His landings were never (Wrow!) good. But bouncing into the forest (Wrowwro!) floor never phased him either, the snap-snarl-shine (Wroro—!) of his crown ricocheting him from tree to (Wowoworr!!) tree was almost more fun than the flying that started it!

“Ehe—eheeh! Heheha!”

He came to a rolling, tumbling stop, flopping over tree roots and kicking his feet as his tail stretched long and his spine gave a loud pop!. He swiped away the feathers caught between his dripping teeth on a furry wrist.

The worm was used to the smell of himself, but knew better than to let the blood dry and get itchy and sticky on his fur. He crunched the fragile bird with his big teeth, pulling the pulp further into his gullet where the small teeth could grind and grind and grind, the vibration making his head tickle as he rolled off the root and scampered under brush and leaf and over rock and stump.

Good summer sunshine, hot summer wind, best summer weather. Summer better than winter, which was short and dark and full of sleeping. Winter less fun than spring, with the fresh shoots and sweet roots and plenty of little eggs and tiny critters. Spring nicer than fall, despite the sweet fruit and the nesting leaves and the fat fish and the sleepy hares and burrowing toads.

Summer. Summer the best of all. And this was the worm’s sixth summer.

He lifted his head and sniffed through the heat, something new on his pallet that he didn’t like. Sour, like bad blood left in the sun, hurt like thorns in the throat. Bad, but the same direction as water. Fresh water by the sound, sweet and crisp, good for washing and splashing and fish. Thin summer fish still better than no fish at all. Something silent beyond the water. Not enough noise in that direction. Same way as the smell. Odd. Wrong. Bad.

But different. Different meant new and interesting and fun and for eating.

And if it was not for eating, then there was the crown, and the crown made things fun fun.

Nice feathers the worm tucked into leaves, broad and cut with his claws to fold into layers, tougher than normal leaves, and not the best for eating. He’d seen woven leaves on other worms (fought them too). He’d seen pretty things on other walking beasts (fought them too). These feathers were nice, so he wrapped them in the leaves, and slipped the leaves in his belt (not fought this, made this), and took off running through the forest, up the tree, across the branches, and leaped!

“Wroworow!!”

He knew the right path through the branches, flashing through the canopy and counting shards of blue summer sky as he went. Eighty-four, eighty-three, eighty-two, eighty-one! He counted down from a hundred. Last year he had counted down from twenty, but this year he would count down from a hundred.

The ants had taught him counting when he burrowed into their hill for winter. They had tried to eat him, but he had eaten them instead until they walled him away. So, he ate their food, and slept in their hill, and in the spring they had told him they would not try to eat him if he did not try to eat them and that they liked his crown and wanted to know what he liked too. And he had almost said food, but he had seen the paper in the ant’s hands, and he had not smelled a smell like the marks on the paper (paper is just wood with the tasty bits washed out, not good for eating).

The ants had taught him counting, and wording, and in return he had not eaten the ants. Instead, he had eaten the other ants that tried coming into the hill when he was learning counting. He had eaten fifteen and a half other-ants before they ran away.

Then his ants had given him something white and wispy and more than food and better than counting and it tickled more than the hardest bones and sweeter than the ripest fruit. And it had closed his wounds, and dulled his pain, and cleared his sleep, and sated, for once, his hunger.

He liked spending winter with the ants. He got to sleep in the warm and the dark and grow more arms and more fur and eat more other-ants if they woke him up. He got to counting and wording and making, like his belt and his purse, and the little metal clasps on the belt and the purse that only his ants could make.

He liked the ants.

He liked flying too.

Across the branch, dash the length, claws dug deep, arms flung wide—“Wroweeee!!”

Into the bright sunlight and above the sparkling water and the grey river rocks and through the waterfall mists and under the ugly oak’s nose? Ugly oak??

Nose???

The worm landed on his head in the water and trumpeted alarm, claws flexing in the cold as he spun his body down, touched his toes to the rocks, and sprung back up.

The water was fast, the falls right behind him (safe falls, had fallen many times, easy squishy rocks for crown to bounce off) as he bobbed like a clump of leaves under the mammoth snout of a wooden beast resting over his river. The nose was dripping with moss and ferns, attached to a face broad as a hill and sprouted with an oak tree, a massive oak tree, a mountain of an oak tree that went back and up and high too far for the worm to see all the way to the top. The canopy stretched too far, not too far for the horizon but too far for a tree.

The face of the tree was marked with a gold halo around its brow, pulsing with light like the sun if the sun was sterile and blinding and bad.

The water carried him over the falls, and the sleeping oak did not see him. He flopped like floatsam on the rocks below, curling himself up and kicking through the white rapids, for once not enjoying the bubbles tickling his belly or fizzing at his mouth.

He only got a few strokes away from the falls when he had to kick hard and dive.

