Chthonic: Weird Tales of Inner Earth by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Martian Migraine Press
Published: 2018-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

TENDING THE CORE

ADAM MILLARD

For billions of years they circle the core, four impervious titans riding upon colossal diamond bicycles. They know not why they ride, just that they must. Having never encountered each other—they remain equidistant at all times, therefore existing thousands of miles apart—each titan believes it is alone, a sole rider singlehandedly tending the core.

Never stopping.

An ethereal perpetual motion machine, clunking and wheezing and yet as robust as the day the riders set out.

Ka’al, the Great Black Rider, one day begins to consider its purpose as it completes rotation after rotation of the outer core. “There must be a reason!” it bellows into the abyssal tunnel ahead, still pedalling as quickly as its gargantuan legs will go. Its language is like none that has ever been spoken before, its voice a plangent lamentation which startles even Ka’al as it hits the mile-high tunnel walls on either side and returns, slightly altered in pitch and timbre.

All at once, hundreds of questions proceed to besiege Ka’al’s previously vacant mind: What am I? What have I been doing? Where did I come from? When did I start riding? What is this place, whose walls and darkness imprison me so? Why is it so important that I circle the core time after time? One question follows another, and yet Ka’al cannot find the answer to any of them. It has come to accept its surroundings as infinitude; its unremitting cycling—around and around, a trillion times before resetting its internal counter to zero once again—a congenital defect for which there is no known cure.

For three whole circuits of the ceaseless tunnels, Ka’al considers its significance in the grand scheme of things, arriving at the conclusion that, somewhere out there, someone has the answer.

Whether subconsciously or unconsciously, the speed at which Ka’al rides through the abyss reduces. It has never happened before, but Ka’al feels the gradual change. Two-thousand-miles-per-hour becomes eighteen-hundred. Eighteen-hundred becomes fourteen-hundred. Ka’al knows it should not allow this to go on, for who knows what might happen should it stop altogether. The tunnels could collapse inward, burying the rider there beneath miles and miles of rubble for all eternity. The ground might open up beneath the smooth diamond wheels of Ka’al’s bicycle, plunging him into a bottomless void.

But then again, nothing might happen.

And that is far too appealing to Ka’al for it to increase its velocity once again.

One-thousand-miles-per-hour.

Five-hundred.

It is barely moving now, and sees the walls around it clearly for the very first time. They’re beautiful, peppered with things that glisten in the gloom, and it is almost too much for Ka’al to take.

Two-hundred.

One-hundred.

A silence has descended upon the tunnel. The Great Black Rider has grown so used to its own mechanical clamour that the sudden hush is almost twice as deafening.

Fifty.

Twenty.

No, you mustn’t stop! You have to go on, lest something terrible happen!

But stop Ka’al does, and nothing terrible occurs, at least, not immediately. There is only silence and stillness, to which Ka’al does not know how to react. However,

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