The Great Devourer

I was born of earth and darkness into a prison of cold, hard stone. My prison was devoid of light. To say my world was black, would suggest there was color, in reality there was none. I knew only what I could feel, hear, smell, and taste - the rough, gritty feel of rock; the slimy pool of water whose living entities nibble my toes and tickled the soles of my feet; and, then there was the Chasm.

The Chasm was not simply an opening into the bowls of the earth. It was a living, breathing entity. I heard it sucking in long, deep breaths of cold air that it would expel days later musty and hot. To shout into the Chasm caused it to retort in a chanting mockery of my voice. Its gaping mouth was eternally hungry, swallowing stones and boulders as though they were drops of water to be caught on its tongue. Not once did I hear a stone hit bottom. For the Chasm will never be filled. Not with a thousand boulders upon a thousand boulders for it is the Great Devourer.

The Chasm whispered to me in my sleep, and I knew I must silence its voice if I wished to live. I tore at the walls of my prison, removing chunks of rock and mud with my bare hands and tossing every ounce down it's throat. I lived in pain. My hands bled throughout the day and scabbed over at night, only for my wounds to reopen with another days work. I say day and night, though one does not know the passing of time when one never sees the moon, stars, or sun.

A day consisted of working the stone with my hands until I was tired. When I was hungry, I would eat whatever I could find. Whether it meant some grime or moss that grew on the walls and floor of my prison, or one of the fish-like creatures that lived in my pool, for one would not recognize them as normal fish. They had a bony shell around their head, and their flippers felt like legs trapped in a sack of skin and scales. One might think they were amphibious, but out of the water they did not live long.

After what must have been many months, perhaps even years, my hands hardened to the task. I no longer felt pain or bled, and I was able to bore into all forms of stone. Before, what I could not even scratch with stone on stone; I was, now, able to leave great gashes in with my new and powerful tools. Each finger was a pick, my hand a shovel, and my arms were powerful enough to pound them into stone.

I worked with the single purpose of satiating the Chasm’s hunger. I burrowed in all directions making thirty to forty tunnels until I clawed into a passage not of my making. It took me only moments to realize the walls of the passage were old. They felt older than even the walls of my prison. They were slick and smooth, as though worn down by the Chasm’s breath over many ages.

This gave rise to a new thought. It had never occurred to me that there might be another, like me, clawing through the darkness. For you see, all I knew was my pool, its inhabitants, my tunnels, and the Chasm. I had a new goal now, to find the maker of the passage.