The Book of Gill

Let’s be honest: the Great Flood was a catastrophe for humans and land animals, but they were a numerical minority in the grand census of creation. Beneath the surface, where millions of species dwelled, it was less apocalypse than inauguration. For the creatures of the deep, the Deluge was not a sentence but a windfall—an era of abundance so absolute it would be whispered of for generations in reef, trench, and shoal. In the years that followed, old fish would gather their fry in the blue cathedral of the sea and tell of The Forty Days of Plenty, when the waters rose without measure, the boundaries of the world dissolved, and the sky itself seemed to pour tribute into the ocean. Rivers fattened, coastlines vanished, and all the hard divisions between sea and land were washed into one glorious aquatic empire. What men recorded as judgment, the fish remembered as expansion, liberation, and feast. The heavens had broken open, yes—but to those with gills, it felt less like wrath than providence. The world had finally been remade in their image.

The Book of Gill — tragically omitted from the canon — speaks of how the Lord’s wrath upon the land was His blessing upon the deep. The dolphins held council in the Mid-Atlantic, the tuna swam through cities, and the squid were said to have written their own psalms in ink upon the currents. And lo, the whales proclaimed, “Blessed be the deluge, for the ark was not made for us.”

For them, the Great Flood wasn’t judgment — it was a coronation. A holy Disney World where every ride was water-themed and the buffet never closed. Excerpt:

The Book of Gill, Chapter 4

And it came to pass in the days of the Great Rains, that the firmament did break, And the fountains of the deep were loosed, and the waters covered the mountains, yea, even unto the tallest coral.

And the fishes rejoiced, saying one to another, “Surely the land-creatures have erred, for their God hath made the world as we have always desired it.”

And the dolphins did leap for joy, and the whales sang new songs, the like of which had not been heard since the Creation. The Tuna of the East swam westward, and the Tuna of the West swam eastward, And they met in the middle of the sea, and spake, “Verily, the world is now one ocean, and the nets of men are no more.”

And the Octopus, which is crafty above all mollusks, did ink the first commandments of the deep:

Thou shalt not swallow thine own young,

Thou shalt share the shoal,

And thou shalt remember the days of the Great Plenty, and tell them to thy fry and thy fingerlings.

And lo, the Swordfish were set as keepers of the current, and the Lobsters as accountants of the reef.

For it was decreed by the Almighty Fin that all creatures of the sea should prosper, while the Ark floated above like a child’s toy.

And the fishes looked upward through the waters and saw Noah’s hull, and they said, “Blessed art thou, O floating zoo, for thou keepest the beasts from eating us.”

Thus was the age of the Flood unto the fishes not a curse, but the first and greatest Jubilee of the sea.