The Ghosts In Colossal Shells
Gloamback Snails. Massive. Motionless. Misunderstood.
They don’t crawl. They don’t slither. They arrive.
Sometimes you find one already there—coiled into the shape of a hill, steam rising off its shell in the morning mist. Other times, you wake to find a path you’ve walked a dozen times now sunken, torn, reshaped. The air still tastes like moss, but everything is... quieter. That’s the only real sign. Quiet.
They are called Gloambacks by most now.
The old name was Balausk—a word carved in stone and whispered like a prayer.
Calling them “snails” feels like calling a mountain “a lump.”
2. Notes from a Slightly Smaller Thing
It’s strange how something so massive can feel so… reverent.
I’ve only seen two that I’m sure were alive. One was curled in on itself like a petrified sculpture, glistening with dew and ghostcap spores. The other was crossing a ridge at dusk, each limb folding and unfolding with impossible slowness. Its movement was more suggestion than action—as if the land agreed to bend rather than resist.
I remember standing still for what must’ve been an hour, just watching. Listening. You don’t hear them with your ears. You feel them with your ribs.
Some locals avoid them. Others leave offerings in their wake—fruit, mushrooms, bits of music hummed under breath. There are stories about people who tried to harm a Gloamback, but I don’t like those stories. They don’t end well. Not because the Gloambacks retaliate, but because the land does.
There’s a stillness in them that feels older than cruelty.
3. On the Nature of the Gloambacks
Gloamback Snails are ancient, towering, semi-mythic beings believed to be as old as the soil itself. Some are the size of villages, others like wandering ridgelines. While most are shell-bearing and limbless, certain rare individuals possess legs—typically four or six—giving them the appearance of massive, moss-draped guardians.
Their movement is glacial. They may sleep for centuries, then shift just far enough to change the topography of entire valleys. When they do move, their path leaves behind unnaturally fertile growth—twisting vines, luminous fungi, and occasionally, stones that hum when touched.
Many believe Gloambacks are connected to the deeper consciousness of Loria’s fungal network. Their shells vary wildly, composed of strange materials like:
- Boneglass: A semi-translucent, ivory-to-green fossilized structure.
- Umbracite: A matte, obsidian-like stone with subtle inner shimmer.
- Fallowglass: A brittle, dull material that crumbles under light yet reforms when buried.
Some theorize these materials are not formed over time—but chosen, grown, or summoned through the snail's connection to the earth's memory.
A few Gloambacks carry fragments of ruined architecture or trees atop them. In some cases, entire ecosystems thrive unknowingly on their backs.
4. Variant Types and Theories
Not all Gloambacks are the same.
Some have evolved (or been shaped?) to carry limbs—massive, rootlike legs thick with lichen and armor. Others are shell-only, indistinguishable from hills or crags unless studied over years. At least one record mentions a Gloamback whose body had fused with a cathedral ruin, suggesting either immense age or a strange kind of symbiosis.
There is no known upper size limit. The largest verified specimen (if it was moving at all) is estimated to be nearly 2 kilometers across. No one is certain whether these beings are born, created, or merely remembered into being by Loria itself.
Some say the Balausk don’t live forever—they just change form. That over time, their consciousness seeps into the stones, or splinters into the fungal web beneath them, until only their shell remains. A fossil, yes—but a fossil that still hums when you sleep near it.
4.5. Snails and Storytelling
Some ancient and mossy ideas:
- A town built unknowingly on the back of a dormant Gloamback begins experiencing strange tremors and fungal dreams.
- A Gloamback’s movement shifts a river, exposing a ruin—or flooding one.
- A shell fragment from a deceased Gloamback becomes a relic that echoes voices from its past migrations.
- A dying Gloamback sings for weeks as it decays, and no one understands the language—but some start dreaming in it.
- An old woman insists the hill outside her cottage used to listen to her. Then one day, it moves.
You can also use them as environmental metaphors: of patience, of balance, of slow inevitability. It’s all this one moment.
5. Speculations, Myths, and the Unknowable Weight of Them
I hesitate to make grand claims about Gloambacks. I’ve walked along the seams of their ancient trails, slept in the shade of one’s unmoving shell for six nights without incident, and once followed a shallow depression in the moss that local guides insisted was a “migration path”—though they delivered the term with a wink and a bit too much ale. But I’ve yet to witness a true waking.
There are travelers who claim to have heard them speak. Not in words, precisely, but in layered sounds—like tectonic moans stacked atop a choir of echoing beasts. One man told me the voice of a Gloamback sounded like a memory you didn’t realize was yours until it finished the sentence for you. I found that confusing. And compelling.
Some believe they are dream-bound avatars of the land itself. Not quite gods, but not quite animals either. They do not seem to eat, nor mate, nor die in ways we understand. I once saw a ring of glowing fungus growing around the cracked lip of an old Gloamback shell—identical in pattern to the map of a nearby forest. Coincidence, maybe. Or not.
Some of the oldest maps—etched into clay tablets now buried under moss—refer to them as Balausk, which roughly translates to the patient crown. I can't say for sure.
There are even stories of a six-legged Gloamback—a creature of such age and mass that villages grow atop it, mistaking it for a hill. They say its legs are thick with boneglass and still move beneath the roots. I’ve not seen this one either. But I’d like to. And if I ever do, I’ll try my best to ask it something useful.
Until then, I’m just listening.
"I once met a scholar who claimed the Gloambacks were Loria’s way of remembering how to be still. I asked if that meant the rest of us were how she forgets. He didn’t have an answer. Neither do I."