There was a new rock in the river, attached to the ugly oak. Not a foot, more a toe, a boulder of swollen burl that blocked his river and sent the water screaming at a sharp bend and carried him with it. He slammed his back into it with a gurgle, toes curled to keep his claws from nicking the bark as the water pulled him along.

The sweet water was bitter and gross where it touched the ugly oak, and two more harsh diversions later the worm had enough and kicked his way to shore, retching at the unholy ichor bleeding into his river.

“Worm?”

“Oh, Worm!!”

Voices and the pleasure of devotion pulled him into the tree line, and a moment later he was looking up at Caterpillar and Dave, who looked exactly like Caterpillar but was called Dave. They were both worms like him.

He pointed back at the river. “The fuck?”

“Real bad,” said Dave.

“Champion Oak,” said Caterpillar. “Seven-toed Oak.”

“Trees don’t have toes,” the worm said. Trees also didn’t show up in one day, or one night, and become bigger than mountains. “Do they?”

“Oak does,” Caterpillar said. “Can we eat it?”

“Tastes bad,” he said, and let his tongue unroll from his gullet, wiping the aftertaste of ichor off on his fur.

“Oh well,” sighed Caterpillar.

“Guess we’ll die,” agreed Dave.

“What? No.” That was stupid. The worm was dumb but he was not stupid. “Oak got here. We can get oak to go away.”

They laughed at him, but they also wept that aroma he couldn’t smell and filled him with the flavor he couldn’t taste. His bones felt stronger and fur thicker and claws sharper.

“We? No way,” said Caterpillar.

“Me then,” the worm decided. And the feeling got stronger, the devotion seeped into his teeth. “I’ll do it.”

“You’ll do it?” Dave asked, pushing the fur out of their blue eyes.

“I’ll do it,” the worm decided.

Dave’s eyes went pearly white, and the vibration that built in their gullet rocked them so hard they made a purr the other worms hadn’t heard before. Listening to it, leaning into it, feeding from it, felt so good.

“Okay, you do it,” Dave said. “Get a name first.”

“Why?”

“Gotta tell the Queen after, right?”

This was so complicated. He could have just eaten Dave but Dave smelled too sweet for eating.

“Ant Queen calls me latchkey.” Because it was a thing in ant tunnels made of metal that click-clacked, and he liked the click-clack, even if his ants didn’t like if he click-clacked the clickity-clack when they weren’t with him to clackity-click it after.

“Lackshee?” Slurred Dave, because Dave was stupid.

“Leshky,” tried Caterpillar, who was dumb.

“Close enough,” decided Leshy, who didn’t know why anyone would tell his ant queen anything after he got rid of the ugly oak ruining his river.

It was easy to do. (<- recommended song)

He just went around the Oak first, because it was big, and he counted all the toes, which were more than seven of, and he counted the branches when he got bored on the long flight back to his ants. And his ants were very scared because something very heavy and big with bad roots had destroyed half their outer compounds and was very close to their main entrance and this was bad for some reason although Leshy had counted and they still forty-seven other entrances.

“It’s summer,” he said. “Gimmie metal.”

His ants didn’t want to give him metal, they didn’t like giving metal to anyone, not even him, not even for pretty feathers or woven leaves or when he ate one of them.

“Hmm. Need metal,” he said, disappointed that his ants still tasted like normal ants, pulpy without crunchy and sour instead of sweet. He looked up at his ants’ queen. “What you want for metal?”

“You’d have to get it yourself, Green Crown.”

“Leshy,” he corrected, forgetting to really chew that last leg and hacking it back up for his teeth again. “Where’s metal?”

Ant Queen shook her head. “Far too deep for us to tunnel with this current crisis over our heads!”

Leshy stopped eating the ant leg, stared at his ant queen, and realized she was stupid.

“Okay.”

He put his claws into the floor and dug. He went right through (wrow!) the ceiling of the main ventilation shaft and crown-bounced his way down several meters before finding purchase and tunnelling again. He listened to Mother this time until he reached Warehouse 7-N, because 7-N was too big to bother going around and there was only harvested chitin and glass stored there so it was fine.

He dug until he found stone, startling Mother. She helped him sniff out his ants’ tunnel, and here he used his sharpened claws and strengthened teeth to dig rock instead of dirt. The crown was warm on his head, and made the grinding rumble in his head like a little song he could sing while chewing. He decided that as long as it was still summer when he was finished then this would work.

He brought the stone that tasted different and more like metal back to his ant queen, and told her: “Make metal, I gotta get rid of the Oak.”

Stunned, they asked how he would do it and he told them, so they made the ore into metal. They formed the metal into nails like his, to make it easier. One hundred nails, so he could count them.

