J is for Jellyfish of the Mother Countries

The quaraxa is a fine beast, six fingers across and lavender like the plant, shot through with opalescent veins and green swells of tissue. A full-grown one makes a light meal, condensed into a stew or sautéed, or alternatively may be folded into an omelet with jack beans for a heartier repast.

Five mojh together may dine upon the hoortinanya, provided the moon is full and spirits are high. It’s vital that spirits be high, for if even one of the five diners is not completely committed to the event, the moon will fall from the Celestial Firmament and crush everyone involved.

Consumption of the forpada is an art best left to professionals. An improper stroke during the carving phase of the operation might result in accidental eating of the jelly’s gland-of-eighty-dreams and the narcotic toxin within. While in theory one might eat a forpada prepared by another, such an act would be called sinful by the Humble Knights of the Hill of Quiameto, the Quiametes.

A cabal of disreputable zoologists would relegate to obscurity and call dubious Esther Red-Hands’s addiction to nummno juice, but the truth wins out, traveling in the wake of conviction and faith, not dismal fact. Two nummnoi, crushed to pulp then pressed, yield a thin red liquid. Regular consumption of this liquid grants the addict (for the drug is indeed a needy master) improved reflexes and muscularity, at the cost of color vision.

The far sea of the North houses the singular ferrinyo, a spherical jelly eleven feet in diameter and possessing hundreds of venomous cilia. The sting of this venom may be an acquired taste: the Velvet Men tell tales of libertines capturing live ferrinyoi and keeping them in luxurious tubs, that they may bathe with them at leisure.

The treasure-of-the-cove, the laxinado, may be properly harvested only by virginal faen males over the age of four hundred, and then only in certain widely-spaced lagoons on the Wordwood’s southern shore, and then only on certain auspicious summer nights. A few villages subsist entirely off the industry of the harvest and supporting venerable and pre-venerable faen men; they split the profits of medicinal treasure-of-the-cove into a great many shares.

No index of jellies would be complete without description of Yomno Swarming Color, the unique god-ruler of the Yomno Islands. Yomno has never been directly studied by professional zoologists, or even indirectly, but the few free natives willing to consort with academics agree in describing a massive jelly, completely filling a brackish artificial lake fifty feet across and nine feet deep, glowing and shining all the colors of the rainbow, with multitudinous tentacles to bind and sting, and telepathy stronger than iron.

SEE ALSO: Esther Red-Hands, the Velvet Men, the Yomno Islands.