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It is called The Reviled Worm.

People used to love the worm (and when they did, they called it by a different name). Now, they resurrect it every twelve years, just to execute it again. Likely, the number has some religious significance. The worm doesn’t know what.

The worm wouldn’t mind, being not that happy to be dead, and very happy to be briefly alive again, except they don’t really feed it, whether before or after, and as a result it’s gotten smaller. It, the living mountain, with jaws wide enough to ride a horse through! In its last execution, the worm had been scarcely larger than a house. They had to rustle up new chains to hold it, as the former ones slid off like shed skin. It had embarrassed itself, too, that last time. It had said “please.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” and “don’t you love me?” and “wouldn’t you like it if I granted your wishes? You used to like that so much. Please?”

(In its weakened state, it wasn’t sure it was capable; but they didn’t need to know that.)

“Liar,” one of them had hissed– which hurt its feelings. “Kill the reviled worm,” others had shouted, and then things other than its feelings had been hurt, when the knife came down.

And now? It stood no taller than a mule! The next execution would be it last. Or the next, or the next after that. It couldn’t get much smaller. It couldn’t lose much more of itself. And when it got too small and too weak to rise from the dead – they’d move on. They’d consider it defeated, worthy of forgetting. And then it would die in the truest way. 

This was all in mind when it rose gasping from the funerary ash of its last incarnation. They buried it, after they burned it, and then they lay heavy planks of wood overtop, carved with sigils meant to keep the worm dead (which worked because the village thought it worked). With the planks dragged off by harnessed horses, and the sting of their symbology no longer keeping its mind in a state of oblivion, it was able to lament its situation for a brief while. Then, they sang the resurrection rites, their voices tugging it up, into the present, and into a body again. That’s when it started gasping and choking out soot. Its rings of scales shuddered against the surrounding earth, while its beady eyes shut fast. The bones of its inner ear carried vibrations from above, of a great many singing, dancing bodies. They’d be dressed beautifully, too. Wool and fur on some, disguising their short, pallid forms, their worminess so much like its own. Some of them would be dressed as monsters, in order to ‘scare’ the worm. And, because they thought it was scared, it was.

The worm’s spade-like head worked against the earth, tunneling toward the sun. It didn’t take much exertion to break through the surface. In fact, it over-committed, thrusting upward with such force that it sprouted up, up from the soil like a waving poppy, a totem surrounding by a singing crowd. Two of the monsters approached, rolling their heads and butting the goat-horns sewn into their costume. The worm quivered. Briefly, desperately it thought of returning to the cool damp earth. But no; the song pulled the rest of its coils free, the pink-grey of its scales glinting like precious metal.

The monsters held a chain-bridle. Like you might put on a horse, except crueler, because you’d never subject their poor soft mouths to those pinchy, yanky things, would you? Maybe you would. In any case, it opened its jaw obediently, and they forced the bit in, past its back-curved teeth, into the tender corner of its cheek. It fit. Last time, it hadn’t fit.

Had they done their calculations? Predicted how shrunken it would be? Or was it the force of their expectations that forced it into this shape?

The air shuddered with the dancer’s coordinated stamps. Fur-draped limbs swept, and dipped, their synchronicity hypnotic. The monsters pulled the worm’s bridle tight against its nose, sinching the chains until they bit into the sensitive scales of its snout, securing it shut. Its jaw muscles bulged. It could fit against the bridle, perhaps even force it open. But it never did. 

Before it had even fully emerged, the monsters were pulling, bringing it swaying down the steps of the alter, and into the streets proper. Its slender body spooled out, with its thick, blunted tail finally emerging. That tail – and the ringed pattern of its scales – is what caused them to malign it as worm. 

Vendors crowded the streets, and crowds crowded it too, the village swelled far past its natural capacity for the event. Roasted lamb, skewered songbirds, smoked and seasoned with heavy garlic. Breads of all sorts of breads, twisted, stretched, plumped and cut. Animals, breying. The people here took advantage of tourists, bloating this into a festival where the best of their livestock could be purchased, eaten, or fought. Mostly the fighting contained itself to roosters. Sometimes, dogs.

A dog barked, as the worm slithered past, but it would not be fighting. Someone loved it. That someone pulled at the scruff of its neck, kept it from trying its teeth against the worm’s pearlescent scales. 

Pain, hot and sick across its snout. The worm had slowed to consider the dog, and the monsters had yanked at it. “Stop,” it said, in its great deep voice, the first thing it had said in this new incarnation. Its jaws worked against the chains, forcing them ever-so-slightly open. “That hurts. Stop.”

The monsters pulled again, the chains sinching tight, and its followed, its tiny eyes dry of tears. In the shape it was in, it could not weep.

Many of those who lined the street, standing before white-washed buildings, had the pale skin and eyes of the worm’s former worshippers, but others stood out. A long-necked woman with curled hair narrowed coal-black eyes at its passage. A group of men, dusky and flat-cheeked, clutched at each-other in wary fear as its coils swept back and forth. And a pair of fawn-brown children followed, scampering after the worm, daring each other to brush at its scales. One succeeded; the worm heaved a sigh, the softness of the touch a contrast to the pain in its face. Warm, fetid breath swamped the closest monster, and for a moment, the monster flinched.

It flinched.

The monster, created to scare the worm, was itself afraid.

An invisible binding broke. The cobblestones of the street scraped against the worm’s underside. The sun beat warm against its back. And it raised itself, pulling again against the chains, so that those attached dangled and had to be pulled and held by others. It squinted its little eyes. Ahead lay the second altar, the one where it would be killed. Distance made the waiting figures small, but their knife glinted, nevertheless. Knife, it wasn’t really a knife – they’d adapted a two-person saw used to fell trees. Sharpened it and polished it, and lavished the wooden handles with intricate carvings, but still it held an ugly utilitarianism. And its teeth hurt. They hurt a lot.

