Once upon a time there was a little creature born into a field of darkness. It knew that it existed. It could feel that it existed. However, it did not know what existed around it, for it had eyes but could not see.

It could hear and it could feel, and eventually it learned that it could taste, but it could not see.

This creature, gradually over time gaining energy from sucking away at any growing lichen found covering a surface, shuffled and made its way around, and gradually it learned the small area around it. It learned the feel of cold stone and sharpened stalagmite, growing down, and it knew how to go around certain areas, but it did not know how far it could go and it feared going too far. Sure, it could find its way back, but it didn’t know if it could.

So much of the creature’s directions and navigation was based on understanding objects and proximity, and a little distance away from where it was most familiar, it could go fine. This helped when it came to taking in more food, of course, as things grew at varying rates and to scour one spot would mean that it would not be getting food from it for a long time; a lesson it eventually learned.

Going too far from the familiar, and the space became featureless. The creature could go backward from there, but there was no telling if it would go backward correctly. What if it turned? What if it went in the wrong direction? And turning around didn’t mean it would turn to face the right way, either.

This creature wondered what the organs that had coverings that opened and closed were, and wondered what purpose they served. When not covered, everything was dark. Everything was invisible. There was nothing that they provided. When covered, it was the same. The creature still felt somewhere in there that it was better to keep them open. They never knew. Maybe the organs would do something some day, but there was no telling as to how long it would take to reach that day.

As the creature grew, its food sources were not growing back quickly enough to match its increased consumption, and there came some days where the creatures was finding more hunger within itself. Eventually this would mean that it would have to go further if it were to survive, but it feared. It feared this featureless expanse. It feared going further and getting lost, and never finding a way out. Never being able to return. It feared not knowing what could happen. It did not understand mortality, but it knew that being hungry was not what it desired.

And its food grew more scarce, and its periods of hunger grew longer, and so it found itself no choice but to venture further. One last patch of lichen consumed, and it started making its way to the featureless place.

At the least, the creature knew that a stretch was featureless. It had prodded here and there, and it found itself lucky to be able to come back each time it checked. However, it had never gone the whole way, and it didn’t know how far it went, anyway.

the creatures approached the area, and it set out carefully at first. Carefully and with hesitation, but it needed to find a greater source of food. It needed to find something that could help it survive for a longer period of time. Something that meant that it wouldn’t be spending more and more time seeking out its food. And so it went.

The darkness of everything seemed heavier in this space, though maybe it was due to the unfamiliarity. It proceeded carefully, and picked up its pace gradually, for there was nothing there. It was all flat and smoothed out and, whilst the same stone as everywhere else, absolutely featureless.

The creature walked for so long that it began to wonder as to if it was still on the ground. It knew that it was moving, but it could not tell, for how uniform the space was. It kept going and going, and it went for hours, and perhaps days. Time didn’t seem to matter and the creature knew not any difference anyway.

And the creature grew hungrier and hungrier, and its energy started to dwindle, and it began to slow. All seemed like nothing had changed, and the creature could have been walking in circles for all it knew, and it did not know.

Eventually a crack appeared in the fabric of the darkness, and it was a slither. A small cut, and the creature wasn’t sure what this meant. It saw it and was distracted by it as it walked, and instinctively it turned its head as it walked, its unused organs sensing this thing, and the creature proceeded to walk into an object as it looked at this thing.

Suddenly stopped and suddenly feeling a sense of hesitation it had not felt for a while, the creature’s first choice was to move as far away from this thing as it could, but it did not go with that choice. It’s second was to carefully approach, see what was there.

It approached this change in the reality it knew, and it looked at it from close. It could feel another object near it, and that object quite easily moved, and swung open, and suddenly there was greater detail. This tear became larger as the object moved, and there was so many things visible that the creature had not seen before. The tear surrounded it, but did not swallow it, and the creature noticed that it no longer walked on darkness, and instead stood on something new.

Carefully the creature continued into this new thing, and eventually it found a lichen to eat, and so it ate. And carefully it explored this new space, this new thing, and it left the darkness it knew behind.

The time it took to write one thousand words: 18:22:78

With this one I was thinking of ending it on a grim note. I had ideas of making it sudden, too. These came to me as I was writing, but I decided to not do that. It’s a bit of a slow bit of writing and it’s not great, but I felt the ending that came about works better than going for something a bit heavier.

Written at work.