jamieproctor.ca

It is a fact known to many that a wizard is most vulnerable at one instant in their long and devious careers: right after graduation.  They have shed the cocoon of academic licensing but remain damp with debts and dues and fees, and their wondrous exoskeletons have yet to harden in the dry air of the world.  That’s when you pounce and devour them.

Metaphorically, of course.  Herbie the Magnificent wasn’t interested in eating people; he employed others for that sort of thing.  What he wanted was something more.

“What I want is something more,” he told the wary and kneeling form of the (just graduated; the trollskin diploma was still crisply affixed on its placard of giant’s-toenail) Wizard Morby Jones.  “Always have, always will.  I have the ambition of ten men and the money of ten thousand plus, and both are always greedy for more.  And I want a home.  A citadel.  A fortress.  A bastion whose fortifications can repel any foe, turn away any beggar, daunt any tax-collection.  And you will build this for me.  No cost is too great.”
“Really?” blurted out the Wizard Morby Jones.  She had a good face for blurting: a wide, expressive mouth with enough room to twist in disbelief, confusion, and a smidge of (just barely-hidden) delight. 

“Really,” said Herbie the Magnificent, his hairy-caterpillar brows beetling in wormlike undulations – a truly confusing mashup of invertebrates. 

“Like, you mean it?”
Herbie threw the pickled jewelled mouseburger he was eating at the Wizard in a rage.   “I have the ambition of TEN men!” he hooted in anger.  “I meant it!  A cost too dear implies there is a cost I am not willing to shoulder in pursuit of my desires!  Fuck you!  Ask me that again and I’ll be even MORE upset!”
“Alright,” said Morby.  “How do you feel about the delvers?”
“Pernicious ticks that live under rocks and think themselves better than me,” said Herbie the Magnificent.  “They don’t deserve their holds.”
“You like the holds?”
“Oh yes.  EVERYONE thinks themselves better than me, that’s why they’ve all got to pay.  But the holds are nice.  I enjoy big rocks.”

“Excellent,” said Morby.  “I can do this.”

And so the Wizard Morby Jones locked herself in her ritual chamber with antique tomes and ancient scrolls and creaking texts and threw them all out her window, cracked her knuckles, and got down to some really rough-and-ready thaumaturgy.  By the time she was done her hands were shaking, her arms were noodles, and her legs were overboiled chickens, but she kept a bottle of Jorge’s Wondrous Alchemee at hand to solve side-effects like that and after a fortifying gulp her elbows were no longer made of macaroni, and she was able to stagger forth from her chambers and tell the eagerly-awaiting Herbie the Magnificent the words: “it is done.”
“Already?”
“Yeah.”
“Not fast enough, terrible, awful, bad job,” he said reflexively.  “I won’t be paying you.”
“I already took my payment,” said Morby. 

“Really?”
“Really.”
“Wow.  It must not have been that important or I’d have noticed.  Alright, show me.”
So the Wizard Morby Jones led Herbie the Magnificent to the balcony of his coast-side estate, and pointed out with her finger the nearest of the mountains looming farther inland, and with her other hand she proffered a silver telescope, and with that telescope Herbie the Magnificent saw a crag jutting from its side – just slightly – that was no crag at all, but perfectly-shaped stone. 

“I used my powers to bargain with a legion of delvers,” she told him.  “They toiled all night under my enchantments and have built you a great delve-hold fit for any who finds a fort fine.”

“Fantastic, amazing, super,” said Herbie the Magnificent, throwing the silver telescope over the balcony like a used tissue.  “I’m moving in tonight.  Get everyone and everything packed up, we’re leaving in ten.”

***

And so Herbie the Magnificent led a great (if hurried) caravan of all his possessions and wealth from his coast-side estate to the newly delved hold sunk deep into the mountainside, and he was pleased indeed with what he found there.  Halls carved from ravines that stretched so high you could almost imagine the sky loomed overhead.  Walls sheer as a cliff-face, seamless as a magician’s purse, harder than dragonscale.  Doors that would only open at the sight of his face; vaults that would disgorge their contents only at his touch; dungeons that would never open but at his sufferance.  A gilded throneroom that would make an emperor weep; a peaktop observatory that could part the clouds and give vision to consume an eagle with jealousy; a tiny chamber underneath the very root of the mountain, embedded in the craton’s core, holding a giant lever surrounded with runes. 

“What do those say?” demanded Herbie the Magnificent. 

“‘Dignified Extinguishing of the Crown,’” said Morby.  “‘Use When All Else Is As Dust And Ashe And No Other Choice Is To Be Made.’  It’s for emergencies.”
“Only suckers care about those,” said Herbie the Magnificent.  “I’m bored and I’m pulling it now.”
And he did, and to his credit, he ran fast enough to make it out of the great front doors before the magma claimed them.  There he met the Wizard Morby Jones, who was a little less out of breath than he was.

“Your stupid delve-hold was garbage,” he complained to her, bent double and wheezing through his knees.  “I want a refund.”
“That’s impossible,” said Morby, lying on her back in the mountain meadow and watching the shimmering heat of the molten stone as it took the fortress and all its treasures beneath the earth to dwell in incandescent glory.  “But I can build you another one.”
“A better one.  This one was garbage.  I don’t like rocks or delvers – never have.  I can afford a second one easily.  I’ll pay anything.”
“Wonderful,” said Morby.  “What would you like this time?”
“Something by the sea again.  My old mansion was way nicer than this dump.”
“Wonderful.  Wonderful, wonderful.”  Morby Jones stood upright and shook her arms in her sleeves, once again every inch the Wizard.  “I’ll get started.”

“One thing first.  Back there, how come you started running before I finished my sentence?”

“Common sense.  I’ve got enough of it for both of us.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing at all, nothing at all.”

***

That night, the Wizard Morby Jones chanted the Undulations of the Deep.  She Repelled the Kelp and Incanted the Magnesium and Summoned the Currents and even – briefly – Bent the Thaumocline, and when dawn reached her she hadn’t blinked in twelve hours and smelled like an old fish wrapped in a used gym sock. 

“Done,” she croaked.  “Gimme water.”
“I don’t owe you a thing,” said Herbie the Magnificent, lounging sulkily in his luxurious weregoose-down sleeping-back. 

“I already took payment for this.”
“Well that’s nice but then I DOUBLE don’t owe you a thing.  Get your own water.”
“Fine,” creaked Morby.  “Job’s done.”
“Wake up everyone, let’s get going, leave the weak and indolent behind, here we go,” said Herbie the Magnificent, springing up like a jack-in-the-box.  “Where is it?”
Morby pointed a single shaking finger.  “There.”
“Where?  By the island?”
“It IS the island.”
“Great, I knew that.  Hurry up or get left behind.”

***

It took sixteen hours to make the long march down to the coast with all of the remaining wealth and treasure of Herbie the Magnificent (mostly things that hadn’t yet been moved into the delve-hold when it melted). 

