Mouth to Feed
It was a Friday night, and everybody was having a party under the moonless, cool desert sky. The stars twinkled spitefully, washed out by the light of lanterns and the uproarious sounds of a toast being given and a guitar being strummed. While the wedding party caroused and stamped their feet, Leonard swore. It was a terrible night to be a gigantic sand worm.
"They'll never even know I'm coming! Run, oh please run!" But people never do run fast enough.
Leonard's six serrated jaws unfolded into a gaping maw, becoming a vortex beneath their feet, dragging the whole party and all of their tents and all of the sand and all of their newly-wed, happy-go-luckiness merely tickled Leonard's tummy. Even the party's open bar, smashed into a deluge of liquor within his gullet, would give him not one bit of solace.
"After I attacked that caravan of exported spirits, I knew I'd never be drunk from anything," Leonard said aloud to himself as he lurched back into the dirt, though were anyone alive in the surface-dwelling desert they would have surmised that he was roaring his victory and delight over a tasty meal.
The truth was, Leonard was still hungry. He always was. He had control over everything except when and how to eat, which was whenever he could and violently. If there were people up there, and they dared make too much sound and were not too far away, Leonard was driven by a hunger beyond his control to eat them.
Honestly, it was ridiculous.
"Why does anybody come to the desert, anyway? I eat literally everybody I see or hear." That was a figure of speech--Leonard didn't have eyes. His inherent echolocation was robust enough to get a visual of everything above ground as long as it wasn't a bird. But concepts like birds or being drunk or having eyes and sight weren't something Leonard overheard from somebody else's reckless desert wedding reception.
He was born with these notions.
"Makes no sense," he muttered, thrashing face first through the dirt towards his subterranean, cavernous home. His mother, much larger than Leonard himself, had left her body here when she gave birth to him, her husk fusing with the deep sand to form the den Leonard inhabited while waiting for his next meal. Where did she come from, though?
"I know me--I'm the only one of my kind, which means we must reproduce asexually. Can there really only be one of me in the world?"
*****
Reports of people going missing in dust storms, as these events appeared from a distance, were enough to cause to advocate for caution in the desert. But eventually someone actually did survive.
It was a little girl who had strayed from her caravan and somehow managed to be still enough to avoid detection. When she was found, she confirmed hundreds of years of suspicions--that something deeply monstrous was the core cause of all those missing people.
In an unusual show of collaboration, people of diverse nearby nations banded together to lure and then attack the beast. It was never going to go well for them, but it was thrilling to watch them show such camaraderie.
"Men working together! I love it!" the worm bellowed without irony. And then he swallowed them while their weapons harmlessly bounced off of his body. It took a little bit of time because they were so spread out, so before returning to his den, Leonard coiled across the surface feeling the sun on his carapace.
"If I could have let them kill me, I would have," he muttered. What a world, where a giant worm can be all by himself, bringing people together only to consume them.
"This must be reincarnation. I must have done something terrible to deserve this" he grumbled. Maybe being a sandworm was the ultimate punishment for the worst soul, a curse allowed to only one person in the world at a time.
"I guess it can't get worse than this, then," Leonard reflected. Maybe being a monster meant that the next life could be something more beautiful. Leonard the sand worm fell asleep to the warmth of the fading light, and in the twilight he dreamt of becoming a bird.
*****
The humans did not let up. Each attack got more sophisticated. Even knowing that they were luring him, Leonard always ate the bait and then the people.
Soon they were using bombs and guns, and honestly, it was a little soothing to have his thoughts silenced momentarily by the screeching missles and thudding of land mines. But whatever calming rhythm he could feel against his carapace soon turned to silence when all of their armies dwelled within his stomach.
Worse, Leonard was growing. Leonard had become vast and could no longer fit into his mother's shell. He had to carve out his own den by devouring and excreting sand.
"Plbllept! Phblleppt!" Leonard spat as he carved the hard stone beneath the sand with his many teeth. It wasn't difficult to make a home, and he had come up with a good strategy where digging downwards in a spiral gave him the best hollow to lay in, but almost nobody enjoys putting dirt in their mouth.
And then he bit his tail, and it hurt.
After he finished roaring and swearing, he had an idea.
"They can't kill me, but I can. And if I eat myself, tail first, I can stop myself from killing them!"
But biting down hurt. So instead of biting, he started swallowing his body. By the time his tail touched his stomach, he reckoned, the powerful acid within him would take over for the hard work.
As soon as he put his tail into his mouth again, a fog settled over his hearing, like he was listening to himself from the center of the earth. Leonard began hearing and remembering a sound he had not heard in many years. The sound of his birth.
It was his mother, devouring her own tail. And instead of the acid breaking down the tail, it all just kept going, the loop closing in on itself and tightening, constricting, collapsing, furiously shedding sturdy layers of carapace. Leonard's mother became a loop, then a lump, and then a ball. Within that ball, she continued to compact until she was tiny.
And from that orb, like an egg, Leonard had emerged.
*****
Leonard spent a long time thinking so hard that even his relentless hunger seemed to quiet. With his tail still poking into his own mouth, he realized at last: he was his mom. It had only ever been Leonard.
Endless cycles where self consumption was the only escape and in the end turned out to be only a reset crashed and collided upon each other like rocks tumbling into a hole. Leonard could remember it all now. How he had once, long before his mother, lived in all kinds of places besides desert. He had heard many kinds of things, even a lot of very noisy birds.
"I can't control it. I can't be anything other than I am," Leonard thought, accepting at last that he would rather be the biggest monster than be bound to a ceaseless cycle of self-destruction. And with that thought, the carapace on his back cracked open and twelve tremendous wings emerged from his shell.
"Oh was I like a caterpillar? Now I'm like a butterfly? This is incredible!" he howled with delight. His twelve eyes opened at last and the world was gorgeous, far more brilliant than ever before.
"Wow! I could get used to this! I love the color of the sky! I am like a bird!" And he was. A great, big, terrifying bird.
Unfortunately for mankind, he was also still quite hungry.