Shiv
Nov 3rd, 2015, 02:27:11 PM
When the worms came, Shiv felt them before he saw them. He lay with the hard earth beneath him and just as hard above him, all of it shaking. If there was a rhyme or reason to where the worms went, he could not see it. In the pitch-black darkness of the tunnels, there was very little he could see.
“It could be people. People on the surface!” a voice whispered, there-but-not. Murmured against his ear. He shifted, felt a sharpening of the ache that never left his shoulders, the pain that came of spending his days stooped low and his nights sleeping fitfully on uneven ground.
It's not people, he told himself – but the voice was quick to reply. “How do you know? Why can't it be people?”
But there was no time to answer. There was a shift in the air. A subtle difference that Shiv had learned to feel, because it meant the difference be tween life or death. The earth quaked and pitched him forward, to his knees. Shiv staggered to his feet and threw himself into a spirit, loping forward into the unknown.
Behind him, the worm surged onward with the chuggachugga-chuggachugga of a steam train. The deceptively soft flesh of its huge body rippled through the earth in a relentless march towards who the frell knew what. Had there been bones in its body, not one of them would have been malicious – but Atraken was it's planet, these were it's tunnels. It was a force of nature and either he got out of its way, or he was flattened beneath it.
“It could be people. People on the surface!” a voice whispered, there-but-not. Murmured against his ear. He shifted, felt a sharpening of the ache that never left his shoulders, the pain that came of spending his days stooped low and his nights sleeping fitfully on uneven ground.
It's not people, he told himself – but the voice was quick to reply. “How do you know? Why can't it be people?”
But there was no time to answer. There was a shift in the air. A subtle difference that Shiv had learned to feel, because it meant the difference be tween life or death. The earth quaked and pitched him forward, to his knees. Shiv staggered to his feet and threw himself into a spirit, loping forward into the unknown.
Behind him, the worm surged onward with the chuggachugga-chuggachugga of a steam train. The deceptively soft flesh of its huge body rippled through the earth in a relentless march towards who the frell knew what. Had there been bones in its body, not one of them would have been malicious – but Atraken was it's planet, these were it's tunnels. It was a force of nature and either he got out of its way, or he was flattened beneath it.