In the midnight depths of the trenches, there were not many large prey options and even fewer creatures like the one weaving her way among the rocks.
Only a faint lavender light could be seen of her from any real distance, unless she happened to pass overhead high enough in the water column for light to be visible above her.
She had no tail, moving like a strange, slender cetacean with her long, flexible legs kicking in unison with strange webbed toes flared.
Occasionally, a webbed hand would flick otter-like at her side along with a gracefully boneless looking curve of her torso to change direction.
Near an outcropping of stone, both hands flared and flicked back once to pause her forward movement.
She hung like a corpse in the water, gangly limbs dangling unsettlingly as only her spines moved in a slow ripple that could have been the current, were she not free floating.
Some small white amphipods eventually came to investigate the lights that tipped her horns, but it wasn't until a few tadpole shaped fish got close enough for her red cheek lights to color that she moved.
A sudden yawn, a blur of motion, and she had three; one in her jaws and one locked in the wicked claws of each hand.
They squirmed in her grip for only a few seconds before her strange, gelatinous dreads reached out to almost tenderly touch them, rendering the things near instantly immobile.
Alternian snailfish were not large, but they were abundant enough where amphipods were plentiful to fill up on them on a good night.
They looked soft and insubstantial as jellyfish, but their oily flesh hid a shockingly intricate skeleton that was more like a puzzle mesh connected by tissue instead of joints.
They required a powerful jaw full of flat crushing plates to bite into, and the crunch could potentially echo for miles.
Opening her mouth revealed a forest of transparent needles entirely unsuited to the task.
But no attempt was made to sink them in.
Stretching her primary jaws wide enough triggered the extension of pair of phalangeal jaws, into which she fed the snailfish one by one, swallowing the meal whole.
After a serpentine yawn to realign the outer set, the feral predator continued her exploration slightly more languidly.
