An Awakening
© Bryan Beal
For millennia, the slumber had continued since the first seed had been planted there among the other giants. Giants whose boughs reached to the clouds that scudded on the winds of ancient breath, standing watch over a vast land denuded of civilisation or those who would come to establish it on these shores.
The slumber was deep and comatose until those first bipeds arrived and began to make noises around him. The whispers were no more than a brushing graze against the very limits of his consciousness, a ripple on the surface of the calm unconsciousness that had been his for aeons past. As more came, more whispered and the whispers became sounds. Sounds added to sounds and became voices. More voices added to voices and they became words and then strings of words. Words imploring and need. Words of reverence and awe.
The voices knew nothing of what heard their words of request and honour. They new nothing of the his slumber that had started to end, an awareness that began to rise from the shadows of the dark prison in which he found himself. With tentative ripples that emerged from the core of his mind, he stretched and tested his awareness, sending his spirit out in small steps.
The once great giants were gone. All that remained was himself and the pathetic remnants of a place now desecrated by the bipeds. The voices had begun to dull and recede from his hearing. The words were no more, but by then it was too late. The point of his own rising had passed and he was destined to rise again.
Lights, noise and voices came suddenly to him. He watched and observed from the safety of his prison, now his refuge in his time of weakness. The words reached him again from those who were nearby in the failing sun of the ending winter's day. They had noticed one of their own missing. He had seen the biped wander too close to his prison three nights before. A morsel, a snack. Someone had found the physical husk a day earlier today.
The taste of bipeds lent energy and recovery began to accelerate towards awakening. He felt his mind and soul expand and he was able to reach further. He took another. And another. And more.
The voices returned. Louder and more solemn than he could remember. These voices were tinged and stained with fear. They did not come too close. They remained a distance from him and he left them alone, as the ancient ones had agreed with him.
Yet more came. Thrill seekers who came at night, on a dare or challenge. On the 13th of May, the last one came. A name was spoken from the biped to himself. Sornorthq. He then remembered himself. Sornorthq the Many-Aged. The Sundered. Sornorthq the Slumberer.
No more. The last one, a thing called Jason Tribett, ventured too close. A tentacle reached for him and snatched him from off the ground in a flash of speed. No more slowness for Sornorthq. He pushed open all of Tribett's orifices, ripping soft organs out of the way. Tribett had no time to even cry out. His throat full of Sornorthq's imploding being that was crushing his own soul in the weight of aeons of patient anger.
And then the mind collapsed. Sornorthq fed on the last vestiges of Tribett's life and memories. Every one torn from his psyche and soul with merciless vengeance and hate. A hate born of the natural order of things. A hate birthed in the very nature of the universe, that unknown, terrible darkness of ice and heat that hated all life in it. Sornorthq laughed between the fragmented shards of Tribett's being. Sornorthq was the anti-thesis of life. He was the servant of the universe's natural order.
His awakening showed him a waiting planet. Ignorant and asleep, more so than he had ever been. A feast.