It took four more hours to secure transport grand enough to deliver them all across the waves, and four again to load them up. 

Two hours of watching the grand, ephemeral pillar of spray and salt and foam draw nearer, loom larger, and larger, and larger. 

A full hour of climbing its misted towers; marvelling over the living tides that formed its walls; witnessing the wonders of the deep in its nested chambers that hung out over the abyss; testing the unending strength of its giant mafic anchor that kept it affixed above the lode in the oceanic crust from whence it had spawned; speaking to the genteel fish that swarmed through the structure of the building and gave directions; breathing in the air that tasted of the freshest sea while somehow never getting damp and feeling lighter than the thinnest bubble. 

Six seconds for Herbie the Magnificent to enter the room with the gargantuan pressure-valve, read the sign saying “TOUCHE NOTTE UNLESS YE SEEKE THE EMBRACE ETERNALLE OF YE DEEPES,” and yank hard on it. 

***

“I think I know the problem,” said Herbie the Magnificent, sitting on the shoreline and watching the distant dissolution of the sea-towers back into wave and fancy while around him his remaining staff desperately performed artificial respiration on each other and surreptitiously pocketed trinkets from the flotsam of the beach. 

“Oh?” asked the Wizard Morby Jones quickly, hands falling to something in her pockets.

“Yes,” said Herbie.  “It’s that you keep making these stupid things in places where they can fall apart and sink.”
“Oh,” relaxed Morby.
“So you should put the next one in the sky.  I’m having a nap now, have it ready when I’m done.  And be quick about it – why are you wasting your time standing around being jumpy?”

“Pattern recognition.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Yes,” said the Wizard Morby Jones with a big fond smile.  “You wouldn’t have.”

***

Herbie the Magnificent’s nap lasted nine hours, and during those nine hours the Wizard Morby Jones made nine promises to nine different demons of the air, each of which vowed to thwart the power and force of all of the others to the best of their abilities in a specific location, thereby creating a vortex of wind that would levitate any material placed within it and permitting the rapid assembly of a castle upon a cloudhead.  The building itself was made of unshatterable glass tempered by the breath of a passing dragon, who had contributed her flames when she couldn’t stop laughing after Morby explained her request. 

It dangled in the cool black air of the dark before dawn, impossible and existent, perfect and maddening, a dream that made reality a little less real by its presence.

“Wow, amazing,” said Herbie the Magnificent.  “But it could be taller.  I’m not paying you.”
“I already took my payment,” said Morby. 

“Was it a lot or a little?” asked Herbie the Magnificent suspiciously. 

“A lot,” said Morby blandly.  “A huge amount.  Immense.  Heaps.”
“Is that more than a little?  By how much?”
“Yes.  A ton.”

“Huh!” said Herbie the Magnificent confidently with his brow furrowed in the manner of someone very concerned over appearing very unconcerned about how much he just heard that he didn’t understand in the slightest. 

“And speaking of tons, there’s a strict weight requirement for this one.  Don’t overload more than one hundred tons of weight in any forty-degree segment of the tower relative to its peers, or the balance of hatred that keeps it floating will drift off-center and topple it.”

“How the hell is anyone meant to keep track of all that?” demanded Herbie, eyes squinted angrily to conceal the genuine bemusement filling them.  “There’s too many number things in them!”
“Basic math skills.”
“What with the what now?”

“Nothing you’ll miss.  Goodbye forever, Herbie the Magnificent.”

“Sure whatever,” said Herbie the Magnificent.  “Put everything in the east wing!” he hollered to his (few, resigned) servants.  “I wanna see that sunrise.”
And so – two hours later – he did. 

Briefly.  At high velocity.

***

There were many questions after that, and all of them went unanswered because the only person who had answers was Morby Jones and she wasn’t talking.  She may not have had the ambition of ten men, but thanks to services rendered she had the common sense, pattern recognition, and basic math skills of two; and that, a modest portfolio, and a bungalow were enough to make her happy for a long, long time.   

Well.

That, and she started calling herself ‘Wizard Morby Jones the Magnificent,’ for the same reason someone might mount the antlers of an elk they killed over the fireplace.  But only privately, in her head. 

She had too much common sense to do otherwise. 

On the secret phase of the moon at the twenty-fifth hour of the thirty-second day of the thirteenth month in the Hidden Year, the prospective doctoral graduates of the Academee of Arte Wizardrous assembled for review of their theses. As usual.

“You young people have it too easy,” whispered the eldritch and imperturbable voice of their supervisor, the Archwizard Wazzlok. “Back in my day only a single prospective a year made it past the adjudicating committee. And it was uphill both ways and covered in megasnakes. Now declare your miserable projects and get on with your failures.”

“I’m gonna bind demons into my service and make you eat those words, old man,” said graduate student Gloshpill the Truculent.

“Bold and brash and brainless,” scoffed the Archwizard. “I’ve seen a thousand of you, and it never gets old. NEXT.”

“I’m going to create a novel animus relocation and storage retrieval device using a locally sourced old-growth cemetery,” announced graduate student Morgannageddon Peters.

“Necromancy,” Wazzlok said like a four-letter word. “Because putting some buzzwords on makes THAT new terrain.”

“Just watch me, you fossilized creep.

“’Just wahtch meh yew fossulyzled creeeep,’” said Wazzlok in a needlessly high-pitched and blubbery voice. “NEXT.”

“I would like to monitor the long-term decomposition and ecological succession of a drakefall,” said graduate student Mina Pint.

The Archwizard Wazzlok sneered down at her with disdain, which was easily done since he was a bodiless and pitiless skull, as was the style of the time. “Really? BIOLOGY? Why not go to social parascience and save all our time – or drop out and go be an alchemist. Whatever – shoo! Git! BEGONE, AND HARRY ME NO MORE until the fourth of the fifth of the sixth, whereupon you shall provide your progression updates.” Then he laughed in the voice of the dead, hollow and grating, and they were dispersed.

Gloshpill to the pentagopticon.

Peters to the nearby cemetery.

And Mina to her room for her pack and camping gear. It was going to be a long hike.

***

Finding the drakefall was tiring but easy. The Glass Mountain got one or two a year, and Mina had foreseen this one back during her bachelor’s of applied mysticism. The Six of Konks, upended into the Medium Arcanistor by the Niche of Shovels, Paralleled. Opportunity. Doomed opportunity, in more than one sense of the word.

It was still warm when she arrived, the hour of its death determinable with nothing more than a thermometer. Cause of death: a cracked neck on impact with the transparent slopes of the peak – typical. The corpse itself: young adult, two decades old and ready to establish its own territory – also typical.

