Tuesday 18 December 2012

Castellian Caddis Larvae

Giant caddis fly larvae that builds its tube-like shell from metal and lives long in underground rivers. The only metal that won't eventually corrode in these conditions is either gold or magical steel.

The shell of the Castellian Caddis Fly is made up of shields, swords, spears and other weapons of legend. All washed clean of markings by the rivers flow. A shell of blades. Each one was the legendary blade of a particular culture or hero-cycle, made to kill gods and defeat evil. But eventually forgotten and lost. The shell is more dangerous than the fly inside it. Heaves itself up out of the white water, plumes of foam spilling on its spiked and shining sides.

When the fly needs new stuff for its shell. It finds the river system below a climax culture and waits a few thousand years for it to decline. Once the museums have burned and the hero's are dead, the blades will be forgotten and lost. Eventually they will end up in the water sink and the fly will recover them.

3 comments:

  1. This is really cool. Everything, one way or another, will eventually end up underground.

    Have you taken a look at the 19th century London sewer-sifters? They did this, only in real life and a much smaller scale. Wading through the dark and the filth, looking for lost wealth. Fending off swarms of rats, which, allegedly, ate lone treasure-hunters alive.

    Makes me think of sinkholes, too. Interfaces between the surface and underground. The old sinkholes remain as lakes- thousands of acres and perfectly round. The scary ones are in cities. City blocks replaced with perfectly circular pits with smooth sides, too deep to see the bottom.

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    1. I have a book by Peter Ackroyd called 'London Under' which I think you would like. It mentions the 'toshers' who scavanged the sewers and the legendary 'tosheroon', a fabulous ball of coins, moulded together in a ball by excrement. It doesnt say if anyone ever found one for real.

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    2. Tasty. I suppose people who sift through sewers as a living would be less deterred by a tosheroon's composition than most. It is interesting how sewers are mythologized. There are stories of beautiful rat women seducing toshers(!!!), and the Romans had a shrine to Venus Cloacina, the goddess of sewers.

      I'll check out London Under, though. Right after the Muqaddimah and On War...

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