Reth'can

Bogyn's Nastiness Rating: 93 (Nastiness Incarnate)

So far as anyone can discern, there is only one Reth'can. The Reth'can is the Varnak's unmoving counterpart in the Valley of the Varnak at the Ruins of Blee. It is an enormous fleshy horror with teeth where no beast ought to have teeth and rubbery tentacles that, oddly enough, do little more than twitch menacingly on the ground. Its shape is best described as nebuglobtaculous. And it is huge. Think "castle-sized."

No one knows when, how, or why the Varnak and the Reth'can settled in the Valley. Oddly, everyone seems to know why it is called "The Valley of the Varnak" and not "The Valley of the Reth'can" or even "The Valley of the Varnak and the Reth'can." The Varnak, of course, is a clawed, six-tentacled, winged beast who uses an old woman's skin as a tentacle-style sock puppet and is vanquished by by the Four Underdogs in ElamenSTAR Episode 114. The Reth'can is an enormous blubbery mass of slippery, furless flesh that breathes with a choking rasp, smells like a man's underarm, and has too many teeth in its uncountable orifices... but is apparently completely harmless.

Yes, while it is initially frightening to behold, what with its thousand eldritch tentacles, once one realizes that the tentacles aren't writhing so much as twitching and that the enormous beast seems to lack any way to actually hurt people, it's actually sort of cute in a strictly "I-can't-tear-my-gaze-from-its-undulating-mass" sort of way. If cut, it "bleeds" goopy white or chunky black or sometimes bright, liquid red, yellow, or green, but it always heals completely within seconds.

Even so, it is so huge and so terrifying that it absolutely must be blocking the path to somewhere very, very important. Or so reasons Asana Millytopthought, the heroine of Book 8 of The Elemenstor Cycle. She and Trafficant the Sly even think it might somehow be the key to finding the Eldersbane, and spend a good deal of Chapter 10 sneaking out to find ways to repel the Reth'can, supposing at one point that it might actually be concealing Eldersbane beneath its hulking mass. Eventually they are chased off by Halfmen, leaving the Reth'can in peace.

The Reth'can's origins are hinted at in Return to Eldersbane, a book in the Great Wars of Battal series. It is suggested that the Reth'can is in fact a failed attempt at constructing a living castle during the Vampyric Wars and left to die slowly in the Ruins of Blee, where it was found by the Varnak. Further details, like who might have made such an attempt (from the description given in the book it appears that it might of been Damien Darkhorn that attempted to construct the fortress for Vhadxi) or why the Varnak was interested, have not been revealed. If it is indeed dying, it has been dying for centuries.