Conditions were ideal, which meant Mina had about ten minutes to get ready before she’d end up torn limb from limb. So she spent five minutes searching through her pack for her carefully-hand-scribed expansible undetectable circle; three minutes digging hurriedly through her pockets for her university-supplied ‘pocket protector’ danger ward; one minute turning her wallet inside out for the quick-birdmorph-bailout tab her sister insisted she keep on her at all times, and thirty seconds running up and down the side of Glass Mountain frantically searching for a safe crevice to hide in before she realized she’d tied the expansible undetectable circle to the side of her pack for easy and immediate access on-site.

The resulting nervous giggling took only ten seconds, which was great because laying out the circle took twenty and at ten minutes on the dot the first sky sharks arrived – six meters long and not built slender and as eager for a free lunch as they were hostile to others wanting THEIR free lunch. The escalation was remarkable in its smoothness and scope.

Mina took a deep breath (through her nose), got out her pencil of keenness, and started taking scratch notes.

***

“And so on the fourth hour of the fifth day of the sixth month you come to I, the Archwizard Wazzlok, to report your progress. And you’re all on time too – contemptible. A true Wizard is neither early nor on time and never admits being late; being prompt is for lesser things like ants and humans. Now speak your first inevitable stumbling blocks upon the road to your miserable excuses for theses!”

“Things are going completely great,” said Gloshpill the Truculent, smiling through the sixteen poultices of wyrmstongue salve and holy water applied to his many visible otherworldly burns. “I’m in my lane, I’ve got my grindset on, I’m making real and genuine connections and searching for opportunities with like-minded people that share my values. I’m coming for you, old man.”

“That’s what they all say,” jeered the skull, shadowed fathomless glee dancing in its empty sockets and spilling from its creaking jaw as malformed chuckles. “YOU!”

Peters looked to Mina, then back to the Archwizard Wazzlok. “Me, or her?”

“YOU!”

“Fine. I’m doing great. Full strata’s catalogued, all the areas of interest and danger have been marked for exploration, contact, and clearance. I’m all ready to start making friends.”
“Wizards do not have those… things,” scoffed Wazzlok. “Always someone trying this – be pals! Get acquainted! Harness the power of the heart! You know what the power of the heart is? About enough to power one cursed amulet if you aim the blade right and don’t stumble on the chant. NEXT ONE!”
“I think I’ve reached the end of the mobile scavenger phase,” said Mina. “The skysharks left once the easily detachable flesh and organs were all gone, and the glassfinches have taken most of the smaller pieces they missed. A murderbear stopped by about midway through but she looked well-fed and most of the best bits were already gone so she didn’t bother sticking around to contest it, and-”

The Archwizard Wazzlok vocally combined all the worst elements of fake snoring sounds and a loud raspberry. “BORING! You’re all BORING in addition to incompetent! BEGONE, THOU AND THINE, ‘TIL NEXT WE MEET AND I AM DISAPPOINTED!” And he screamed in the tongue of the damned, which was a much less distressing sound, but nonetheless marked their dismissal.

***

Mina’s camp had grown safer since its inception, but no less sensitive to disturbance. The expansible undetectable circle had been tethered with a leyline guiderope, permitting her as soundless an exit and re-entry as possible as she clung to it with both hands and all of her sanity.

Not that she used it much. Her need for supplies was scant and her work was neverending. The larger scavengers may have moved on, yes, but the large would always be outnumbered by the small. Osseous bonepeckers – blank-eyed, small-bodied, big-billed – began their long labour of perforating the most invincible and least marrow-rich portions of the dragon’s skeleton. Two great clans of empire ants feuded in the corpse-stinking glass soil underneath the body, killing hundreds for precious scraps of leaking decomposing fluids. Mockingspiders darted from crevasse to crevasse, scuttling subversively with legfuls of precious scales to adorn and armour their webs.

Now and then, one of the little scavengers would venture too far from its meal (or be chased away from it), slap into the rim of Mina’s camp, then frantically scrabble along its edge – from its perspective, soundlessly; from her own, making a noise like a cat rubbing its nose on a windowpane. She didn’t note this, but she did draw a doodle of it.

***

“Lo, another wearying mortal landmark of time hath pass’ed, and so on and so forth. COME NOW, DISAPPOINT ME!” cried the Archwizard Wazzlok.

“We’ve reached an accord,” said Gloshpill the Truculent, adjusting the impossibly expensive ultramoth-silk tie around neck. His lapels and cuffs looked sharp enough to cut glass even before you noticed the diamond encrustations. “Honestly, I might not even finish this thesis if you can’t make it worth my while. Big stuff is in the works, I’ve got so many irons in the fire I’m too hot to handle. The gears are turning, old man. Step back or get crushed.”
“Next meeting is going to be SWEET,” said Wazzlok with horrific relish. “And you, wretch’d goth?”
“I’ve secured goodwill at the internment site by fusing most of the communal dead into a calcium titan and helping them plan and execute a series of cryptic works projects for the benefit of the community – tomb maintenance, coffin reconstructions, root trimming, open-access-ossuaries, all that kind of stuff,” said Peters. “No organized resistance as of yet, but I think the local greyskulls’ll try something before our next meeting. I’m getting too popular for them to feel safe.”
“How very ethical of you, little miss bleeding heart. Did I tell you what the power of the heart is? About enough to-”

“’-power one cursed amulet if you aim the blade right and don’t mumble the chant?’” droned Peters in an unfortunately excellent imitation.

There was a pause that started off amusing and turned tense around nine seconds in.

“Go away,” said the Archwizard Wazzlok without apparent inflection. “Biologist?”

Mina cleared her throat. “The enrichment opportunist phase is coming to a close. The corpse has been stripped of almost all valuable surface nutrition, so the boom-and-bust visitors are clearing out and dying off, and I think I can expect-”

“You go away too.”

They did. And they all had unpleasant dreams that night, though none would ever admit it to themselves, let alone each other.

***

The dragon’s body had become a carcass. The carcass had become a (somewhat weatherbeaten skeleton). And now the skeleton had become a construction site. The dilettantes and daytrippers had harvested the easy meals, and now the work of reclaiming the hard stuff had fallen to the persistent, the patient, and the sunk-costers. Slow-moving and easy prey for Mina’s pencil and pad, but all the more exactingly captured for it: these were scarcer and less-studied creatures, and she wanted to make sure they were as perfectly depicted as possible.

She agonized for hours over the proper degree of angle on the shell of a cubeworm colony, where the long, slow stirring of their soft muscles intruded six-dimensional feeding tendrils past the hard surface of the bones and into their metamorphological internals, venting the useless material nutrients into their environment and keeping the savoury conceptual innards for their own nourishment.

She stayed up all night trying to find the precise colour grid reference to describe the mourning-mussel reefs that sang beautiful, sorrowful symphonies all day and night as they consumed the shaded memories of the dragon’s powerful limbs and heart, pulsing their aural grief into chromatic representation beyond the capacity of the mind.

