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Watch a (short) novel emerge from beginning to end as you read it! Will it be 50,000 words long? Very probably! Will it have a beginning, middle, and an end? Hopefully! Will it be any fun to read? You decide.
The Stats:
Words this entry: 1913 Words total: 22,165 Words to go: 27,835
Words this entry: 1913 Words total: 22,165 Words to go: 27,835
Nota Bene: This one started out with a general idea of what I wanted the story to do, followed instantly by a picture image in my head. I drew the picture (see above), and then wrote it, which is backwards for me in retrospect, but was fun to do. After drawing, this chapter sort of came out more or less on its own, which is always exciting to me. Let's see if it works in the future.
Chapter Ten
Shiny loved mother, and wanted so badly just to be good.
He knew this even before his hatching, when he’d first awoken in darkness and knew he was hungry but not alone, never alone. The dark was close, packed dense with thousands of his brothers all struggling to wake up, as he now had. He was always hungry at first, no matter how many of them he ate. He was the only one awake that he knew of, those were the best days of his life.
They were too soon over. The first quickened brother he met was smaller than him, and he dismembered and consumed him easily once he understood fully what he had encountered, but even then the tiny web of his mind was troubled with what finding one brother meant: he could and would meet more. And soon he did.
Mostly they were smaller than him, or about the same size. If he engaged, and realized they were slightly larger, he would let his fear consume his heart completely, because only then would he kick and scratch and bite with such complete frenzy that he overwhelmed his larger opponent and succumbed him for consumption as well. He always ate every bite of his brothers like a good boy soon, and because of this he developed his lovely claws quite early on. It was the claws that saved his life.
Once he was wriggling through the walls of his mother’s loving body and munching up any little brothers he might find when he ran into a wall. It was so enormously wide and firm against his young, soft skin that he thought at first that it must be a part of his mother’s body he hadn’t found yet. He was trying to wriggle his way around the wall and find a way through when it suddenly moved. An enormous set of claws rasped over the membrane before and behind him, and then again, when he’d dived for nonexistent cover, to either side. He realized then that he was faced with a brother so much larger than him that he might as well have never awoken or grown at all. He might as well still be completely silent and asleep. It was just this thought, and the idea that followed it, that got him through.
Shiny instantly froze, and curled up into a little dormant ball as if he were still one of his younger brothers, still fast asleep and dreaming of mother’s love. Sure enough, he soon felt the rasp of the great claws on his sides; not cutting, but merely scooping upwards to the titanic body’s snout and mouth. There was the sound of something crunching nearby, a change of odor and temperature as the fluid of his mother’s body walls was replaced by the fluid inside his brother’s mouth, and the little digger knew he’d been eaten.
I must not be chewed up, he said to himself, feeling great grinders coming together just above his head, but then he also thought, I must not stir or all is lost. So he waited for the grinders to grind, his tiny scarce-beating heart pounding furiously, until at last there was a colossal squeeze and a pinch, and then he knew he had to act.
With every ounce of terrified fury, of uncoiling all the energetic little digging sinews his body held, he thrashed his claws, which no young digger his age should yet have, against the soft tissue of his brother’s throat. He was struggling to breath the space was so tight and the fluid so foul-smelling, but he kept writhing with his whole body, slashing and scratching and causing as much damage as he could. When he thought he was about to black out, he suddenly felt one of this claws give, and he knew he’d clawed his way through the throat to the outside.
He pressed his mouth against the opening he had made for a clean breath, but he did not try to wriggle back out. He knew this was his one chance: after taking as many deep breaths as he could, dodging the pointy ends of his brother’s desperately searching claws, he dove deeper in and began to thrash the tender walls below the throat as hard as he could.
After a long and turbulent time, with the foul inner fluids and stringy tissues tangling his limbs, and after many struggling gasps of cleansing outside fluid he had to force his way back upwards to get, he felt his brother shudder, stretch out colossally, and at long last lie still.
After that, he ate like only the Eldest are allowed to eat for many many days.
He had grown enormous. There were no brothers left, he imagined, that could compete with him, but there were none large enough to feed him anymore either. He searched everywhere for younger brothers to sustain him, and he was becoming dreadfully hungry once again, but there were none to be found, and soon he was afraid he’d have to start attacking his own mother’s body for food, or starve. He did not want to starve, but he wanted even more to be good.
At last, the day came that changed what his life was for good, though he did not imagine what would happen before it came. He felt the impulse, the curious impulse, to wriggle downwards. He wasn’t sure he clearly knew what downwards as, but he knew he had to wriggle and dig down as quickly as he could, doing anything else was just odd feeling and unsatisfying.
