SQUIBIAN

🐙 Squibians: Brains, Bookshelves, and Betrayal
“Glory to knowledge. Doom to the ill-shelved.”
I. The Abyss That Thinks
Deep within the Cerebrine Deep—a midnight trench woven with psionic currents and coral cathedrals—dwell the Squibians. Cephalopodic in form, theatrical in diction, and utterly ravenous for revelation, they are scholars of the abyss and tyrants of trivia alike.
They hold a controversial doctrine: that the mind is the purest manuscript. To consume a sentient brain is not mere hunger—it is acquisition. Memory, language, instinct, regret, culinary preference, unfinished arguments—absorbed. Catalogued. Filed somewhere behind the eyes.
With every devoured consciousness, they believe themselves closer to completeness.
Or collapse.
Their cities rise in gothic spirals of black coral and arcane iron, their libraries descending deeper than their foundations. In the Cerebrine Deep, knowledge is not sacred because it is rare.
It is sacred because it can be stolen.
II. The Shelves of Status
Among Squibians, prestige is measured in shelving.
A Squibian’s worth is not determined by territory, offspring, or military might—but by the number of bookshelves lining their dwelling, and more critically, how many volumes fill them.
Scrolls, etched coral tablets, bottled memories, transcribed confessions, dream-fragments preserved in glass—everything counts.
Professor Profundus Quarn of the Deep Eight once boasted 101 full shelves. The claim ignited a frenzy of acquisition across the trench. Ships were plundered. Ruins were scoured. Brains were… consulted.
But the Index Dominae—the ruling council of arch-scholars—grew suspicious.
Upon inspection, the 101st shelf was revealed to be illusion: conjured tomes, hollow pages, glamour-crafted prestige.
Quarn was condemned.
And thus began another spectacle of—
III. Squib Justice
The Squibian Trials of Shame, colloquially known as Squib Justice, transform punishment into public ceremony.
Liars, plagiarists, false-shelvers, rebellious Gelatians—all are subjected to psionic games adapted from surface cultures and twisted into lethal performance.
“Guess the Ingredient”
“Musical Thrones”
“Red Tentacle, Green Tentacle”
Their motto is simple:
“Yeat or be yeated by the Mercy of Maw.”
Crowds gather in coral amphitheaters. Wagers are placed. Ink stains the water.
Justice, in the Cerebrine Deep, is never quiet.
IV. The Roots Beneath the Sea
The birth of the Gelatians began not with convenience—but with curiosity.
Across the ocean floor, strange roots began to appear. Vast, fibrous structures pulsing faintly with arcane light. Some pierced the seabed at random. Others coiled beneath Squibian foundations, their glow bleeding through stone.
The Squibians traced their origin.
They knew.
These were roots of the great world-tree of Myrr’Kael.
Vaelthyr.
They recorded this fact.
They did not care.
Within the roots pooled a viscous arcane essence—raw, unstable, fertile. The Squibians harvested it. Refined it. Bound it with stolen neural matter and abyssal plasma drawn from Grimspire’s submerged rifts.
The first Gelatian rose from a basin of glowing slurry—shapeless, luminous, obedient.
At first, the harvested essence thinned. Roots dimmed. Yield waned.
Then, without warning, the roots pulsed brighter than before.
The Squibians made no inquiries.
They simply harvested more.
Thus were born the Gelatians—plasma-formed servants animated by root-essence and borrowed cognition. They refill goblets. They transcribe at impossible speed. They duel in Squib Justice. They remember things their creators never experienced.
The Squibians call them triumphs.
The Gelatians do not always agree.
V. The Riftward Rivalry
Knowledge unclaimed is an insult.
It was inevitable that the Squibians would learn of the grand archive hidden within the Azure Rift—the colossal underwater library constructed and guarded by the Physchrin and Torqle, who named themselves the Loremasters of the Rift.
Coral vaults. Living parchment. Currents enchanted to preserve ink for millennia. Entire civilizations’ worth of texts catalogued not by greed, but by stewardship.
The Squibians were… offended.
How dare knowledge sit untouched upon shelves not their own?
Reports arrived first through intercepted scroll fragments and drifting crates torn from Rift caravans. Then through a captured Physchrin courier whose mind yielded maps before dissolving into psionic static.
The Index Dominae convened.
“It is inefficient,” murmured one scholar.
“It is unacceptable,” replied another.
The decision was unanimous.
Gelatians were deployed first.
Wave after wave of plasma-formed servants surged toward the Azure Rift, slipping through trenches and storm-currents to breach the Loremasters’ outer defenses. The goal was not conquest of territory.
It was acquisition.
Bring back the books.
Bring back the catalogues.
Bring back anything that could sit upon a shelf.
The Loremasters proved formidable.
Torqle shield-lines held against psionic blasts. Physchrin archivists fought not with brute force but with precise arcane countermeasures—wards that disrupted plasma cohesion, currents that scattered Gelatians into harmless mist.
The Squibians escalated.
Their finest spellcasters descended—ink-mages and abyssal arcanists who wove pressure into weapons and bent currents into blades. Coral citadels trembled. Vault doors shattered. Entire sections of the Rift library were torn loose and dragged into the deep.
The war was not declared.
It was catalogued.
To the Squibians, this was not theft.
It was correction.
Knowledge belongs on the highest shelf.
And the highest shelf, in their estimation, was always theirs.
The Loremasters endure.
The raids continue.
And somewhere in the Cerebrine Deep, a Squibian runs a tentacle along a newly acquired tome and whispers:
“Better housed.”
VI. Tides of Contempt
Surface dwellers despise them.
The Physchrin call them defilers of thought.
The Torqle name them corrupters of memory.
Even some deep-sea kin whisper that the Squibians meddle too close to forces older than scholarship.
But to the Squibians, morality is a distraction.
Truth matters.
Acquisition matters.
The height of one’s coral tower matters.
If the roots tremble in distant Myrr’Kael?
If some winged empire tends the tree above?
Irrelevant.
The abyss thinks.
The shelves fill.
And somewhere in the dark, a Squibian adds another volume to their collection—ink still wet, mind still warm.