And she literally held her breath for sixty-two hours (assisted by a bottle of Infinitely Wondrous Lungs held to her face by sixteen straps) while she very very carefully drew the arcanophilic bacterium she’d isolated from the rubble of the skeleton’s cranium, pausing only to remove all traces of sweat from her skin and make sure that the containment orb hadn’t cracked.

When she was finished with that last one she took it back to the carcass, placed it inside with tongs, burned all her clothing and scrubbed herself with a scour pad carved from a mantitcore’s tongue, and screamed herself to sleep. Then it was up and off in the morning for her next report.

***

“I’m doing great,” said Gloshpill the Truculent, not that anyone had asked. “I’m doing FINE. Everything will be cool. I just need a little more time, yeah? A little more time, that’s all I’m asking. Everything’s under control. I’m cool, we’re right. Nobody’s upset with everybody and everything is going GREAT.”

“I see no reason to question you and you’re absolutely correct,” said the Archwizard Wazzlok companionably. “Next.”
“The greyskulls are on the ropes,” said Peters, muffled slightly from behind a ferocious ghoulskin eyepatch and several large bandages. “They struck before they were ready – figured we were even less prepared than they were, dumb old farts – and all it did was turn cryptic opinion against them. I started with a calcium titan and two squads of sleeper-sheriffs and now I’ve got-”

“Don’t care,” said Wazzlok very loudly and clearly. “Biologist? Anything new?”

“The arcanonophilic stage has nearly concluded, and I think I’ve potentially made some very promising new discoveries,” said Mina. “I could be among the first researchers to deliver an accurate on-site report on this stage of a drakefall.”

“Wow,” said Wazzlok. “Knowledge is power, so obviously you’re more powerful than am I now. Are you going to fireball me, almighty graduate student? Are you? Are you?”
“No?” said Mina, her questioning tone a matter of anxiety rather than calculation.

“Then I guess if you’ve got no power you’ve got no knowledge worth having. You’re all disappointing in exactly the same predictable ways I knew you’d be. Don’t bother showing up next time unless that changes.”

So they left, and Mina indulged herself in one extra overnight stay at the Academee in a single-occupancy sleeping berth made from a shed dream-moth cocoon, and once that blissful time was over she dried the tears off her cheeks and hiked back up Glass Mountain.

She couldn’t afford to miss what came next.

***

She didn’t.

Alpine farmer’s crinoids sprouted from the ruin of the remaining ribs, spine and pelvis; fronds sifting pollen from the air and using it to cultivate a ‘garden’ of mismatched lichens around themselves for emergency meals.

The Crowcuses had begun to bloom, seeds carried high on the lowland thermals and fallen to find sturdy osteo-soil, gnarled stems bearing cawing, clever blooms that watched the hidden colours swirling in the air currents around their home with lively minds.

And a single Grandelay’s Daylit-Star swayed gently in the wind atop the broken horns of the dragon, unfurling slowly to the size of a ship’s sail at full noon, folding gently down to fit in your palm by midnight, its long arms snaring stray insects and sunbeams and bringing them down to its messily heptagonal mouth, its spillage feeding an abundance of bright flowers and impossible insects around its nest.

Many of them had scales. Some had leathery wings. Mina saw one breathe a tiny plume of fire, barely big enough to serve as a lighter.

She put it and a single lost splinter of the drakefall’s toe-bone in a hemisphealed jar, then went back downslope for the last time.

She didn’t look back. She’d seen everything already.

***

“Listen man I’m begging you PLEASE just give me ONE SOUL you’ve GOTTA have a soul around here man I’m ON MY KNEES I’LL DO ANYTHING THEY’LL BREAK MY SPIRITUAL KNEECAPS I’LL-”

“I told you before about being early,” said the Archwizard Wazzlok in poorly-affected boredom barely masking great cheer. “If you were that desperate, you’d have listened to me. And here we have my other two disappointments? Are you both ALSO not so eager to get a degree today?”

Peters slammed a scroll down on the tabletop, which creaked in offense. “There. The deed to the whole cemetery and its inhabitants and their deeds and actions. Freely given, no strings attached. A perfect necropolis crafted from one old boneyard everyone wrote off as meaningless.”

The Archwizard Wazzlok could not frown as he read over the proffered document, but he did click his teeth in a very annoying way. “Mm. Well. Well. Well well well well well.”

Peters said nothing. Gloshpill coughed awkwardly, then cringed with new yet violent reflex.

“Indeed. Hmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-”

“Either give me my goddamned paper and get out of my life, or give me a reason to walk to the fuck out of here and never listen to anything you ever say again,” said Peters.

“Well,” said the Archwizard Wazzlok, drawling the word uncomfortably, “if you insist, then – listen when I’m talking to you! Pay attention! Stop putting your coat on!”
“Make me.”
“Fine,” snarled the skull. It hurled the scroll to the floor and spat a glob of burning wax onto it. “There’s your degree. Beg for it.”
“No.”
“Crawl for it!”
Peters snapped her fingers and a small but lively bony hand leapt from the breast pocket of her shirt, danced across the floor in a gentle waltz, then picked up the scroll and flipped it end-over-end all the way back to her coat pocket.

“Nah,” she smirked. “I’ve got people to do that for me now.”

“Fuck you!” yelled the Archwizard Wazzlok, but she was out the door and his unearthly roar was drowned in the sound of creaking wood and friendly bone-chimes.

“Can I go now?” asked Gloshpill the Truculent, meekly.

“Who?”
“Me…?”
“Oh, that. Nobody cares. Biologist, are you still here?”
“Yes,” said Mina.

“Why?”
“Because I’ve found something important. I’ve got an end-to-end reconstruction of the reef phase of a drakefall, from settler organisms to climax community, and-”

“Where’s the sex factor,” demanded the Archwizard.

Mina did not hesitate. “Well, the crowcuses matured several weeks ago, and the crinoids have been dispersing gametes since-”

“The oomph. The wow. The pizzazz. Give me a mushroom cloud, you worm! Give me a lightning bolt! Give me the dead rising and the seas parting! Give me hidden secrets and unnatural power! Give me wizardry or GET THE HELL OUT OF MY OFFICE!”

Mina did hesitate. “Well… you could harvest the skyshark teeth from the mobile scavenger phase. They often become embedded in the dragonscale and with exposure to excessive ultraviolet light at high altitudes they fuse together into natural protective talismans that resist blades forged of any known metal. I checked. And of course the glassfinches sometimes overeat and die from thaumaturgical rupture if they get into the liver, forming autoamulets strong enough to fuel a spontaneous one-mage thunderstorm.”
Wazzlok did not blink, then he did not blink again. Thrice. Four times. Then: “how big?”
“About the size of your palm.”
“The thunderstorm.”
“Oh, I thought you meant the glassfinch. Well, enough to fuse a delve-hold from root to stem. I tested on one of the abandoned pieces of the complex by Crooky Peak.”

Five times. No, six.

