Worldstone

This is the only place I fit. I fit nowhere else.

If I were to tunnel too fast and too close to the edge of the world, I’d be lost.

I have never met others like me, but I know they are there. I can sense them, tunneling too, all around me. The waves and the shudderings of their grinding teeth against the worldstone reach the tender little bulges along my cylindrical body.

I am the shape of my tunnel and my tunnel is the shape of me. As I carve this shape with my stone-like teeth, which are harder even than the worldstone, this shape holds me and supports my delicate frame so that the weight of gravity may not flatten me.

That there is an outside cannot be doubted. That there is an end to the worldstone is without question. The call of that emptiness echoes within my hollow structures and organs. Within the call of emptiness are other calls of other beings which live and which must live in that hollowness without walls. They must live in the unfettered hollowness the way I must live in hollowness girdled by solidity.

The outside is there, but I will never know it. The moment I should enter it, I would be wiped from wakefulness. I would break, compress, shatter into my particles far below where the gravity is heavy. And they would eat my dust, those others that must live in the denseness to keep from blowing away in pieces into the emptiness. I feel their hunger. I feel their false vibrations tempting me too close to the edge. But I resist. I have all I need. I drink the sediments. My body is made of this.

How big is the worldstone? The sensation of its edges arrives from the distance. How many of my kind will it fit? If it is too full and the tunnels too densely interwoven, the organ on my softest side will not activate. If there are already too many of us, my generative fluids will not flow. The tiny organisms from within me will not go out through fissures in the worldstone seeking other tiny organisms to join with. If the worldstone will not hold it, no new life like mine will form.

For me it might never happen. I may never give birth to the one-half of someone. But when my form grows thin and loses its suppleness and its strength, I make a space for someone’s birth. When I fall away from waking, when I cease my digging, the worldstone will fill my tunnel up again. The sediments will fill up this shape of me which will no longer hold me. I will no longer hold the walls around me. I will leave my nutrients.

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This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge