For the Drounge was a swab. It roved the world picking up the pain and misery and wounds and hurt of whatever it came in contact with. A vague amorphous shape the size of a hippopotamus, it humped and oozed along in the absence of legs or cilia, making slow but inevitable progress toward a nondestination. It had no arms, but could with difficulty extrude lengths of its own substance and utilize these to exert pressure on its surroundings. Other creatures, unseeing, often ran into it, giving rise to consequences that were disastrous for them but of no import to the Drounge.
Open, running sores bedecked its body the way spots adorn a leopard. Scabs formed continually and sloughed off, to be replaced by new ones ranging in size from small spots to others big as dinner plates. They were in constant lugubrious motion, traveling slowly like small continental plates across the viscous ocean of the Drounge’s body. Foul pustules erupted like diminutive volcanoes, only to subside and reappear elsewhere. Cuts and bruises ran together to comprise what in any other living being would have been an outer epidermis.
None of this unstable, motile horror caused the Drounge any discomfort. It did not experience pain as others did, perhaps because it had never been allowed to distinguish pain from any other state of being. For it, it was the way things were, the circumstance to which existence had condemned it. It did not weep, because it had no eyes. It did not wail, because it had no mouth. Though capable of meditation and reflection, it did not bemoan its fate. It simply kept moving on.