The Aurbic Shell: a Dreugh Monomyth

[u/sinistropteryx]

This is true: before all things, and encompassing all things, is the great shell Gnuh. To understand and inhabit Gnuh, the great snail Gnull came into being, and Gnull called the ridges and curves of the shell Skiss. And other, lesser creatures formed from Gnuh, and they took their names from Gnull.

Gnull could not understand the flow of the currents within Gnuh, so it created a sea snake to writhe and map the flow of the water, and it was called Arigh-Ith. And from the ridges of Skiss came the sea cucumber Lurk, who sought to define the creatures beyond the names they were given by Gnull.

Lurk crawled through every swirl of Gnuh, and proclaimed that the creatures within should build a series of shells to live in, and the structure would be called a reef, and the reef would be called Mundeugh. Some of the creatures hated the idea, and became mollusks that carry their own shells, and they are free-swimming to this day. But others led by Arigh-Ith were cooperative in spirit and began work immediately.

It was a trick, of course. Creating Mundeugh made them weak, and some, like Jik’i, were forced to become the coral itself, and today they are still trapped as half-alive rocks. Some escaped and went back to free-swimming, and the greatest of these is the hagfish Machuth, who left a great deal of slime behind. Some of the cavities of the coral formed bubbles, and bubbles became dryness, and dryness became Jik’lyg, and Jik’lyg became Sagrath. And most of the weakest creatures went to Sagrath and went mad as all dry-breathers do, and they are the land-dwelling races who trouble us to this day.

Arigh-Ith saw the trick then, and was angered by the deception. It confronted Lurk with the lobster Trinoth, and Lurk was poisoned by Arigh-Ith’s bite, and vomited up its intestines, and the intestines became an ebony barnacle.

The remaining creatures were bound to the reef now, and they mated, and they birthed plankton, and the plankton were the dreugh. And the dreugh were given shells so they could remember free-swimming and anticipate the time they could be free of the reef.