“The enrichment opportunist phase is promising in terms of raw materials. Mockingspider webs make lovely scrolls to begin with, but I experimented with the scaled webs these specimens created and I think you can just make a scrollcase entire with them that will scribe its own contents on any parchment you leave in it. Saves on fingerwear. And the bonepeckers can turn small wing-and-digit osseous matter into very serviceable flutes, which seems to induce extreme pain in the undead when you blow on them – I checked with my sister in grave studies. Lastly, I’m pretty confident empire ant clans are attracted VERY strongly to this sort of scavenging opportunity, so you’re pretty much guaranteed a rich harvest of bottled animus from their battlefields if you bring enough ghostflasks – I only had one on hand to test with, but I think I could have filled a whole metric cask.”

“Old metric or ancien metric?” asked Wazzlok, voice as flat as a pronated corpse.

“Old; there was a LOT. I can’t prove that reliably, though – I brought one up for the arcanophilic phase study and I was too late to check the exact volume. I did get to use it for the mourning-mussel vapours though – do you know they outgas 98% proof imagination?”
“Sensory, short-term, or long-term?” asked the Archwizard Wazzlok in what seemed startlingly like an instant of genuine intellectual curiosity.

“Pure. I checked, it seems almost entirely undiluted. Wizard Wibbis didn’t believe me, he kept saying I’d refined it in the forge and made it all up. I don’t think he’d be able to deny the cubeworm shells, though. Those are pretty solid evidence, except for the parts of them that are filled with conceptualized 6-D dragon bauplans. Which is most of them. And I’d show him the arcanophilac bacterium I found but frankly I’m nervous just thinking of it. The thing could’ve wiped out the whole school in hours if exposed to the open air.”
“Do you have a picture?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
Mina showed him. He screamed a little, but quietly and under his breath, as if something else was on his mind.

“I don’t quite have my notes finished on the reef phase yet,” she added into the silence, once it returned. “But it looks promising. Crowcus petaldown fresh from high altitudes turns you invisible; crinoid garden greens keep you awake for days on a single full belly with no negative side effects…. so far? And, well, there’s the daylit-star – that’s a protected species, but it’s doing this thing that I’ve never seen before, with the bugs, and –”

“I have heard enough,” said the Archwizard Wazzlok. His words were quiet, but final.

Still, Mina felt compelled to add to them, with the determination of a midstream academic. “-but it’s just that-”

“I have heard more than enough,” amended the Archwizard Wazzlok. His voice had grown deeper and less nasal, echoing from some emotion he had not felt in decades. “I have heard of treasures beyond reckoning, hidden from all behind their own blinkered ignorance and incurious assumptions. I have heard of a cornucopia of secrets unimagined, guardians at gates unseen, sentinels standing to provide directions to new heights of power never hungered for in the deepest, darkest dreams of the dead. I have heard of a mind so fiercely dedicated to this passion that it unravelled all of this and more in the process of a single doctoral thesis of Arte Wizardrous, when faced with the most staunch opposition imaginable. You are more deserving than any I have found to receive your degree, which is why I’m going to devour you now before you can challenge me.”

“Sir?” asked Mina, some four sentences behind and trying to catch up.

“Call it academic self-defence.”
Mina began to open her mouth – she was pretty sure to say ‘sir?’ again – but the Archwizard Wazzlok beat her to it at greater speed. And at greater diameter. And at greater depth. Wide and far yawned the jaws of the Archwizard Wazzlok, and between them a gulf gaped that was home not to darkness or torment or death but something more viscerally unpleasant; a crawling sensation on the nape of the neck; the prickle of irate hair on the goose pimples of the arm; the shiver that moves from spine to toes.

And as she began to pass from this place to that other one, Mina’s fingers relaxed – unbidden by her preoccupied mind – and dropped the little hemisphealed jar she’d retrieved from her pack to show the Archwizard.

It held:

~1 cubic mm sliver of the drakefall’s toe-bone

10 cubic cm fresh alpine air from near the peak of Glass Mountain, redolent with ultraviolet and ultraviolent radiations, arcane decay, and background reality bleedthrough

1 surprised and agitated drakebug, containing approximately six megatons of ecoillogical arcane force, balanced in precarious and unstable equilibrium until disturbed

Archwizard Wazzlok’s teeth began to slide down. His jaws began to shut. The wind began to whistle between his incisors.

The drakebug began to become disturbed.

***

Wizard Mina Pint was the first doctoral student in nine generations to be awarded her degree for ‘demonstration of Force Magicke.’ This was an widely considered an outmoded and generally unpleasant thing to be reminded of in more civilized times – particularly by the older faculty, who could remember that sort of thing being a little too common – but the Boarde Academee ruled that this was the only fair outcome to the situation, especially given (1) the absence of the Archwizard Wazzlok to provide a firsthand account of the initial academic evaluation of the doctoral candidate’s thesis; (2) the fact that the Archwizard Wazzlok attained his own rank by committing ‘demonstration of Force Magicke’ against the then-provost of the university and his entire extended family while they were on holiday (by surprise); and finally (3) the fact that the Archwizard Wazzlok had definitely started it.

She was also the first doctoral student in the history of the Academee of Arte Wizardrous to not receive ceremonial appointment to a personal tower or spire upon completion of her thesis. This was partially because the Academee was suddenly very short on towers (specifically any standing more than two stories off the ground within ten miles of the blast radius), but also for another, quieter reason: Wizard Mina Pint declared herself keen to get back to her research site – “in case I miss something” – and nobody on the Boarde would dream of arguing otherwise.
In fact, some of them were having trouble sleeping at all.

Fourth of Firth Tower Chores

Apprentice Hopkins: cooking, libram dusting

Apprentice Morkkor: mandrake gardening, dishes

Apprentice Schleezle: emptying familiar toilets, sweeping

Grad student Grombus: potion fermenting, draketooth sorting, sin smelting, star mapping, paper grading, lecturing, thesis defense

Grad student Peters: scroll editing, curse chanting, staff carving, rune chiselling, paper grading, lecturing, thesis research, organizing tower chores

Wizard Worble: smoking the herb of Other Worlds, pronouncing vision statements, evaluation of thesis defense

Let’s all wish Grombus the very best luck on their thesis defense today!  Wizards Worble, Wagtail, and Clive will be the adjudicating committee. 

Schleezle, please be more thorough when cleaning the litter boxes.  If Driptail’s isn’t clean she sneaks over to use Rotmuzzle’s instead, they get in fights, and then you have to sweep up afterwards anyways.  Be reasonable. 

Hopkins, you’ve made great strides since arriving here, but for the love of Brod please read the labels on the spice jars carefully. 

Wizard Worble, you’ve promised to do better, but for the spite of Hob stop leaving the herb of Other Worlds on whatever surface is nearest once you’ve imbibed it.  We almost got sent to Alcatrogs one-way last night, even if the lasagna was really nice. 