One of his ants was dumb and thought he wanted to tie metal nails to his nails, and he said no, but they said why not? And he said:

“Don’t care. Do what you want. Are you done? Gimmie.”

His ants’ eyes were full of white, and Leshy could hear more than he’d ever heard in his life, from the pupae in the nursery two levels down to the ant queen pacing in her chamber above him. He wanted to shed his skin and get bigger, stronger, wormier.

“Come back safe,” his ants prayed. A lot of them. In the converted warehouse 2-H. He breathed in all the air and felt all the feelings and now he would get bigger, he just didn’t know how.

It was still summer when he left his ants.

The Ugly Oak was right over their hill.

Best way to kill a tree was to eat the roots, but these roots were bad, so blegh. Second best was this way, when the air was hot and humid, the best for foraging, but dangerous for flying.

Leshy flew anyway.

Trees don’t care about worms. Big trees don’t care about nails either.

Turns out, they do care about little green crowns worn by little green worms who stick little black nails into their bark. And he had one hundred nails, so he put them in a lot of branches, three and four and sometimes more, bashed in with a rock.

The ugly oak was too big to feel the nails; it was the bashing that woke them up.

[W-H-O-D-A-R-E-S-?]

Leshy didn’t say shit. He was a pile of leaves, among the leaves, being a leaf. Stupid worm on a dumb oak, a dumb oak who was too bloated-huge-gross-big to feel one worm who weighed as much as a worm carrying sixty-four iron nails.

It was getting dark. This was good. A bit of night time dark, but more of the bad time for flying dark.

The wind was blowing. It was blowing more and more, tearing off the Ugly Oak’s leaves, making the smaller branches sway, and forming a crack in their old boughs that Leshy found and drove a line of nails from the dry bark down to the bitter flesh.

[C-U-R-S-E-S-O-F-T-H-E-G-R-E-E-N-E-Y-E-D-Q-U-E-E-N-U-P-O-N-T-H-E-E-W-O-R-M-!-!-!]

“Uh-oh.”

This was hard to do. Now the branches kept moving, and sometimes breaking, and the acorns popped open with hornets and spiders and squirrels and mice and centipedes. Leshy would have eaten a few of them but he was too busy running, scratching, climbing, flying away from all that.

The wind was scattered, left, up, away, in, around. The sky was getting louder, the first spits of summer rain flying cold in his face.

Every jump he put his weight into a nail, driving them in. Didn’t matter where: dead wood, living, any, just wood or leaf or litter. He jumped seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three times, counting and ducking, dodging and driving, and decided he had too much metal.

Crossing the Ugly Oak’s halo was the dumbest thing his stupid worm self ever did. He’d thought he was on the back of the canopy, not the face, and when he jumped—

[T-H-E-I-F-O-F-D-I-V-I-N-I-T-Y-!-!-!]

His crown went hot cold hot hot cold. He screamed, claws splitting to the quick as his bones wracked and his fur tore and he fell thirty, forty, fifty feet.

No ricochet, just smashed bones and torn skin and fear, real fear, horrible bad awful scary fear.

But he broke his body on the ugly oak’s ugly ass fucking nose, and had to laugh at that.

He rolled his bleeding body over, all his inner fruits and bones mucked up as a meal for a baby worm on the ground somewhere, and grinned with his blue blood leaking past his teeth.

He wiggled his broken claws.

“Hi.”

The Ugly Oak’s two eyes were massive as moonpools, glowing yellow like twin suns if the sun had a twin that was ugly as a worm’s ass and pulsed like an overweight pupa.

But the best way to kill a tree was eat its roots.

“Bye.”

Second best was fire. From the sky.

Lots of sky-fire in summer.

The sky broke. Lightning forked hot and delicious toward tidbits of iron sitting in dry summer wood. Lightning riddled patterns in flesh and sand, hence why ants live underground, and where ants get glass. Ants are stupid but they’d not dumb.

Lightning ate iron, traveled through wooden flesh, and found more iron.

Mother’s bounty drove the sky mad and caught the Ugly Oak in its jaws. The ants saw it happen from their observation deck. Caterpillar and Dave had already told Snuff and Sniff and Snarl and Jake. The hornets witnessed everything.

[D-E-V-I-L-!-!]

Leshy laughed on his back on the Ugly Oak’s nose. He clicked his broken claws and gnashed his bloody teeth. He watched the piss-yellow eyes of the Seven-Toed Oak roll and burst in its big ugly head, smoke venting from its screaming mouth as its oldest boughs sheered off.

Flames roared up from its heartwood core. The sap sang pop! Pop! Hiss! And filled the air with sweet. The bitter ichor burned green and purple and white.

[D-D-E-A-M-O-N-!-!]

“Leshy,” the worm corrected.

When their dying face tilted, he rolled off their ugly nose, landed in his river, and floated away.

[Next] <- When it's done. (May 31st)