The Arms That Howl

In the wild lands of the northern Americas, between seven rock-grizzled cliffs and four withered forests, all covered over by spinnings of acrid steam leaking between realms, a pit lies in the land.

Those humans who heard the name call it the Pit of the Seven Knives. But it has another, older name. The insects called it Kl`kknnn. As we often ascribe meaning to things in order to elevate our own importance, one could translate this word as “Between.”

Have you thought of insects? The buzzing hordes whose members cause revulsion merely by appearing? No, you simply killed them. Crushed them underfoot, as callous as a brutish giant. Wiped their bodies away and forgot them.

They remember. Though their minds are small, they are made as groups. Tiny sparks animate their thoughts, flowing through the world to reach one another. Kill one, ten thousand feel the loss. Slaughter a hive and earn the enmity of millions more. The insects of this world had only the notion of survival upon which to count. These deaths over centuries became a collective pain so great that their ephemeral cores shuddered.

They had only one final recourse. The Inevitable could be called. When the Seventh Knife fell, crashing deep into the realm-plunged Pit, they could at last have their long-waited revenge.

One moon-shining night the first insects arrived. Darting moths and gnats, dancing in clouds around the trees standing a hundred feet back from the Pit (lest they too become swallowed and torn into the next dimension below). Over the next four days the crawling, wriggling swarms came. Entire plagues migrated from all Earth-corners within a thousand miles. Countless millions from the thinnest worm to the mightiest arachnids. They flooded the sky, dark clouds in blotted waves. And the land, blankets of twitching and mottled color. All surrounding the angry stone gape named the Pit of the Seven Knives, drowning the air for a hundred miles in torrential throat-cries.

And there they fought.

Spiders bit scorpions, who stung their killers. Flies collided with one another and dropped in grotesque fusion. Entire colonies of ants made war with other populations before turning on themselves. Thousands of feet stepping through yellow slime to spill more. Venom melting into soft bodies. Millions of tiny metallic screams. It was the most numerous, most savage war Earth has ever known.

In each insect there was both rage and regret. They killed until they died, their core of survival mutated into one of murder. And yet none bore ill will toward one another; none wished for the death of yet more brethren. They only knew it was all necessary.

The bodies collected. Piled upon the slick stone surrounding the Pit, staining it a glittering black-green with ichors and torn carapaces. The mystic spider called Meln’k, the size of a man’s head, she who knew the first song-line of the Wild Tribes and wrote the garbled riddle-secret, lasted the longest. Her fangs oozed with brethren-blood, which she stabbed over and over into beetles and locusts. Until two legs stuck fast in the entrails of a scorpion called Hkort, and a hail of wasps stung her down.

Generations died. Laying down to join the land-crust.

For this was how they must summon and become their god. Only he, only the one whose name was buzzed at windows and lamps for millennia could make the roar that would call to their giant otherworldly cousins. Only he could sound the Inevitable Call.

In hours it was over. The Insect War ended as the last gnat fell. The barren patch around Kl`kknnn returned to harrowing silence, now drenched in the corpses of Earth’s insects. A day they rested, juices congealing, clenched limbs relaxing. Their painful sacrifice, their last defiance against the giants called Man.

Then within the carpet, something shuddered. And twisted together. And heaved. The winds stilled, then retreated from the spectacle.

Exoskeletons jammed up against one another. Like misshapen blocks they built up something larger. Something a thousand thousand times larger than any of their dead members. Something huge, and heavy, an emblem of their long-suffered rage.

Until at last in the red-swathed twilight, the long-dead insect god Knk’k-lusz splayed its cobbled legs upon the landscape once more. Taller than the tallest man, its body constantly grinding against itself, the fleetingness of insect life given titan shape. At every step carcasses sloughed off its chitinous body, shells clattering like the soft parts did in life, a hollow chorus. More were slurped up from the dense collection baked upon the gray stone as it dragged toward the rim of Kl`kknnn.

Knk’k-lusz came to the rim of the moss-dampened gorge of Kl`kknnn. Its mind roiled, hot with fury over the collected memories of its fallen worshippers. It was them all, and the more. For its task was clear. A god formed of its people served both its purpose and theirs.

It was at last time.

And so all the dogs, the birds and the humans within a thousand miles heard the roar that night. Heard the grotesque howl of the Inevitable Called. Felt it in the ground-rattlings, saw it in the tree-limbs’ panicked vibrations. A tearing of the skies, viscous shatterings. Bird flocks flew any direction that led them away. Children ran to their parents’ beds.

Deep in the Pit of the Seven Knives, the passage to Lu’kk-Enoth the martyred insects called Kl`kknnn, the creatures of the other realm heard the insect god.

He had made the call. It was time.