The worm knew about darkness.
Blind from birth, void of consciousness in any traditional sense of the word, it did not know that it was also called the Syrox. Nor did it have any sense of how far it had traveled from home. On its native planet, Monsolar, where its species had been revered for thousands of years, it had been worshipped as a god and dreaded like the plague, its silken bag-tents clustering in the high branches and filling the nightmares of the local tribes.
For generations the elders and priests had spoken in hushed and reverent tones of the swollen, pale Wolf Worm that lived in the remote jungles. Their culture was embroidered with the graven images and death songs of a thing whose hive mind was informed by all the spirits of those it had devoured, their souls trapped for an eternity of undying torment, while fueling its unending hunger.
The worm knew about hunger.
Given the dread that it evoked among those who knew it best, its origins were ignominious in comparison. Each year, its newly hatched pupae swarmed in their countless trillions within the silken treetop bagtents. Growing, they soon fell from the nests into Monsolar’s unfiltered rivers, streams and swamps, destined to colonize the stomachs and intestinal tracts of anyone foolish enough to drink the unfiltered water. Gestation time could be slow, sometimes years, as the worm grew stronger in the bowels of its host.
It was in the small intestine of an otherwise forgotten inmate and Monsolarian named Waleed Nagma that the Wolf Worm had first arrived at the Hive, three years ago. Nagma had died unremarkably, seconds into his very first fight, but the Syrox larvae inside his gut—only a few millimeters long at the time—had survived. It had, in fact, already absorbed Nagma’s consciousness in the few seconds immediately following his body’s death, so he became the first of what would eventually become hundreds of tenants trapped inside the Wolf Worm’s mind.
Soon there would be more. So many more.
As the Wolf Worm found a home here, fattening its body on the blood of dead inmates, its mind had become a chamber of horrors, a prison within the prison where all the sentient and nonsentient beings that it had eaten were doomed to measure out an eternity by the yardstick of endless torment. It had spawned countless larvae of its own, and they had continued to breed down here, hungering and growing larger, but none had ever approached the size of the Wolf Worm itself.
Now, still as sightless as it had been on the day it had hatched, the worm was aware of its own existence only as a vast and endlessly renewing collection system of screams and agony. It thought of itself—in the rare moments that it thought at all—in the collective sense, not as “I” but as “we,” not as “mine” but as “ours.” Sleepless and restless, it knew nothing but the unending torment of those whose blood had fortified its continuous, slithering tour of these reconfiguring shafts and tunnels.
And hunger.
Always hunger.