as small as a world and as large as alone, Wormweirds are delicate, dangerous creatures,...

2:33am July 10, 2014

Wormweirds are delicate, dangerous creatures, resembling nothing so much as large, fragile slugs. They don’t move much, and almost never around other people, as their glomphing, oozing method of locomotion is rather undignified, and wormweirds are very, very conscious of their dignity. They prefer to perch in one place, often for years at a time. Roads have occasionally been built with previously unplanned corkscrews and roundabouts to avoid disturbing a settled wormweird. They are capable of digesting startling things, including wood and rock, and deriving nutrients from them.
Highly intelligent, capable of performing complex calculations both mathematical and political, wormweirds are valued as accountants, advisors, astronomers, theoretical physicists, and other such cerebral occupations, and held in an almost superstitious awe. The protruding head appendages are tied around with beads and charms, and serve as a symbol of age and rank—the more impressive the pigtails, the older and more highly esteemed the wormweird.
How these creatures reproduce is unknown, and their genders are obscure. While some use the male pronoun, and some the female, it’s not consistent across languages—a given wormweird might be “he” in one language and “she” in the next. If there is a wormweird language, nobody but the wormweirds speak it. Nobody has ever seen a baby wormweird, or if they have, they haven’t recognized it as such. At least one naturalist wrote a paper proposing that they might reproduce, as some slugs do, via a hermaphroditic dance with dueling, sword-like genitalia. They found the body eventually.
Well, most of it, anyway.
Research into that area has been pursued only carefully, and with utmost discretion, ever since.
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Just a doodle of a critter based on the one from the painting “It Gnaws the Walls” which was in turn based on this freaky dream I had once about these giant silkworms with women’s faces living under my office building and eating people when they tried to move their desks. In retrospect, I don’t think I liked that job very much. - Ursula Vernon

Wormweirds are delicate, dangerous creatures, resembling nothing so much as large, fragile slugs. They don’t move much, and almost never around other people, as their glomphing, oozing method of locomotion is rather undignified, and wormweirds are very, very conscious of their dignity. They prefer to perch in one place, often for years at a time. Roads have occasionally been built with previously unplanned corkscrews and roundabouts to avoid disturbing a settled wormweird. They are capable of digesting startling things, including wood and rock, and deriving nutrients from them.

Highly intelligent, capable of performing complex calculations both mathematical and political, wormweirds are valued as accountants, advisors, astronomers, theoretical physicists, and other such cerebral occupations, and held in an almost superstitious awe. The protruding head appendages are tied around with beads and charms, and serve as a symbol of age and rank—the more impressive the pigtails, the older and more highly esteemed the wormweird.

How these creatures reproduce is unknown, and their genders are obscure. While some use the male pronoun, and some the female, it’s not consistent across languages—a given wormweird might be “he” in one language and “she” in the next. If there is a wormweird language, nobody but the wormweirds speak it. Nobody has ever seen a baby wormweird, or if they have, they haven’t recognized it as such. At least one naturalist wrote a paper proposing that they might reproduce, as some slugs do, via a hermaphroditic dance with dueling, sword-like genitalia. They found the body eventually.

Well, most of it, anyway.

Research into that area has been pursued only carefully, and with utmost discretion, ever since.

————-

Just a doodle of a critter based on the one from the painting “It Gnaws the Walls” which was in turn based on this freaky dream I had once about these giant silkworms with women’s faces living under my office building and eating people when they tried to move their desks. In retrospect, I don’t think I liked that job very much. - Ursula Vernon