With the enormous eye as a reference point, they could resolve the shape’s features: a fin, a long barrel of mantle, a splay of serpentine arms. As the crowds milled and jostled for a view, the Doctors Sen watched the creature’s vast form fade to the ghostly white of cephalopod senescence. A cephalopod of an order that had already used up superlative names—giant, colossal—without anticipating how much size remained to classify. Only legend and myth could provide a name.
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