I do not know how long I stand there at the precipice of the burrow, looking out into the great expanse outside our world. It is beautiful, but it is also terrifying. No monster could be as frightening as the sudden realization that everything goes on forever in a great emptiness that will never be filled.
I am eager to prove myself in battle against the lesser-wyrm, a child of the great beast that stalks the planet. Tradition states I may only carry one spear and one knife. If the blade breaks, then I am prepared to destroy the beast with my bare hands. All night I have been drinking the brew of the braves. My head is clear. My eyes see far.
Today, I walk on the surface of the planet alone. There are no hunters with me, no warriors, no guardians. I will return to the burrow with the head of a lesser-wyrm, or I will not return at all.
My eagerness for the hunt begins to fade several hours into the day. It is too bright, and it is too cold. The heat from the sun is insufficient to keep me warm. Many have died from exposure out here on the sands of the over-world. As much as the beauty of the world beyond excites me, I know this is not where I belong. From the darkness I have come, and to the darkness I will go.
It does not take long to find my prey. I see a long tail flicking through the air, bright red against brown dune and blue sky. It is a lesser-wyrm, playing amid rock and sand, diving into the earth and emerging again.
It sees me and lets out a shrill cry. I ready my spear, expecting it to attack me, but it does not come near me. Instead it whirls into the sky and then back into the earth before popping up through the sand again, only its head emerging to look at me with grains of sand drifting down from quizzical brow ridges.
This is the beast I have been sent to slay? I do not feel brave at the prospect. I feel cruel.
It is my calling to kill the wyrm. But I cannot bring myself to do it. Not because it is too powerful a creature, but because when I stare into its eyes, I feel something sentient staring back. Something playful, something that feels the very same joy of life I do.
I begin to question everything I have ever been told. Why must the children of the wyrm die? We live inside the burrow of the mother. Our world has been constructed by these creatures.
The elders say that they must be slain in order to prove maturity and bravery. But would it not be even more brave to capture the beast and tame it to my will?
It makes a chattering sound. I throw the rock and it follows after it, bounding over the sand and leaping into the air with wings spread to grasp the hard mineral between great jaws and crush it into dust.
These lesser-wyrms look dangerous, but if I am not hostile, it seems as though it will not be hostile either. Maybe there is another way.
* * *
I enter the burrow, triumphant, the head of the lesser-wyrm sticking out of the pouch on my back. I proceed to the main chamber of reckoning, the place where all our kind are gathered for the ceremony that will make me a warrior among our kind.
All eyes are on me as I approach the dais where the lesser-wyrm’s head is to be laid. But instead of pulling a bloody stump from my pouch, I draw the complete animal, perfect in its entirety and still lit with life and I set it free.
I had imagined this moment as a triumph. Above the ground, I played with the beast until it grew bold enough to come to my hand. It was not difficult to tame, for it was not greatly wild.
“It’s alive!”
I hear the screams of my fellows and at first I beam with pride, until it dawns on me that their cries are not of celebration, but of fear. Most of them have never seen a living lesser-wyrm. The burrows we live in are old and abandoned. We live on tales and stories of the time before we descended below ground. I thought they would relish the discovery that the lesser-wyrm need not be feared or destroyed, but instead panic ensues as all try to run from the beast that, blinded by the darkness, flies with equal panic, crashing into walls and swooping at random until the great warriors who came before me hurl their spears and bring the animal crashing to the ground, bleeding and screaming.
Kinasi, the eldest of the warriors, holds it down, a foot upon its writhing neck.