As he wriggled, he came across another enormous wall of tissue. He thought for a terrible moment that here was another invincible brother to overcome, but he knew all along that this time it was really his mother’s body and nothing else. He kept wriggling downwards, following the wall, and eventually he realized he felt walls closing on either side. The way grew narrower and narrower, until at last he was in a sort of tunnel pinching him on all sides, and the only way he could go was down, because he couldn’t even wriggle around the other way if he’d wanted.
Then there were the hooks. They were like little barbed nails or teeth in the walls, and first they scratched his scaly skin, which felt marvelous, and then they started to wear that skin away, which felt strange, and then he wriggled further, and they started to tear at the softness under where his scales had been, and this was painful, growing soon to agonizing. But he was in a blind dash now; he had to go down, go down, go down.
There was something strange happening in his mind, the space in front of him was gaining a peculiar form of intensity to it that wasn’t smell or temperature or texture, because it was a numb feeling that seemed to be involved with something happening away from his body himself. He did not like whatever it was, but it was growing stronger all the time. Soon the feeling was the whole world in front of him, and he almost forgot about the pain from the claws. Then with a burst several things happened at once, and he realized it was all over.
He knew later, though he didn’t know he’d learned it, that he had eyes, and that they had started to work when he’d been wriggling his way out to be hatched. Or they’d been working all along, but had no light to see until he was nearly outside. Either way, though his mother’s nest was almost black darkness itself, he knew suddenly that he could see, and that this emotion, or sensation, he did not quite know which it was, would be the master of his mind from that moment forward, along with his sense of smell, from whose dominion any functioning organic memory will never have escape.
He was also aware, almost at once, that he was living no longer in the loving fluid of his mother’s body, but in the true and outside air. At first the separation from his mother was so terrible that he almost felt he would collapse and die on the spot. But after a few moments of not dying after all, he realized that he could breathe this air freely, and sense its movement and temperature (the nest was very warm but felt chill to his scale-less, skinless mutilated little body). And most importantly, he could still smell; he could smell many of his siblings in the darkness around him, and, of course, the steady reassuring reek of mother still close at hand, motionless in the darkness. He could hear the droning hiss and wind of her breathing from somewhere far overhead.
Finally, he knew that he was no longer a he, no longer one of his many brothers, but that when mother’s claws had bitten away the scales and the outer flesh, Shiny had become female, and was now a sister, now outside mother, and finally fully alive.
With these threefold revelations of self, Shiny licked herself all over to work up a good coat of healing jelly, curled herself into a ball to rest and grow a new shell, and began to dream.
She dreamed a long mixture of images and emotions. She knew they came from mother, and that they were important, so she knew she would remember them when she awoke. She dreamed of a funny-looking creature with no shell, and with limbs and a head so skinny and frail-looking that she was surprised it didn’t fall to pieces as she watched.
There were several of these creatures, and they were wriggling in a funny way (Shiny did not yet quite fully understand walking) through tunnels that were flat and hard looking and had almost no fluid in them at all that Shiny could see.
She felt hungry looking at these creatures, and she knew she wanted to sting, though she hadn’t grown a stinger yet, not being a mother herself. She dreamed and she dreamed, and she first doubled and then tripled in size, and kept on growing.
Her mother, calamitously gigantic in the darkness overhead, watched over her and the brood of her sisters with a loving appetite, and sent her dream instructions through the black air into her daughter’s minds. Hers was a lucky position; if her daughters succeeded in making their dreams a reality, she could bask in the pride of successful parentage. If they were not successful, she would have whatever mass they ate along their journey for nourishment, when she crunched their nimble bodies down her throat, and kept on laying more.
She dreamed for a very long time, until one day she felt herself beginning to uncurl. She drew her beautiful, long, elegant claws, still shining with healing jelly, away from her new face and coat of scales, peering into the darkness. She felt her mother give her a name then, because of the way she looked in the nest's dim light, her healing coat still shining with gloss after long unknown years of dreaming.
She was ready to hear more about these creatures from her mother’s mind, and ready to go out of the nest and search them out, because she wanted to be good.
She was ready to hear more about these creatures from her mother’s mind, and ready to go out of the nest and search them out, because she wanted to be good.
And also because, after all, her long long growing and dreaming had left her ever so hungry.
Bonus!
It turns out my drawing program has a feature that lets me make time lapse videos of whatever I'm drawing, so while I was putting together the Shiny portrait above I let it do its thing and this is how it came out, in case it's interesting to see how it goes. (The time lapse of me actually working on it involves a lot more snacking and video games.) Thanks for reading as always!
It turns out my drawing program has a feature that lets me make time lapse videos of whatever I'm drawing, so while I was putting together the Shiny portrait above I let it do its thing and this is how it came out, in case it's interesting to see how it goes. (The time lapse of me actually working on it involves a lot more snacking and video games.) Thanks for reading as always!
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