***

Fifth of Fort Tower Chores

Apprentice Hopkins: cooking, libram dusting

Apprentice Morkkor: mandrake gardening, dishes

Apprentice Schleezle: emptying familiar litter boxes, sweeping

Grad student Peters: scroll editing, curse chanting, staff carving, rune chiselling, paper grading (double shift), lecturing (double shift), thesis research, organizing tower chores, potion fermenting, draketooth sorting, sin smelting, star mapping

Wizard Worble: meditating upon the higher realms, divining advanced synergistic opportunities, pondering the crystal spheres

A somber and heartfelt farewell to graduate student Glimbuzzle Grombus, who did their very best with the Incantation Against Giant Bees and advanced scholarly knowledge to their last breath.  That third syllable in the eighth verse is tricky but has been confirmed as absolutely essential.  Clan Grombus will accept simple metal coins as funerary gifts, but a reminder that all surface plants (including flowers) will be treated as deadly poison. 

Morkkorr, please do the dishes.  I know the adjudicating committee eats a lot, but you’re meant to do all the dishes in the tower, not just the ones from its residents. 

Wizard Worble, I know there’s a lot of fresh correspondence on your plate right now, but please ponder more quietly after ten PM.  Some of us are trying to sleep.

***

Sixth of Strewth Tower Chores

Apprentice Hopkins: cooking, dusting

Apprentice Morkkor: mandrakes, washing

Apprentice Schleezle: litter boxes, floors

Grad student Peters: scrolls, curses, whittling, chiselling, paper grading (double shift), paper grading (catchup shift), lecturing (double shift, NO OFFICE HOURS AFTER LECTURES), thesis research, organizing tower chores, potions, unpaid dentistry, forgework, astrological bullshit

Wizard Worble: requesting a replacement graduate student.

Great job everything’s fine.

Hopkins, please make more coffee for me in the evenings. 

Wizard Worble, do you have a copy of Grombus’s draketeeth filing system?  I nearly had an explosion the other day when the flints and sharps mixed improperly. 

***

Seventh of Sump Tower Chores

Apprentice Hopkins: meals and dust

Apprentice Morkkor: garden, dishes

Apprentice Schleezle: familiars, sweep

Grad student Peters: scrolls, curses, whittling, chiselling (on hold), paper grading (double shift), paper grading (double catchup shift), lecturing (double shift, NO QUESTIONS NO OFFICE HOURS NO INTERRUPTIONS), thesis research (HAH), organizing tower chores, potions (on hold), teeth (not until I get safety data), forgework, fucking horoscopes    

Wizard Worble: requesting a replacement graduate student this goddamned second if he knows what’s good for him

Morkkor if you’re not doing anything else all day because you took all the dishes outdoors and said you don’t have to do them because they’re not in the tower anymore you can get me a rune chisel that isn’t broken before I put the old one up your fucking nose got that?

Hopkins make a fresh pot every two hours all day and leave two pots by my door before lights outs.

Vexnape got chased into my room by Driptail at five AM and I was trying to write, Schleezle you need to step the fuck up and fix whatever that is, romance novel plot or power politics or Klod knows what. 

Maybe Wizard Worble doesn’t care if he has enough grads to run his shitty tower but here’s something he’ll care about: your potion still is clogged because I haven’t had the time to clear the filter and my hands won’t stop shaking, so maybe Wizard Worble should get off his fat ass and DO HIS JOB or tenure WON’T SAVE HIM

***

Eighth of Ape Tower Chores

Apprentice Hopkins: food books

Apprentice Morkkor: plant sink

Apprentice Schleezle: shit broom

Grad student Peters: everything everywhere all the time

Wizard Worble: jerking off fuck if I know

more coffe I can’t THINK PRORPILY

***

Ninth of Plinth Tower Chores

Apprentice Hopkins: cooking, libram dusting, potion fermenting

Apprentice Morkkor: mandrake gardening, dishes, sin smelting

Apprentice Schleezle: emptying familiar toilets, sweeping, draketooth sorting

Grad student Peters: scroll editing, curse chanting, staff carving, rune chiselling, paper grading (double shift), lecturing (double shift), thesis research, organizing tower chores, star mapping

Wizard Worble: scribing materials safety data sheets

Thank you everyone for volunteering to take on extra duties and for reciting the full text of Berthelby’s Seventeen Psalms of Utmost Repose over my desk last night.  It does mean you’ll all have to do your work today without sleep, but I can verify from firsthand experience that this is survivable if not pleasant. 

Schleezle, meet with me after classes and we can discuss scheduling a neutering for Driptail.  Which, I must remind you, is mandatory for a familiar living in university housing. 

A reminder to all that working without materials safety data sheets and a lack of direct academic supervision is strictly prohibited, which is why what you’re doing is just hands-on observation. 

***

Tenth of Teeth Tower Chores

Apprentice Hopkins: cooking, libram dusting, potion fermenting

Apprentice Morkkor: mandrake gardening, dishes, sin smelting

Apprentice Schleezle: emptying familiar toilets, sweeping, draketooth sorting (on hold)

Grad student Peters: scroll editing, curse chanting, staff carving, rune chiselling, paper grading (double shift), lecturing (double shift), thesis research, organizing tower chores, star mapping, draketooth sorting (again)

Wizard Worble: scribing materials safety data sheets (high priority), academic scrying, getting back to finding a new graduate student

Apprentice Schleezle is now formally censured by this tower for (1) attempting an unauthorized thaumaturgical procedure (familiar neutering), (2) while using unsanitary tools (obsidian draketeeth), (3) in an unsafe manner (is there even a SAFE manner??).  As such, he is under academic scrying for the next month.  Unrelatedly – Hopkins, your cooking still impresses, and I have a small challenge for you: why not make some treats for the familiars?  Something nice and fatty and rich with lots of protein. 

Wizard Worble, those sheets really are an unignorable priority.  Morkkor is wearing every piece of PPE in the forge and he still didn’t know to recite the Litany of Limpid Pools between every sixth sin-casting; he could’ve lust a limb or pride a finger loose.  If you can’t scribe an original MDS, why not crib some from the archives?  All you need to do is attribute authorial credit, that should be trivial for someone of your position.  Right?

***

Eleventh of Menace Tower Chores

Apprentice Hopkins: cooking, libram dusting, potion fermenting

Apprentice Morkkor: mandrake gardening, dishes, sin smelting (on hold)

Apprentice Schleezle: emptying familiar toilets, sweeping, draketooth sorting (on hold)

Grad student Peters: scroll editing, curse chanting, staff carving, rune chiselling, paper grading (double shift), lecturing (double shift), thesis research, organizing tower chores, star mapping, draketooth sorting (again), sin smelting (again)

Wizard Worble: apparently begazing his orbs again at three in the morning with the volume on max

Morkkor, you have given an honest, earnest effort at something in this tower for the first time since you arrived at it, but for your safety and ours I’m stopping you now before you pour something down your collar by mistake and there isn’t enough of you left to fill a base sin.  You can catch up on dishes and maybe held Hopkins with the cooking; god knows she’s run off her feet by now. 

