The Fracture Wyrm

The ground hums before it breaks. That is the only warning. A low vibration that rises through the boots, through the knees, through the spine � and then the stone splits, and the wyrm rises. Fracture Wyrms do not burst from the ground like monsters in a children's tale. They emerge slowly, deliberately, their pale-grey scales grinding against the rock with a sound like wet gravel. First the head � broad, flat, eyeless, a blunt wedge of bone and muscle. Then the body, segment after segment, each ringed with crystalline growths that glow faintly in the dark. The wyrm does not look at the humans frozen before it. It does not see them. It senses only one thing: the moon fragment. The worm ignores everything else. It will slide past a row of armed Tide-Weavers to reach a fragment the size of a fist. It will crush a supply cart without noticing. It will coil around a building to get closer to the light. When it reaches the fragment, it opens its mouth � a vertical split in the underside of the head � and draws the fragment inside with a suction that pulls dust and pebbles from the floor. The crystalline growths along its body flare briefly. The worm grows a fraction of an inch. Then it turns, slowly, and descends back into the dark. The Pale Dominion insists that these creatures are sacred. They argue that the wyrm's attraction to moon fragments proves Yssara's design � the wyrms collect what is holy and carry it deep into the earth where it cannot be desecrated. The Tide-Weavers, who lose equipment and crew to collapsing tunnels every season, disagree. They have harpoons. They have explosives. They have a very practical understanding of what happens when you confuse hunger with divinity. A fully grown Fracture Wyrm has never been killed. The Tide-Weavers have killed juveniles � specimens under fifty feet � by collapsing tunnels on them and waiting for the crushing weight to do its work. The adults are too large to trap, too deep to follow, and too indifferent to fight. They do not defend themselves. They do not attack. They simply eat, and grow, and descend, and the only evidence they existed at all is the hole they leave behind.