Trenchmark - The Sahuagin
The gouges scored into the hull look like rot. They aren't. They're an invitation, and something already answered.
Role in Its Society
Trenchmark isn't the invasion. It's the question the invasion is still asking. Somewhere out past Baitcast Wharf's reef line, a sahuagin hunting band has been pushing closer to the shallows each season than the Fisher's Guild elders are used to tolerating, and Trenchmark is the scout sent ahead of the rest, the one who counts hulls, tests nets, and decides which boats are worth a raid's time. The Guild doesn't have a proper name for it yet. They only have the marks: long, parallel gouges scored into keel wood below the waterline, never deep enough to sink a boat, always deep enough to be found. Two boats marked this season haven't come back from their next haul, and nobody in Baitcast Wharf believes that's a coincidence anymore.
Appearance Description
Trenchmark holds close to a sahuagin's usual shape, a lean, scaled humanoid built for depth and speed, its hide a mottled green-grey that vanishes against kelp and shadow the instant it stops moving. What sets it apart is what it's collected: a cord of small, deliberately cracked mollusk shells strung at its throat, one for every hull it's marked and lived to report on. Its spear haft is wrapped in salvaged fishing line pulled from a net it dragged apart at the seams. Its eyes are a flat, depthless black that never quite settle on whatever's directly in front of it, always scanning past, as though the real threat is still approaching from somewhere behind you.
Backstory
Sahuagin don't usually press this close to a working harbor without a reason worth the risk. Iron hooks, weighted nets, and a village that keeps half its watch awake at all hours make the shallows a poor place to hunt for food. That's exactly what makes Trenchmark's presence south of Baitcast Wharf worth taking seriously. It isn't feeding out here. The marks it leaves are too precise, too consistent, too plainly the work of something taking inventory rather than something hungry. The Guild elders who've tracked the pattern believe it's scouting on behalf of a larger band working the reefs further out, deciding which boats run slow, which crews get careless, and which routes go unwatched long enough to matter.
Nobody in Baitcast Wharf has seen the rest of that band. They've only ever seen the marks, and once, at a distance just past the pilings, the wake Trenchmark left behind after finishing one.