“Please,” the worm said, the strength of its jaw tensing the bridle. “Didn’t you love me? I granted wishes! I served you!”

Someone threw a braided bread. It hit the worm’s eye. From the worm’s reaction, it might have been a boulder, for it recoiled and thrashed. And people laughed. They laughed! With the sound of mockery, its power bled, its scales softened, and the pinch of the chains produced budding beads of red. “Ow,” it said, and lowered to its belly, ready once more to crawl to its death. The two children had danced out of its path as it descended. They did not laugh. The boy looked serious; the girl awed. Likely, they had never seen a god before.

What had I resolved to do, it thought, as it was yanked and jeered at, with more loafs co-opted into throwing devices. What had I decided? That this would be a last incarnation, or one of the last. That I could not continue as I have been. That I need to fight. To rebel. To show them, truly, how Reviled their worm can be.

But as it came to this brave conclusion, its orientation changed, and it was pulled up, up the long steep steps of the twinned altar. Polka music played, jaunty and irritating, and belated tears swelled in the worm’s eyes. 

“I wish. . .”

Instantly, its attention shifted. Its massive head – and it was massive, its jaws thick with muscle, its curved teeth as long as the ribs of a cow – and it peered at the little girl who had spoken. One of the two children who’d been trying to touch its scales, her brother yanking at her, panicked like a rabbit by the swing of the worm’s head. “What do you wish?” it breathed, through the stretch and rattle of its chains. But the child’s voice caught in her throat; she stared in silence. Just as she seemed on the verge of speaking, a woman swept her up; then the children were gone, and it felt the bite of the metal again on its snout. The monsters had been pulling, oh had they been pulling, but that tiniest flicker of worship and want had been enough, just for a moment.

It distracted the worm too much, in the end. It didn’t remember, not until they’d crested the steps, with the town splayed out in a bustle of colours. They led it into the wooden stocks, and clapped down the top, pinching at its scales, to keep it in place – that’s when it remembered. It was supposed to fight, this time.

It hadn’t. It didn’t. Even as they brought the saw-toothed blade into position, it just squirmed and pled. “Remember when you loved me?” it said, and “Remember when you fed me?” and “Why are you so angry? What have I done?”

The first jags of the blade, it felt as a pressure, dulled by its pearly-grey scales. The climaxing of the music, paired with the screams and cheers from below, let it know more than anything that its death had begun.

When the saw bit through scale to jag its way across flesh and nerves, it screeched, and its long, slim body-that-was-also-a-tail thrashed across the steps, upsetting a torch, knocking a monster off its feet, but ultimately stopping nothing. They cut in time with the song, which it hated, as this weighed each beat with expectation, so that when the music swelled it thought not-again-not-again-not-again, but it always happened again. Blood spurted from its mouth at one sawing stroke. It was close to over. Usually, that brought relief. Not this time. It lolled its eyes to the sky, washed grey with threat of rain, the sun hiding behind clouds, and it thought, I want this. I want to be here, in this world.

I don’t want to die.

It held on as they sawed through its spine, and its trachea, and the thickest pulsing artery of its neck, and it held on when they worked extra hard to push through the last scrap of skin and scales on its belly. It held on as its head tipped forward and fell onto the altar stones, where one of its eyes darkened, and the other stared skyward. It held on as they gathered about it, presumably baffled by its continued-holding-on. “Why do you hate me?” it tried to breath, but it didn’t have lungs anymore. With a final, airless sigh, it let go. Both its eyes grew dim.

Its last recollection was their poisonous shouts of triumph.

Then, death. 

Any muted awareness it retained turned to nothing as planks were lowered across its buried ashes.Weakness and nothingness. It was enough to make a worm feel, well . . . nothing at all.

The worm didn’t know how long it stayed dead. 12 years, presumably, that was the pattern. When its body gathered back together in the soil, and its heart thumped the rest of its organs into some approximation of action, it just huffed, not moving. The call was easier to resist than usual; typically, it came to already in motion, its body shaping itself for the sole purpose of answering the summons. 

A single voice serenaded it, with a single set of drums. A bur, bur, bur that scarcely penetrated the earth. It could choose to ignore it. It could . . . but already, it wiggled up. 

Maybe they’ve changed their mind. Maybe they won’t kill me. Maybe they’ve remembered how to love me.

Things got stranger the closer it got to the surface. The song came muffled, low, as though the singer was near whispering. And the drumbeats were more of a pat-pat-pat, ripe with meaning, and certainly audible enough for the worm, but hardly the enthusiastic hammering it was used to. Either, this was a new showing of disrespect, or . . . it was a single person, trying not to be heard.

The worm dug a little faster. The muscles of its head went to work, aching pleasantly with use, its spade-snout shovelling through pounds of soil with scarce resistance. When it surfaced, the loose earth shuddering down its scales like rain, it blinked a few times, confused at the darkness. Never before had the worm been summoned at night.

At the edge of its altar knelt the girl child, lengthened with the passage of time into a lean and severe-looking woman. Stress lined her prematurely, cutting grooves alongside her mouth, but her growing smile softened the,

“Reviled worm,” she said, with a sort of tenderness typically reserved for children. “Devourer of a thousand bodies and souls.”

Oh, here we go, thought the worm. They were gifted! Why doesn’t anyone ever bring up that they were gifted? Everyone seemed very happy with me swallowing them up and adding to my mass, until they weren’t anymore, and how was I supposed to guess that they’d all change their minds? Why punish me for their fickleness, when I’ve never done anything but oblige!