Deeper and deeper Lu Gun tunneled. Faster and faster he pulled the earth up from below him and cast it off into his wake above. So ferociously did he bend the earth around him that he was no longer merely digging, but falling through the earth.
He had long since escaped the dangers above. But in the darkness, the only thing left to him was the feeling of tearing up the earth and letting it flow around him. He lost himself to the motion, and before long, he knew he must be miles belowground, more distant from that surface world than he had ever been.
At this depth, nothing lived. At this depth, there was naught but fossil and ancient earth.
So when the final layer of crust broke beneath him and he fell through open air, Lu Gun thought he would fall forever.
Instead, he splashed down onto marshy ground.
Marsh? Down here? This made no sense.
“FINALLY! A MORTAL!” The voice was louder than an earthquake, filling every space in his mind, every pore of his flesh and rattling it.
“Where am I? Who are you?” Lu Gun’s lack of sight added a note of desperation to the question that he hated hearing in his own voice.
“YOU ARE DEEPER THAN ANY LIVING THING AUGHT TO DELVE. AS FOR WHO I AM…”
Something – many somethings – slithered through the waters of the marsh, closing in on all sides. Lu Gun scrambled to one knee, cocking his head this way and that, trying to hear where the attack would come from, trying to listen for an avenue of escape.
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“...ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO KNOW? ONCE YOU KNOW MY NAME, THERE IS NO UNKNOWING IT. MY NAME IS A CURSE TO ALL WHO HEAR IT, A POISON ON THE TONGUE OF ALL WHO TASTE IT.”
The slithering drew closer, then slowed. It waggled back and forth as if tasting the air around Lu Gun. Lu Gun knew a predator when he heard one, and he had been on the other side of the hunt enough times to imagine what it felt like to be the prey.
What had the creature asked? Did Lu Gun truly want to know its name? Lu Gun knew there was no escape. To run was to die. To refuse was to be consumed.
Lu Gun lent metal to his voice, making it, not a plea, but a command. “Tell me your name.”
The creature laughed in a way that permeated the Earthbreaker’s bones. A low rumble rose up all around them like the aftershocks of an earthquake, or the first cracks of some new cataclysm.
The tendrils slid closer to Lu Gun, and the first one gripped his leg, stinging like acid, flaying the skin from his flesh.
Lu Gun recoiled but it held him in place. More tendrils wrapped around his limbs. He scrambled to flee but they coiled around his body, his neck, his face. Burning, stinging, consuming.
“No! I don’t want to die!” he screamed, “I want to know your name! Tell me your name!”
His screams were cut off as the tendrils poured into his mouth.
“I AM WHAT LIES BENEATH. I AM THE WORLD BORER. I AM GRANDFATHER GLOWWORM!” the inhuman voice rumbled with the earth, “AND YOU WILL BE MY NEXT AVATAR!”
The End of…
Lightbender: Book One of the Wild Bender Trilogy
Check Back Soon for…
Shadowbender: Book Two of the Wild Bender Trilogy