Physical Description
The Weepwyrm is a great salamandrine amphibian, long and low and eel-bodied, built to lie almost entirely submerged with only the broad flat head breaking the surface of its pool. A mature lair-holder measures sixteen to twenty-two feet from snout to tail-tip, the largest recorded grotto-lords longer still, yet the animal stands barely waist-high to a man at the shoulder; the bulk runs lengthwise and low, not upward.
The skin is the defining feature, and the source of every name the creature carries. It is pale, bone-white to a translucent grey-pink in deep specimens that have never seen daylight, soft, and perpetually wet. The Weepwyrm does not simply live in water; it weeps a continuous thin film of its own across the whole surface of its hide, secreted from glands banked along the spine and flanks. In the saturated air of an old-growth cave this film never dries. It runs in slow sheets down the body and drips steadily from the jaw and tail, and the sound of a large specimen at rest is a constant soft patter against wet stone that carries some distance down a cave mouth.
Beneath that wet film the hide is thin enough to be faintly translucent, and through it run the water-channels, a branching network of vein-like vessels, blue-grey and slack at rest, that flush dark and visibly swell when the animal draws. They carry water forward from the tail to a single heavy organ seated low in the throat and chest: the water core, the muscular mana-seat that pressurises everything the creature takes in. A roused Weepwyrm can be read at a glance by the channels alone: they engorge and pulse along the flanks as the core charges, a slow throb of dark water climbing the body toward the head.
The head is broad, blunt, and flattened, the jaw lined with backward-hooked teeth made for holding rather than tearing. The eyes are small, milky, and nearly useless; the species hunts by vibration, not sight (see Behaviour). A frill of feathery external gills stands out behind the skull in a pale crimson fan, the one spot of true colour on the animal, flushing brighter when the creature is roused. Four short, splay-toed limbs carry it in an ungainly belly-crawl on land; a deep, flattened paddle-tail drives it through water with far more grace than its land gait would suggest. The tail is also the creature's intake. Rows of fleshy suction ports run the length of it on both faces: puckered, lamprey-like openings that clamp against wet stone and draw water up into the channels. To refill, a Weepwyrm beds its tail in its pool or in any standing puddle and soaks, the ports working in slow waves while the channels darken and fill from tail to throat.
Behaviour
Hunting is by ambush from the waterline. The Weepwyrm reads the world through the vibration of water and the fine lateral sense-lines down its flanks: the tread of an animal coming to drink, the disturbance of something entering the pool, the patter of its own film telling it the shape of the chamber. Prey that comes to the water is taken in a single explosive lunge, clamped in the hooked jaws, and dragged under to drown. Larger or land-bound prey is dealt with by the creature's water-working. It is an opportunist and a scavenger as readily as a hunter; a Weepwyrm's pool is often ringed with the cleaned bones of whatever has come to drink over the years.