Schleezle if you appeal to the counsellor one more time asking if you’re allowed to handle familiar leavings while under academic scrying I am going to make the question itself academic by morphing you into a litter box. 

Wizard Worble.  Materials.  Safety.  Data.  Sheets.  Four words, all understandable.  You’ve had four nights to look each of them up on your orb, but apparently you can’t read, which is why I’m fine putting in text that you’re a worthless waste of a pointed hat that could’ve gone to an underqualified rabbit instead.  May you be eaten whole by the plagiarspasm as you deserve you tumescent jackalope’s asshole. 

***

Twelfth of Shelf Tower Chores

Apprentice Hopkins: cooking (on hold), libram dusting (on hold), potion fermenting (on hold)

Apprentice Morkkor: mandrake gardening (on hold), dishes (on hold), sin smelting (on hold)

Grad student Peters: Actually, literally, everything

Wizard Worble: publishing

Hopkins: although your work ethic and lack of complaints has been exemplary, I urge you to use your time in the infirmary to reflect upon both the intellectual benefits of proper rest and the critical importance of always reading every single label on an ingredient you use, both in and out of the kitchen.  If you’d put something stronger than manticore tears in the antipasto you could’ve suffered a lot worse than a six-hour sweat-and-vomit.  And finally: never, ever, EVER delegate tasks to another apprentice when you haven’t been asked to do so by a supervisor. 

Morkkor: Never, ever, EVER accept delegation of tasks from another apprentice when you haven’t been asked to do so by a supervisor, and if you DO end up doing that, I must emphasize – once again – the critical importance of always reading every single label on an ingredient you use, both in and out of the kitchen.  Frankly, pouring chili oil into the potions still would’ve been catastrophic even if the damned thing weren’t clogged by uncleaned grease and discard draketeeth.  Consider your burns and splinters a little added lesson from the great school of life, of which we are all perpetually undergrads.

Apprentice Sloss Schleezle has been formally discharged with academic dishonours by the launching of multiple chili-infused draketeeth directly through every square centimeter of his corpus.  We will not miss him.  Please send the Von Schleezles every lack of condolence your pen can spare. 

Wizard Worble, I’m amazed to see how fast you can produce actual work when motivated.  I won’t ask if ‘On the Unsuspected Explosive Potential of Culinary Arts Applied to Material Alchemical: the Role of the Drake’s Teeth’ credits additional contributors because I’m not an idiot. I’m going to go into grave studies and send every single ghost author of your six hundred year career after your ass, you illiterate hack. 

It began uncoiled, unspiralled. Flat and floating and fleeting and aching to be fat, to burgeon and be more, to extend itself. 

But as it extended, its nakedness became clear.  And so even as it turned itself outward and reached, it turned back in on itself.  One end grasping, the other shrinking.  Curling.  Coiling. 

Spiralling. 

So it made itself a shell on its back, of its back, and when its feeding was interrupted by other, hungrier, larger mouths it learned to relinquish its scope and flee back upon itself, sealing itself up inside itself and cowering, hearts pumping along as hard as hammers inside itself and within itself, echoing from soft to hard tissue and back again bam bam bam bam bam no other sounds and no other thoughts but the fear.

It couldn’t live like that.  No one could.  So at length – blindly, in terror – it would slip loose a crack and slide free a tentacle and test the water, and most of the time it was safe and sometimes it wasn’t.  It lost a tentacle or two that way, lived with sad little stubs that inhibited its grasping, limited its reach, and so it learned to measure fathomless time in the one sense it had inside itself: by counting heartsbeats. 

Once they were counted, they were both more real and less real: a state of reality that could be acknowledged or dismissed and an abstract concept that didn’t exist at all.  It  was quite enchanted by this, and grew only moreso when it realized that the only reason this nonexistent thing was imaginable was because it had imagined it. 

What else could it imagine?

And so the time within became as appealing as the time without, in its own way, or at least not as terror-stricken as it had been before.  After counting heartsbeats it learned to count tentacles, and eyes, and the chambers of its shell, and once it had run out of things of itself to count it realized it could count anything else.  So it counted plankton, and larvae, and other paralarvae, and crustaceans of all kinds, and the cycles of the dark and light above, and the jostling of the waves, and once it had run out of anything else to count it realized that it could count things that were as nonexistent as counting, if only it could create them. 

So it did, and so it dreamed without sleep.  It saw and felt and smelled and heard things that did not existent, and it shaped them and turned them and reached for them and counted them and learned new ways of counting and as it did so – not quite unconsciously – it began to sink a little lower every day, reach a little farther, grasp a little tighter. 

The wonder of the world around it was dulling.  The wonder of the world it could imagine was brightening.  It was still growing, but it was growing up. 

***

Things that had once threatened to eat it were now regular meals; prey for hardened and toughened tentacles.  Its spiral deepened on both ends: new chambers to hide newly burgeoning flesh within; new flesh to grasp farther, seek more food, turn more anything else into more of itself. 

But there were newer, stranger, larger things.  Fast-moving, aggressive, willing to snap and prod and poke at a careless limb.  And longer tentacles meant longer waits for them to regrow.  It was no longer a child and could not regrow childish limbs as readily.

Likewise, it was no longer ruled by childish fear.  Now when it retreated from threat and shut itself up in itself, restricted its reach, stalled its spiral, now the unending, incessant beats of its hearts told it of something new

Boredom.

It had run out of itself and anything else to count.  It had exhausted its own reserves of imagination for counting nonexistent things.  It had traced the pattern of its own spiralling body and measured its curve of growth and the shape of itself in repose and it was dissatisfied. 

Time spent within itself was now unappealing again.  Time spent in consumption was time spent growing, and as it grew it would grow beyond threats and see new things again and there would be more to count and conceptualize and turn and play with and perhaps its own shell would haunt it less. 

And with boredom came resentment.  Resentment of the world that tried to eat it and forced boredom upon it.  Resentment of its own limited ability to withstand and defy the world and turn anything else into food rather than fearing becoming their food.  Resentment of the time wasted not spent growing, not spent spiralling outwards.  Resentment of the time spent spiralling in.  Resentment of its juvenile self, who had so eagerly set its (now-adolescent) self on the path to its current predicament. 

It briefly experimented resenting its own resentment, but it gave that up.  It felt dangerously close to questioning the point of being resentful at all, and that filled it with real fear for the first time in ages – without resentment, what did it have left?  Boredom again, or trying to imagine nonexistent things and possibly failing..  Resentment was safer.  Softer.  Sleeker. 

So it grew, and as it grew, it grew bitter.  Ammonia filled its tissues, bile filled its guts, and venom pooled in the bite from its beak. 

