged as much to the cold seas of the Nine Realms as to the warm waters of Greece, and that not every one of the breed grew into a devourer of men.