The Arid Pelagia

This summer I went to Koonya Beach on the Mornington Peninsula. There's not much sand there, just rockpools surrounded by wide shelves of stone. The stone is quite flat, coated in soft sea-moss and anemones; the waves roll over it at ankle height. Dotted here and there are deep blue rockpools, clogged with kelp, concealing the homes of crabs and octopuses. Elsewhere there are direct inversions of these holes - tall spurs of windweathered stone jutting up from the flat plain. It's an alien place, one of those places they would go to film sci-fi movies.

The Arid Pelagia is like that, but a hundred miles wide.

A stone plain with a film of restless water stretched over the top of it, where waist-high waves roll for miles without breaking. Where one false step can send you tumbling into shadowy caverns beneath the water's surface. Where there is no fresh water and no shelter from the sun. A wet, humid desert.



THE STORMS

At the far end of the plain is Mother Sea, who surges at the edge of the world. Every year she sends storms to cross the Pelagia. They come quickly, turning the bright blue sky to blackness, scouring life from the stone. Everything that lives in the Pelagia must have a way to survive the storms. The crabs and the flat-headed worms take shelter in the deep rockpools; the giant limpets adhere to the rock; the yellow gulls and the striders ride the wind to escape.


THE WADERMEN

Natives of the Pelagia, nomads who drag their possessions behind them on bladder-sleds (flat bottomed boats that float with the help of inflated bladders). They wear grey djellabas and broad-brimmed hats; on their backs they carry tiny stills that make fresh water by evaporation. When the storms come and the waves grow tall, they puncture the bladders and their sleds become skiffs on which they ride out the storm.
They live by hunting game in the rockpools. Teams of naked divers, armed with bone spears, plunge into the kelp forests to hunt the giant white worms. They are also traders: every calm season they go to the edge of Mother Sea to meet ships from the Incomparable Isles, then return across the desert to sell rare goods to the people of the mainland.

THE WINDWROUGHT STONES

Stone outcrops rise from the plain here and there, scoured by the wind into twisted and fantastical shapes. The mystics of the Wadermen say that in these rocks they can discern the voices of the winds, who speak to the stone on geological timescales. The mystics identify ninety-nine distinct winds, but ultimately seek to go beyond these voices to hear the deep song of Mother Sea herself.
The Wadermen believe Mother Sea is angry with her children for abandoning her. Therefore she sends storms to wear away the land; eventually all the land will return to her, and the world will end. The Wadermen do not fear this, but they hope that before it comes they can finish their translation of the rock, which contains the sea's last message to her children.
Most of the windwrought stones are only small spurs, but a few are large enough to contain chambers within. These monoliths are taboo places for the Wadermen, but it is said that strange treasures can be found inside them, deep within caverns shaped by the voice of the sea.

THE BLUE HOLES

Most of the rockpools are small, but some are very large, up to a mile across. Some of them also connect to caverns underneath the plain. Each pool is its own tiny world: kelp forests and sandbars, twisting worm-tunnels, shell graveyards, and dappled grottoes where red crabs gather. As well as hunting, the Wadermen dive these caverns in search of rare opal-pearls, which are formed by a strange interaction between the sands, the tides and the refracted light of the midday sun.

CREATURES OF THE PELAGIA

The Wise Limpets: They never stop growing. The oldest are bigger than horses, and have many children and grandchildren clinging to their backs. They know many things, most of which humans cannot understand. The only way to communicate with them is to lie down at dusk beside them in the surf; at midnight they will crawl over you, suffocate yet sustain you, and speak to you in dreams. Make sure the limpet is your friend and not your foe before doing this, or you make never wake again.

The flat-headed worms: White, sinuous, fifty feet long with arrow-shaped heads and a ruff of venomous quills. They dwell in the blue holes but can also slither across the plain. One bull-worm can feed a tribe of Wadermen for a month. Their quills are used as spears and their proto-cartilaginous skulls as ceremonial breastplates. Every nine years they migrate to the largest pool in the Pelagia, where they breed in a massive loathsome tangle.

The Striders: Most feared creatures of the plain. Giant pondskaters on four insectile legs, they ride the surface tension to skim along the water at incredible speed. They spear victims with their legs and then impale them, still living, on barbs at their leg-joints. A successful Strider keeps a small menagerie of impaled prey in order to attract a mate. When storms come they unfurl four diaphanous 'wings' (actually more like sails) and ride the wind to safety. Thus the Wadermen say: "the only thing worse than a Strider charging at you is a Strider charging past you."

