Untitled Story: Chapter 2 (Patreon)

This is the second chap of my WIP. Both this and the first chapter are the first drafts, and I intend to go back to rewrite and edit sections after a while. Right now, I'm not overly certain about the snake's voice, but I'll leave it as is for now.

As I mentioned in the first chap, this is the same world as YF, but seperate (mostly) from Solvei's story.

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A pair of bilbies clamber over one another. The larger of the two slides its head under the other, raising it off its feet to flounder as its snout snaps forward. The little one rolls off to the side and regains its footing before striking its claws at the larger’s ear.

A tiny squeak echoes through the cavern before the larger snaps back at the smaller bilby, nipping it on the neck. It pushes through the reactive bite and snaps up its prize: the dead bug they’d been fighting over. Little bilby rushes along the cavern before its older brother can notice the missing prey.

Their playful fighting is entertaining to no end. The two are young, maybe a dozen hunts, and they will be lucky to live another dozen more. Such small creatures are at the bottom of the food chain, no matter how much enjoyment get from watching them, they will be gone before too long.

Big bilby finally catches up to little bilby, pouncing forward, but the rear pair of the small one’s four ears flick back and it dashes to the side, sliding through a spatial bend as the larger sails forward. Its small, beady eyes watch as the younger sibling slips out of its grasp, along with its meal.

Bilbies are odd creatures. Where to most, sound is a distraction, their four long ears give them quite a decent awareness of how space bends around them. It isn’t true sight as I see, but the echoes help them better than most creatures not adapted to the dense spatial bends of my territory.

It took me a long time to discover the eyes of other creatures work differently to mine. Even now, I struggle to understand exactly what they see. Rocks and other animals seem perfectly visible, yet distorted space simply confuses them. They almost exclusively move in straight lines, even when that straight path is the slowest possible choice.

The thought of creatures that are adapted to uniform space brings my mind to the massive cavern I tried to reach the top of a few hunts ago. The dissatisfaction of being unable to learn anything, to satisfy my curiosity, has yet to leave. I hiss in agitation, unintentionally startling the bilbies who flee into their burrow.

There are other tunnels and paths that lead to areas with less spatial distortion, but I’ve never found a path leading completely outside the bounds of warped space like that immense pillar without rock. Never had I thought it was even possible. There is more to this world beyond the warped space around the amber barrier.

It makes me oh, so curious.

And that curiosity angers me. I’ve already discovered how much worse the feeling of dissatisfied curiosity is than any wound I might receive in battle. So much worse than the annoyance of having my clean scales marred.

But… part of me wonders, if this is how bad it feels to be left unsatisfied, how good would it feel to find those answers I desire?

Despite my attempts to bury the curiosity, this questions keeps rising. No matter how hard I try, I cannot return my mind to what it once was. I cannot remove this desire to learn. And it frustrates me; why must I accept new parts of myself that are nothing but a detriment?

This new fascination I have with the things beyond what I know doesn’t help in my hunts. It disturbs my rest and prevents my enjoyment of the energy seeping from my favourite rock. Why it would be included alongside the benefits of advanced thought, I do not know.

With my entertainment gone and my thoughts continuing to spiral, I rise from my favourite resting spot. The stone face of the wall emits a slight heat alongside an intense flow of energy. I have bathed in the permeating flow for hundreds of hunts; since I ate the last apex of this cavern.

My mind in flux, I decide I need a distraction. Silently, my body slithers through the air above those two bilbies’ shared burrow. I could join them within at my current size, but that would do nothing but terrify them. I enjoy watching them, so it would be disappointed if they ran and dug another burrow away from my resting spot.

The small creatures have long since been removed from what I consider worth hunting. Too small and weak, there would be no thrill in the hunt. Not that there are many things that give me that same excitement anymore; the stronger predators of the area have long since dwindled to nothing.

I slither through a hole in space, taking me near the amber barrier. Spatial distortions are at their most intense here, and the closer I travel to the impassable wall, the faster they change. It is impossible to tell which way is uphere. Gravity, like space, acts by its own chaotic rules. Normally, even through distorted space, it is possible to tell which way is down simply because the countless fractures of space trend in a particular orientation. But here? There is no consistent down.

Despite the immense distortion of both gravity and space here, the amber barrier remains the only thing that is unbroken. It was the first thing I ever saw that had uniformity. My sight cannot breach the barrier, as it can with rock. I never questioned it until now, but simply observing it incites my curiosity.

Curiosity that I crush before the futility of its questions can crush me once more.

Often, I’ll pass by the amber barrier to hunt in areas with immense bounty. The holes and rifts near the barrier never last long, so my hunts must be quick. It has happened a couple times now, and each time took almost a hundred sleeps to find my comfortable, energy emitting rock again.

But a path for a good hunt isn’t why I’m here. The space near the amber barrier usually scares off most other creatures, but for me, it is enjoyable. There is a certain danger about being within such tight, constantly changing space that gets my heart pumping.

I figure, if my goal is to get my mind off something, why not experience the thrill and exertion only the barrier can provide?

My body snaps forward with the help of a bend in space. I push off myself in a way that gives me near double the speed striking from the ground would give. My body shrinks down to the smallest it can possibly reach. I don’t even remember a time when I might have been this small naturally, but I’m sure there was a time; most of my earlier memories are cloudy at best.

The slender shape of my body is perfect for sliding between each curve in space. For now, traversal is no issue, but this isn’t the challenge I intend to face. Close to the barrier, space changes from moment to moment. Each bend is sharp and if not quick, they might shear my body into pieces when space morphs.

