Worm Mage

The snow was thick, but each individual grain was smoother and finer than any snow outside—the board wrapped around his finger like a snug little blanket, and if it really was the shedding of an old greater being, he certainly felt as though his finger was being pushed around by an invisible force now.

So, as he felt as though the snow moved his finger, he drew himself. A stickman. There was real giddiness in Ninmah's smile as she warped her chair over to sit by his side, their shoulders bumping as she peered at his drawings. He felt he was getting judged and tried to draw a little better, but there was only so much the snow could possess him and nudge his finger around. He finished his first drawing with him, his parents, and a small town by the shoreline of the continent.

He didn't remember the name of his town.

He didn't remember the faces of his parents, or anyone living in his town.

But he remembered them, and he drew them perfectly: colossal moths with wings made up of eyes, whirlwinds tearing through the lands with each and every flap. He drew their antennae sweeping through the town, he drew their eggs crushing men and women alike like meteorites, and he brushed the town away alongside the head of one of his parents. Which one he'd lost that day wasn't important. He'd just lost one of them.

Ninmah pursed her lips, but she didn't speak.

He continued.

He drew dozens of vessels sailing across the seas, a hundred people crammed in tiny wooden boxes to prevent their scents from leaking out. It didn't work. The snow trembled as he drew legs emerging from the seas, and titanic water bugs splitting the vessels down in half. It was difficult to draw the splinters and the blood and the screaming when he only had one colour to work with, but for the screaming, maybe he could draw the air twisting like whenever the Worm Mages used their warping voices?

Good idea.

He shook the snowboard lightly to make the landscape vibrate, and once he'd erased everything and everyone but himself in the centre of the board, he continued. The snow made him draw a road. Rolling hills. A forest of giant mushrooms, a great pyramid in the distance. Soldiers had told him and about a thousand other survivors that the road to the Capital was safe, but he struggled to draw the sheer number of giant ants bursting from the hills, tearing up those who were strongest and those who had the will to fight back. He drew himself running towards the Capital—as best as he could with those stick limbs, anyways—and then he drew the crest and flag of the Attini Empire, flying above the pyramid.

He drew the army.

He drew the mortars, the rifles, the blunt axes, the dozens of different soldier ant battalions.

He drew the throne of the Empress, Her Four Families, and the Spore Knights who fought at her beck and call.

He drew in his empty circle of a face the crest of the Attini Empire, and in his hands the rifle of a Bullet Ant Soldier.

He drew himself marching towards the blackrock mountains in the Hagi'Shar with an army of floating heads, and falling face first in the snow—but then he stopped, raised his head, and stared straight at Ninmah long and hard.

She tilted her head with a small, uncertain smile, and he figured she wouldn't be angry even if he messed up his final drawing.

So he drew her, the Worm Mages, and Immanu behind him. He did his best to give all of them proper faces, but if there was a god in the snow, he didn't receive any more blessings. Ninmah's face came out especially deformed: her nose was crooked, her eyes were too far apart, and to be honest he wasn't even sure why he even attempted putting faces on stick people to begin with. It wouldn't have looked good in any world… but Ninmah laughed and slapped him on the back when she saw his earnest attempt nevertheless, leaning forward so she could smirk up at him.

"Is that how you see us?" she teased, her smile growing ever wider. "It's accurate, you know. To outsiders without the Whiteworm Class, we look like… that. Our warping voices deform the world around us so much that our faces are blurred, a cold mist permanently twists around our inorganic bodies, and wherever we go, a storm follows. I'm sure that, if we were to meet another soldier from the Attini Empire like you, we'd look nothing like how we look to each other. It's only because you have the same class as we do now that we even look like normal people to you."

He scoffed, picking up the last snack worms and popping it into his mouth.

You do realise none of you look normal to me, right?

"White hair, metal skin, silver veins, blue eyes… you all look like walking machines to me."

Ninmah snorted, rolling her eyes. "My toughness level is seven. You can throw me off a cliff and I'd be perfectly fine."

"No, you would probably be hurt. And your toughness level is at seven already? I thought I told you to spread your points out evenly."

"They are evenly spread!" she protested. "All my attribute levels are at least seven now! Maybe some of the younger kids didn't listen to me, but all of us elders are listening to you diligently!"

"Hm. Alright, then. As long as you do not shoot too far ahead of me, I will… still… have a role…"

"..."

Unbeknownst to him, he'd opened a wormhole on the back of his head, and though he couldn't see where it connected to, he knew where it connected to.

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His mind.

The inside of his head.

And from that wormhole he couldn't see, his own warping voice made his head pound, pain stabbing through his ears and into his brain—a signal that he was exerting energy, but not by too much. It was a tolerable amount of strain for three sentences that physically deformed the world around him.

The wormhole… is connecting the 'physical world' with my 'mental world'.

It is warping my mental voice into reality.