Shell Horrors: The motion of the tides collects countless small shells and deposits them in deep clefts in the rockpools. When these shells have been collecting and grinding into dust for a hundred years or more, then the cleft becomes choked with the ghosts of molluscs. They coalesce into an undead thing, an amorphous blob of sand that bristles with shells. It attacks by grazing the target, slicing their flesh with hundreds of shell edges. Shell Horrors are hungry but unable to eat, which in turn makes them angry and vengeful. If they can be lured into the open air they will quickly dry out and collapse into dust.

Among the other fauna of the Arid Pelagia are the blind crab-people who live in deep caverns and dress themselves with poison anemones; the murderous plaice that disguise themselves as stone; the blue-ringed octopuses and sly reef sharks; the rockpool-diving cormorants, the gulls and the albatrosses; the midges who breed in the salt water in summer, and the great turtles who come from the world's edge to lay their eggs.

Sewer-Guilds of the Fetid Maze

Tsutomu Nihei

Beneath the streets of the City of Shuttered Windows, there is a network of sewers called the Fetid Maze. All the detritus of the city passes through these tunnels, not only human excrement but garbage, offal, corpses and stormwater runoff. After flowing through a tangle of sluicegates and switchback tunnels, the sewers ultimately join together into the Great Sump, an enormous tube that spirals deep into the earth. The Sump is home to a series of Guilds, each a subterranean community with its own insular culture. The Sewer-Guilds have a simple treaty with the city above: anything thrown into the sewers is theirs to keep, but they are never allowed to appear above ground.

Geof Darrow

The Sewer-Guilds also have much more complex treaties among themselves. The bounty of the sewers is divided between them according to the category of waste. Stealing or tampering with something that belongs to another Guild will incite revenge-killings or even war.

First come the Gold-Pickers, who live in the tunnels of the Fetid Maze. They fish out corpses with boathooks, strip them of valuables (anything from jewelled necklaces to mouldy boots) and then return them to the flow. To help them hunt, they breed sightless moles that sense metal using magnetic organs in their foreheads. The Gold-Pickers sell their catch in the basements of disreputable alehouses.

Junji Ito

The Fat-Scrapers live on stone islands near the mouth of the Sump. They use fine mesh nets to strain grease out of the water, or occasionally luck into seizing an enormous fatberg as it comes down the pipe. They boil the fat in great tureens to remove any trace of water, and use it to make excellent tallow lamps that they sell to the other Guilds. The boiling process means their houses and clothes are always coated in a layer of congealed lard. On the upside, they are known for their delicious deep-fried cooking.

Further down the Sump are the hanging net-gardens of the Dream-Sievers. They live in narrow tunnels in the ceiling, swing about on ropes, and weave together the roots of the Night-Mandragora to catch the dreams of the city above. Dreams leave behind a physical residue, and when this psychic runoff is collected in large quantities, it can be distilled into a gaseous potion. A long stairway leads up from the home of the Dream-Sievers to the shadowy House of Vapours on the city surface. Here, oracles inhale the zeitgeist of the city to give political advice to noblemen or crime lords.

Next come the Corpse-Farmers. Often maligned as anthropophages, in reality they are vegetarians. They only collect corpses to use them as beds for the growing of strange fungi. Mushrooms grown in the bellies of horses give a rush of stamina; mushrooms grown on rat corpses are small and salty; mushrooms grown in the wounds of murdered men will bring dark dreams. The halls of the Corpse-Farmers will look like a nightmare abattoir to someone from the surface world, but in their own view they are merely making use of something that would otherwise go to waste.

Moebius

All the Sewer-Guilds worship some form of storm god, and take great pains to propitiate him. In the sewers a rain storm is both a calamity and an opportunity, bringing danger with its floodwaters but also carrying fresh bounty down the pipes. The upper Guilds at least have contacts on the surface to warn them when rain is coming. Not so for the Gong-Shepherds, who dwell deep in the Sump and have never seen the sun. They claim exclusive rights to the shit and piss of the city. They clump together massive floating islands of feces, in whose hyperrich soils they plant fields of Black Emmer wheat. When a great flood comes, the Gong-Shepherds must move their islands into sheltered coves or risk being washed away. They also know how to distil saltpetre from urine, and use it to make crude firework guns to fend off the fanged lizards of the deep.

The last Guild is the Wood-Takers. They wear wooden masks, silk robes and jewellery of strange design. They claim all the wood that floats down the sewer. If even the smallest spar is stolen, they will know about it, and they will come with silver daggers to exact their revenge: a pound of flesh for a pound of wood. They do not use the wood themselves, but carry it away into deeper tunnels. Some speculate that they sell it on the shores of an underground sea where it is fantastically valuable.