I fall, my speed growing each bend I pass until my entire body passes through a point within a moment. Any slower than this, and it’d be too dangerous to get closer. Finally, I slide through a bend that takes me into a field of space that changes before my eyes. My eyes stay peeled as I watch for the changes as they occur.

Slithering through the normal level of distortion in my territory has become second nature over all my hunts. The space near the barrier pushes me, forces me to improve to survive and become better. I cannot only rely on my near instinctual route planning. I must keep my eyes wary of the changes as they happen and remap my surroundings each time.

The first change that occurs happens in the worst possible spot: right before my eyes. My body attempts to curve away on instinct, but it’s too late, so I clamp down on my panic and flow cleanly through the new bend, taking in the new sight before me. It is better to have it appear before me, rather then appear as I’m passing through; having that happen is more painful than the bite of most creatures.

The sudden new bend takes me away from the rapidly changing space, so I quickly dive back in. The challenge is exhilarating, pushing my mind just as hard as my body to adapt to the changing conditions. A single mistake could sever my tail. Such an injury wouldn’t kill me, but I would remain weakened for a long while. The pain of such an occurrence is also something I’d rather avoid.

I take enjoyment in the danger. Not many of my hunts offer the same threat they once did. Not within the hunting-grounds I refuse to venture beyond. The thrill of danger is great only when death isn’t assured. So many rifts lead to incomprehensibly dangerous lands that I am satisfied in my territory even if it does get somewhat boring.

When both body and mind tire from the exertion, I thread myself out of the tight weave of space. This is the closest I’ve reached to the barrier. If I continue for another dozen hunts or so, I might get so close as to touch the unending amber wall. It is still beyond me, but soon.

As I slither back to the hole, ready to return to my favourite spot, only for an intense rumble to shake the very air I fall through. I stop, my body rotating in a loop of space as I cast my sight through the hole that leads back to my territory. The earth is shaking. Stalactites dislodge from the ceiling only to shatter against the walls or ground. One gets caught in a spatial loop for a few rotations before it fractures against the ceiling and rains down a shower of rock fragments through spatial bends.

It takes a moment for all the debris to find their rest, but another quake rocks the earth. This time, I can feel it through the stone on this side of the hole.

The earthquakes have been frequent and unsettlingly strong as of late. For the shocks to reach this far through the earth, I’m not confident my cavern will remain undamaged. It hasn’t caved yet, but if it does, and the spatial hole between here and there gets buried, then my territory is a whole lot more comfortable.

I rush forward, slithering along the fastest path to the hole. The closer I get, the better my vision of what is beyond. Strangely, there appear to be gaps in my sight of the cavern where there have never been any before, but what is visible is the collapse of much of the earth near my resting spot. There’s no time to delay; I slither through the spatial hole before it is buried beneath a mountain of stone.

Immediately, my gaze snaps across the cavern, looking for a pocket to hide from the continual quakes, but that plan collapses at the sight of what lies before me.

An enormous presence, not visible by any means except a contradictory emptiness in space and sheer size. My eyes cannot see it, only the space that warps around it. The spaceless presence crashes into the stone of my resting spot, collapsing the entire wall and dropping a sheen of dust from the cavern ceiling.

It is alive.

The being hidden outside of physical space descends upon my cavern, crumbling the earth with the power of an earthquake from the other side. Only barely, do I slide my way into a pocket of space to avoid the world crumbling around me.

My cavern is massive, large enough to home hundreds of critters, and yet this beingclimbing down is easily a dozen… no, a hundred times larger. The spaceless area that crashed into my favourite resting place is a single limb which connects to a mass of a thousand others equally as massive. But even that feels like an understatement. The gap between space it hides in is deep, holding far more of its presence away from the little my eyes can see.

As it descends further into my cavern, the sheer scale of the spaceless being diminishes. Before my eyes, the area of non-existent space shrinks in a way not dissimilar to how I can, but the sheer weight it bears down on the world around it remains unchanged.

What is this being?

A phantom, the word enters my mind from beyond, and yet the word I now intuitively understand does not seem appropriate. The beyond can be wrong? It is the beyond that tells me that ‘phantom’ is wrong, and yet it still told me. It is a concerning thought, but one for later. The next word it gives carries an immense weight to it, and I know it is true as it forms in my mind.

Titan.

This is a Titan. The mightiest of creatures. The uttermost apex predators of all the world. And, the beyond tells me, the greatest enemy.

The phantom Titan strikes at the wall again, a mountain of stone crumbles away like nothing. The stone falls away to reveal a pillar radiating energy. Like the amber barrier, space doesn’t bend along it, leaving it straight even to my sight. The power flowing off that pillar is more intense then ever, but it is only as the Titan tears away another section of the wall do I realise it is destroying my favourite resting spot. The place I have slept for a ten thousand sleeps.

The hiss rumbles through my throat unrepressed.

It is a horrible mistake to oppose such a being, but it destroys my home, so I continue to hiss in defiance despite the world of difference between us.

The logical part of my mind — the section where advanced though has nestled itself in — screams at me to shut up. It wails in hope that it might not have noticed us, or that it doesn’t care. But the rest of me wants it to know I’m here. I want the being to know I’m here and won’t stand for it to destroy my favourite thing.

But even with that thought running through my mind, my hiss still cuts short when it turns to me. The full, undivided attention of a creature able to kill me a thousand times over in an instant gazes down on me with a presence that crushes all resistance and defiance I had.

The Titan, the greatest enemy of the world, looks at me.

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Please let me know what you think of this concept so far.