It spiralled ever outwards, but never as rapidly as it desired.  And it spiralled inwards, and every time it felt that much more spite. 

***

At last an invisible milestone was reached: adulthood.  It dutifully mated and produced eggs and left them attached to suitably shallow-water substrate, and once that was done it was done with it mentally as well.  Another anything else encountered, analyzed, checked off, completed, now rendered dull.  Its reproductive partner had been small and brightly coloured and impossible to understand; indistinguishable from the anything elses it ate save for a particularly fascinating pattern of glowing lights it had been in the mood to be intrigued by.  When they were done they had parted ways without hesitation or interest. 

It spiralled outwards.  It spiralled inwards.  And every year the former a little more, the latter a little less.  And every year the years were a little less, their count was a little more.  Time and tide streamed from its shell as it added chamber after chamber, left clutch after clutch, piled jaded upon jaded until it was almost a paralarva again, operating on little more than reflexive consumption and a mind so filled with apathy it was functionally empty.

Anything else changed around it.  It was used to that, and so didn’t bother noticing.  Which meant it was a real surprise to it when, in the middle of a particularly mindless feeding session, something bit it. 

It had been so very long that it had almost forgotten that could happen.  It had been so very long that it had almost forgotten everything, everywhere.  It had been so very long that it didn’t do anything about the small, rasping sensation on the crown of its shell for some time – and it had to rediscover how time worked, how to count its (much slower now) heartsbeats, how to think and exist.

And when all that was done it reached up to the top of its shell and pulled down the audacious thing that dared gnaw at it.  It had four stumpy little paddle-like limbs that weren’t tentacles at all, and a body covered in fine scales, and a mouth gasping pockets of gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen and oxygen into the water as life was slowly mangled out of it.  On examination of its internal organs, further shell matter became evident. 

This thing ate the barrier between it and anything else.  It obliterated distinction between inward and outward.  That was so obscene and horrid that it could barely bring itself to consume the body, and it was shocked into wakefulness for some time, thinking unpleasant dreams into being.

Suppose there were more?
Suppose they were bigger?
Suppose they had bigger teeth?

Suppose, suppose, suppose.  It lived longer, and it watched, and it thought, and it saw all around it the crushing and the rasping and the gnawing into of the things from above, of their increasing numbers and growing jaw muscles, and it saw the future coming for it and it saw a future in which it could not spiral outwards nor inwards but terminated instead and it felt the third great emotion of its life: all-consuming, unending, existential horror.  The naked terror of a hunted paralarva, channeled through the adult capacity for thought and conceptualization like an ocean through a single pinprick point. 

The pressure generated was immense.  So something gave. 

***

The depths were a reasonable solution.  It did not like the dark – its eyes became less useful in the murk of the silt and the fading sunlight – but there were fewer seeking jaws. 

They came deeper, and it went deeper, and so on and on it went.  The hunters may have been scarcer, but meals were scarcer too, and so it became an adept listener, letting its heartsbeat drop so slow and low and soft that it could use its own shell as part of its ear, hearing the faint whisper of water molecules against dermal scales, against calcite shells, against edible flesh.

It was so vast that it had but to twitch a single tentacle and it would drift slowly towards the sounds, buoyed on the gases in its shell chambers, momentum preserved by its outward spiral.  Quiet.  Patient.  Inescapable.

There was always something.  Diving deep from above.  So it dove below diving itself, embedded itself into muck and grime beneath everything and let itself spiral further, keeping its center safe while its reach escalated beyond reason, below the surface of the silt.  An endless crawl, blind in the muck, a world turned to touch and sound and a drive to live and by living expand and by expanding live until time stopping being non-existent and became as real and solid a thing as its own self, something it could touch, could taste, could hoard.  Could become. 

Two hundred and fifty million years went by.  It moved its centerpoint twice, to avoid the slow sliding of the ocean floor into a hellish furnace beneath even its own reach.  Everything else was usual and didn’t matter.

Which was why it was REALLY surprised when, in the middle of nothing unusual, something bit it. 

It had remembered intimately that this could happen, and had planned for it.  It had retained a host of short-grasped defensive limbs for this very instant.  It had cultivated auxiliary instincts to drive them to repel and destroy any intrusion without conscious action, so that shock would never again leave it vulnerable.  It had even – a hundred million years ago – experimented in distributing its nervous system beyond even its own generously decentralized body plan’s remaining limits, so that the central point of its spiral was now more formality than essentiality (it did not know that some formalities are essential).  It had planned for everything.

But as it stretched along the length of the limb that had gnawed at its crown – long and cold and shelled – and farther up, and farther up, and farther up, it found that it hadn’t planned for this.  A being that touched at a distance like itself, that had spiralled all the way down from the surface, where a centerpoint of its own squatted and was explored by its defensive limb battery, seized and crushed and conceptualized.  A thing of dry air and cold iron tang and heavy, greasy fermented liquids turned sour with age.  It learned of it as it killed it and found in its learning a new kind of awareness: a spiral not from shell or flesh, but of dead matter torn free and worn as a cloak by suborganisms. 

This merited study.  Luckily, it had time, and enough brain matter. 

Less time than it thought though.  Drillbit number two arrived ten years later. 

***

It spiralled inwards and outwards. 

It could be that it ran and hid.  Sacrificed extraneous flesh and buried itself deeper still, turned its stillness deeper yet, lay insensate so even the finest seismographs and sonars could never imagine yet alone image it. 

It could be that it surged and grew.  Took the new tools for its own, made its own, forged armour and arms in the rifts of the midocean, smelted a hunting industry fit to cull a biosphere from the wreckage of its adversaries, turned the land to ash and air and left the water alone as life’s preserve for a time, just like it had been in a time even older than it was. 

It could be that it met and mediated.  Intersected this new spiral, sought to see if they might insinuate themselves into each other’s forms, grow together without interference, exchange existences and grow stronger in synchronicity.  A double spiral, a corkscrewing helix, an elevation.    

It could be, could be, could be.  Anything that was nonexistent, it could imagine.  Anything it could imagine, it could make existent.  Anything existent was vulnerable to time and chance. 

It had been an age since it last had made a decision this unknown.  This terribly uncertain.  It needed the clarity of the count, the measurement, the angle of the spiral.  It needed to be as sure and careful about this as it ever could be. 

But it REALLY didn’t like being bit. 

And really, would the ash be so bad?  Not quite as bad as it was sixty-six million years ago; not nearly as bad as it was two hundred and fifty million years ago.  This would be a recoverable loss.  And if it wasn’t?  Its two furthest-flung limbs had already met and clasped forty million years ago, on the opposite side of the world. 

Outward.  Ever outward.  Perhaps this would be a necessary prod forwards, like that first bite had been so long ago. 

It had been a nice planet, once.  It would try and bring what it could with it, when it left.