"... You know, our older siblings and parents used to say that the basis for our magic is 'laziness'," Ninmah said, her own voice reverberating across the railings, the shelves, and the windows. Her lips were pressed in a thin, smiling line the entire time. "The worms are slow, lumbering beasts, so if we want to use our magic, we must be slow as well. The three main uses of our magic all revolve around this 'laziness': we hate walking long distances, so we open wormholes and skip the journey. We hate carrying heavy things, so we open wormholes and bypass all the heavy effort. We hate having to open our mouths just to talk, so we open wormholes on the back of our heads and just warp our voices into existence."

Then she leaned even further forward, tilting her head.

"So, how does your 'voice' feel?" she asked, grinning from ear to ear. "I told you your voice would reach me 'In-Between', didn't I?"

"..."

He shook his head, looking up at her with a half-hearted scowl.

"You say using your biomagic brings you no strain, but every time I try to make a wormhole, I still suffer," he said, counting each word carefully, feeling his stamina draining up by the second. To speak, he had to maintain that little tiny wormhole on the back of his head, and his stamina was still severely lacking. "All of you are still… monsters."

Ninmah laughed, wiping tears from her eyes. "You're just weak! Your aura isn't even half of ours!

He groaned and pulled himself upright in his chair. "You are free to give me your share of Boreus meat if you want to take pity on me," he muttered. "I will stop speaking now. This pains me. Each second I maintain the wormhole drains my essence by a non-insignificant amount."

By the time he willed himself to stop pulling his words right out of his head, his headache was starting to swell into something debilitating. It was all he could do to pull his book closer to him while pushing Ninmah's snowboard back to her—he could still stay awake to continue memorising the words and letters he'd just learned, so until he felt he'd brute-forced his way through the book enough for a single, he wouldn't leave the library.

Unless Ninmah wanted him to leave.

This was her house after all.

But for her part, she pulled both his book and her snowboard closer to her, chuckling with a soft shake of her head as she flipped the second page open.

"Here," she said, drawing another landscape on the snowboard with one hand while she pointed at the words on the page with the other. "This book's an introduction to all the big territories in and around the Attini Empire, by the way. These words read 'Northwestern Swarmsteel Factories'. Are there really giant biometal hands that move on their own to make weapons and armour out of bug parts?"

Sensing she wasn't going to let him go until he'd learned enough words for the night, he decided to lay his head down on the table.

At least like this, his headache would hurt less if he only responded with a few words each time.

"Not hands," he mumbled. "Conveyor belt claws. Grab bug parts. Drop weapons."

Ninmah nodded absentmindedly before turning the page, erasing her drawing. A second one appeared as quickly as the first. "How about this? This reads 'Spore Knights, Thralls of the Empress'. Why don't they look anything like you? They're wearing… um, wearing full metal armour, huh? And they're wielding big flat axes?"

"Spore Knights, divine guards of the Empress," he said. "Strongest soldiers in Empire. Can probably fight Worm Mages one versus ten."

"Frightening! And this? What's this little bug pulling this 'caravan' box called?"

"Giant enslaved ant. Tamed by the Tamera from another Swarmsteel Front."

"And this? The 'Royal Ayapacha Military Academy'? What's this?"

"School. Lots books."

The exchanges continued well past midnight, and with each word he strained to twist into existence, the more excited Ninmah only seemed to become. As his eyelids became heavier and heavier and he found himself wanting to get up from his chair, she quickly warped away and back with a blanket over his shoulders—only to continue bearing down on him with ten new questions a minute, most of which he could barely return a coherent response.

But he was expanding his vocabulary bit by bit.

And, another hour past midnight, she sprang the question on him by whispering into his ear.

"Just sleep here from now on," she said, cheeks rosy. "The other elders and I have been thinking, you know, maybe we shouldn't leave our honoured guest in the cabin outside the boundaries of the village, so we've been thinking about who should take you in. Wanna stay with big sis from now on?"

… He didn't really care either way, so he managed a small nod as he resisted the urge to sleep for just a little longer.

He wanted to try pronouncing one word he could now read from the book.

As she started drawing her final landscape for the night, he lifted his head a little and scanned the details: a town in an underground cavern, fields of wheat swaying like waves on a windy surface, and earthen-tiled roofs clumped up even more than the houses in Immanu. While she mumbled and scrubbed and tried to get all the details right, he went ahead of her and ran through the page she was reading off of—putting the words he didn't recognise with words he did recognise together to guess the subject of the whole page.

So before she could lift her snowboard to show him her final product, he spoke with a smidgen of confidence.

He knew how to read a little bit now.

"Alshifa," he said. "That… is read 'Alshifa', Sharaji Undertown."

And Ninmah rubbed his head with a bright smile, lulling him to sleep with a soft, quiet lullaby.

"... Good job," she whispered. "Here. Snack worm."