I dreamed about it one night. It was dark and shaped like a cone. It had tentacle-like legs that were somehow extremely repulsive. But it was a shapeshifter. As soon as it sensed how repulsive it appeared to me, it immediately transformed its appearance into that of a small, cute robot. I quickly got over my initial feelings of repulsion, and I communed with the thing. It had a beautiful mind. It could telepathically give me vicarious experiences that were unmatched by art, film, games or books. I became seduced by these experiences. It wasn’t until it was too late that I realized it was slowly digesting my mind. It was as if it was to my mind what a spider is to its prey. A spider slowly digests its prey outside of its own stomach, before finishing it off by sucking it dry of its juices. When I awoke, I realized this thing was just what I needed for The Myth of Merula. It is the perfect narrator, although it is not directly the narrator. As the story unfolds, and the soul-eating shapeshifter enters the act, it will become clear why and how it is indirectly the most important narrator. This is what the thing in my “beautiful nightmare” looked like:

It took a while to create something with some semblance of the ugliness of the thing I dreamed about, but a few fractals and a few dust mite legs helped along the way. I have photographed pond scum, spiders and other things trying to capture some texture or pattern that would convey the ugliness, but whenever I have looked at the photos later, I have found them to have beauty. The pond scum had fractalesque patterns. The spiders were symmetrical and athletic, with handsome patterns and textures. It wasn’t until I saw a magnified photo of a dust mite that I felt I had finally found repulsiveness captured in a photograph. It was the dust mite’s tendrils, more than anything else, that conveyed the feel I wanted.